Newbie needs help getting started & choosing OS for first home server

Hi Guy’s, first time posting, so apologies now for the long newbie post

The Ultimate home server series got me al motivated to finally stop procrastinating and get a home server up and running do I can move away from some of those pesky subscription services!
I start in IT last year as helpdesk/jnr sysadmin in a Windows/Microsoft environment with a small MSP focusing on the SMB space however I can’t seem to get wrap my head around how to start and reading more posts doesn’t seem to be helping.

I want to setup my first home server to help me improve and deepen my knowledge. Here is what I was wanting to run on a server. The hardware to start will be a i7-7700k with 16 or 32GB memory with a 250 GB SSD for the OS and 2x 1TB hard drives for storage to start off.

  • Network storage with access from mobile devices for photos using something like nextcloud
  • Plex or Jellyfin for movies and TV shows
  • Navidrome or something similar for music
  • Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr
  • Maybe calibre for ebooks
  • Bitwarden
  • Be able to spin up and down Windows or Linux VMs for testing and experimenting
  • VPN
  • Knowledge management at this stage will mainly be obsidian.

As above what I’m finding hard is where to start as configuring these I will be okay with.
I am wanting to get my red hat RCSA/RCE certification so was wondering if it was possible to use RHEL 8 as my OS over TrueNAS to help deepen my Linux knowledge by running RHEL in a “production” environment and what the pros and cons might be?
If I was to use RHEL 8 would it then be better to run the above services/apps in VMs or run through docker or a combination?

Thanks for any and all advice.

I’m sure it would be helpful, if Licensing is an issue for you Rocky Linux is a great alternative and you’ll end up learning skills in a simular way.

As for advantages over e.g. TrueNAS Scale:

  • Customizability since it’s not an Applicance Distro and you can play with the underlying OS as you want
  • You’re not dependent on iXSystems implementing X feature / fixing X bug
  • Less overhead
  • You’ll learn about Linux instead of just how to use the TrueNAS GUI
  • Use the CLI as much as you want, not bound to GUI for certain functions to be registered in the TrueNAS databse
  • Freedom!

Disadvantages:

  • It’s not an Appliance Distro, which means:
    → No easy backup+restore of configuration database
    → There’s less help if you run into issues, although I’m sure you’ll find some here :wink:
    → You have to take care of keeping things up to date and maintained yourself. Nobody tests changes for you before you commit them to your system
  • Harder to get started with, no easy GUI clicking around to get things done
  • Backups and other filesystem tasks are a bit more involved to automate and keep an eye on

It depends on what you prefer, realistically.
Most of these seem to be well-suited in a few contained Docker Networks, with a reverse proxy handling all access from outside the system.

Look into https://cockpit-project.org/ if you go down the Custom Linux Path.
It’s Red Hat’s Mangement Interface Solution that’ll make it easier for you in the beginning to keep an eye on things.

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Thanks for the detailed explanation.
After reading this I think I will go down the custom Linux path.
I think the pros at the moment out way the cons for me, all though my future self might regret it haha

I feel the advantages of actually learning how my system works and services/apps interact with each other is an opportunity to good to not pass up.

This is something I had seen and peaked my interest so will definitely be looking into this. I also want to look at a bit more automation in the future. So was hoping to play around with ansible or chef.

Now time for the fun to begin and install the OS, setup the raid configuration and the file share.

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Finally getting some time to sit down and get things setup.
I must say getting Cockpit up and running was much easier than I had anticipated in RHEL 8.5
After first boot of installing the OS, there was a message before the log on prompt
“Active the web console with : systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket”

So I logged in an ran the command, then on my PC navigated to https://ip-address-of-machine:9090 and there it was, login prompt :slight_smile:

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Since y ou’re planning to run Containers and are on RHEL, check out:

It’s also compatible with either Docker Compose:

or Podman Compose:

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