I already apply these rules myself, but these are the five major things I emphasize to everyone.

1. Don’t overcomplicate things. You don’t need Proxmox on every machine “just in case”. Sometimes, a system can be single purpose. Just using Debian is often good enough; if you need a single VM later, you can do that on any distro. This goes for adding services, too. Docker makes it very easy to spin things up to play with, but you should also know when to put things down. Don’t get carried away, you’ll just make more work for yourself and end up slacking and/or giving up.

2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket if you can avoid it. For instance, something like Home Assistant should run on its own system. If you rely heavily on your NAS, your NAS should be a discrete system. You will eventually break something and not have the time or energy to fix it immediately. Anything you truly rely on should be resilient so that your tinkering doesn’t leave you high and dry.

3. Be careful who you let in. First, anybody with access to your systems is a potential liability to your security, and so you must choose your tenants carefully. Second, if others come to rely on your systems, that drastically reduces your window to tinker unless you have a dedicated testbench. Sharing your projects with others is fun and good experience, but it must be done cautiously and with properly set expectations. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of an angry phonecall because you took Nextcloud down while playing around.

4. Document when it’s fresh in your mind, not later. In fact, most of the time you should document it before you do it. If things don’t go according to plan, make minor adjustments. And update docs when things change. What you think is redundant info today might save your ass tomorrow.

5. Don’t rely on anything you don’t understand. If it works, and you don’t know how or why it works on at least a basic level, don’t simply accept it and move on. Figure it out. Don’t just copy and paste, don’t just buy a solution. If you don’t know it, you don’t control it.

Never buy into a platform, they tend to waste a lot of my time on changing things to upgrade versions that have no point except to change the whole platform, and the things you like to use get deprecated. Or they never get to where you want to be. Your vision is not the maintainers vision. Learn to roll your own…everything.

Document and get a more powerful server.

Reinstall it, it’s very easy when you run everything on arch. It can do it in like 1h and another hour for setting up everything.

It’s a homelab. I start from scratch about every 2 years just because I can.

The only consistent element is the data on the system… the operating system, applications and frameworks often get a workout.

Having said all that, my current setup is working exceedingly well for my use case and I don’t know that I’m going to change it en-masse any time soon. Individual apps will change though I’m sure.

I moved to TrueNAS Scale from Core. My worst decision ever. Core was more stable, faster, and the jails actually worked as expected without some shit k3s cluster nonsense.

Not much - it’s been a pretty organic learning journey.

Very much a crawl > walk > run thing. Can’t necessarily jump straight to the end.

I got a 4TB drive thinking it would be plenty for plex. Oh boi was I wrong. Specially when shows started to come in.

A 12TB drive is on the way and I’ll leave the 4TB one for immich and nextcloud alone.

I don’t have any issues with ubuntu server and I like portainer so I don’t think I’d set things up differently. I should organize and backup the docker compose files though.

Never offer Jellyfin to friends / family so I could downgrade to a much smaller, cost efficient server. Hell if I didn’t have to stream outside the house I’d probably use a raspberry pi for the rest, those things are super capable now.

Unpopular opinion: don’t use any of the Truenas, unRAID, freenas, Openmediavault, proxmox stuff. Sooner or later you will run into something those special interest systems can’t do and it will feel annoyingly limiting.

Choose a widely used vanilla Linux distro, Debian or Ubuntu, install everything as docker container, learn how to handle docker compose and how to configure stacks via docker-compose.yml

I shoulda bought more ram for my truenas box, and prolly shoulda done my file structure a lil better but other than that, no regrets.

Don’t listen to others. Just do what you want and have fun.

I have a bunch of crap deployed between two servers and a bunch of mix match hard drives.

If I could start over I’d plan much better and keep everything organized.

I’d run one server for all my dockers / apps.

Then the other server for storage / backup

I would’ve just sprung for a 12TB drive out of the gate for my Synology NAS/home server. I started with a 4TB, and because it’s only a two-drive system, I can’t really get any more space (if I want to keep redundancy) unless I now buy a new drive. My second drive is now 12TB for redundancy, but it’s not using 8TB of that.

I’d start off with three SFF PC’s instead of a single more expensive server. Most people don’t need expensive servers running Xeons and ECC memory.

More capacity across the the PC’s with better redundancy and HA for important services.