I have a really bad “server” (just a laptop) that runs Fedora Server and uses Docker Compose to host Jellyfin. It has been very annoying to update (the web GUI for Fedora doesn’t even work half of the time), updating is painful, and it’s a pain to manage. I am trying to redo my entire setup, so I will be getting a NAS to store all of my media. However, I still want to host apps like Nextcloud and Jellyfin, but I’m probably just going to use the NAS as storage for such apps.
Should I:
- use CasaOS, Yunohost, or a different easy to use server OS
- stick with Fedora server
- use a different distro
If I should use a conventional server distro (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu), suggestions for management GUIs, easy to use Docker management GUIs, and ways to set up file sharing (Samba configuration seems like a pain) are greatly appreciated.
(side note: I use Docker bind mounts and they seem to allow me to update my Jellyfin content through SFTP/whatever the SSH-based file transfer protocol is. Is there a point in me switching to volumes? I haven’t taken my container down manually since I first started it up)
I use https://github.com/azukaar/Cosmos-Server on Ubuntu and really like it, seems to take care of reverse proxies and stuff for any new services you add. I’m running on the lowest-spec Hetzner auction I could find, but even so it’s a pretty beastly server with an i7 6700 or something, and 128GB of RAM. I’ve got nextcloud and a bunch of other services running and I rarely go above 10% resource utilisation.
Huh. Never heard of Cosmos before! Sounds pretty good, what’s the catch?
I guess that I haven’t read the source code to make sure there’s nothing malicious there? I’m kind of a scrub, which is why I decided to give this thing a go in the first place. I say “seems to take care of reverse proxies and stuff” because I haven’t checked at all to make sure any of that’s working. I’ve done no pentesting either. It’s not that I can’t figure out how to manually configure proxmox or whatever, I’m just usually too tired to put in the concerted effort, so Cosmos has allowed me get things up and running quickly and without having to learn too much more than I already know beforehand.
Also, Cosmos does take care of basically everything by itself, but when I first set it up (many patches ago now) there was some issue with the way it assigned UIDs in containers so that the root user in some containerised apps couldn’t see the data even though it was in directories that were correctly bound to the container. I had to enlist a friend with more experience to help me troubleshoot that. So, defaults are usually fine but it’s happy to let you shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t really know what you’re doing.
I guess the latter, practical points was what I was asking about. I’ve tried Yunohost, I tried Podman+Cockpit… They work fine but there’s always a hurdle to just having a steady home server running. But if some initial wonkiness is the worst Cosmos has to offer I’ll give it a go!
Interesting. Do you know how Cosmos handles storage and especially RAID?
I think it leaves that up to the host OS; I’m just using SMB network shares, directories in which I bind directly to the containers I want to have access.