Edit2: OK Per feedback I am going to have a dedicated external NAS and a separate homeserver. The NAS will probably run TrueNAS. The homeserver will use an immutable os like fedora silverblue. I am doing a dedicated NAS because it can be good at doing one thing - serving files and making backups. Then my homeserver can be good at doing whatever I want it to do without accidentally torching my data.
I haven’t found any good information on which distro to use for the NAS I am building. Sure, there are a few out there. But as far as I can tell, none are immutable and that seems to be the new thing for long term durability.
Edit: One requirement is it will run a media server with hardware transcoding. I’m not quite sure if I can containerize jellyfin and still easily hardware transcode without a more expensive processor that supports hyper-v.
What functionality do you want from your NAS? If it’s simple NFS and Samba then I imagine you can choose whatever you want really.
If the software you want to run has flatpak then I imagine you can try out Fedora Silverblue, Jellyfin do have a flatpak.
Personally I run my Jellyfin on a virtual Debian Bookworm server with transcoding off, my Jellyfin clients don’t need the help.
I always clone my Jellyfin server before apt update && apt upgrade to be able to rollback.
Oh, and my NAS (network attached storage) isn’t on the same machine, my Jellyfin server use Samba and /mnt/media/libraryfolders, so cloning it is quick and easy.
Is there a performance impact on the jellyfin server by having the NAS on a separate machine? How long does it take to serve a 20gb rip of a bluray?
I would think that any immutable linux distribution would be suitable. Just configure it with the services that you want. Is there any special need that you specifically need?
Honestly I had never built an NAS and installed an OS on it before. I’ve only ever used the junk that ASUSTOR puts out and I want to have control over things. So a good part of the reason I asked on here was to see what other people had done and why.
Just think of the NAS like a desktop that you ssh into. The only difference is that you install the server version of the distro. If you know how to use a desktop Linux box and configure it via the command like you can do so with a server. It will be the same except over ssh.
Hardware wise, normal desktop parts are good enough to build a NAS. You don’t need to buy anything special that is NAS specific. The only exception might be the case. If you want a lot of storage the case should be able to accommodate that. Some desktop cases don’t have 3.5” drive slots anymore.
As of my understanding, immutable systems are useful for Devices that are more bound to change, like a Desktop you actually use to install programs try out things and so on.
I do not see much benefit here for a stable server system. If you are worried about stability and uptime, a testing system does a better job here, IMHO.
Virtual machines also exist. I once got bit by a proxmox upgrade, so I built a proxmox vm on that proxmox host, mirroring my physical setup, that ran a debian vm inside of the paravirtualized proxmox instance. They were set to canary upgrade a day before my bare-metal host. If the canary debian vm didn’t ping back to my update script, the script would exit and email me letting me know that something was about to break in the real upgrade process. Since then, even though I’m no longer using proxmox, basically all my infrastructure mirrors the same philosophy. All of my containers/pods/workflows canary build and test themselves before upgrading the real ones I use in my homelab “production”. You don’t always need a second physical copy of hardware to have an appropriate testing/canary system.
I really like this strategy. I currently use proxmox for my home server needs, but I am curious what you use now instead?
Yeah that part confuses me too. It’s a NAS. Install something simple and whatever services you need and I can’t imagine it breaking any time soon. Shit as long as someone else has tested the software I’d be more than happy to install something complex… Which I have and has been running for almost 10 years now with no issues. FreeNAS has been rock solid for me and it sure as hell ain’t minimal.
Immutable systems are useful for separating the system and application layers and to enable clean and easy rollbacks. On servers the applications are often already separated anyway through the use of container technologies. So having atomic system updates could enable faster and less risky security patching without changing anything about how applications are handled.
As of my understanding, immutable systems are useful for Devices that are more bound to change, like a Desktop…I do not see much benefit here for a stable server system.
This logic is kind of backwards, or rather incomplete. Immutable typically means that the core system doesn’t change outside of upgrades. I would prioritize putting an immutable OS on a server over a desktop if I was forced to pick one or the other (nothing wrong with immutable on both), simply because I don’t want the server OS to change outside of very controlled and specific circumstances. An immutable server OS helps ensure that stability you speak of, not to mention it can thwart some malware. The consequences of losing a server is typically higher than losing a desktop, hence me prioritizing the server.
In a perfect world, you’re right, the server remains stable and doesn’t need immutablitiy…but then so does the desktop.
Flatcar linux (this is what I use for my NAS/homeserver) and CoreOS are both good.
edit: OpenSUSE has microOS: https://microos.opensuse.org/
