Every single time I talk to my friends, whom also want an *arr/Plex/VPN/Home Assistant setup like I’ve got, I can see the fear in their eyes when I mention Debian, Docker, and the terminal. It could be a case of “git gud”, but I want to help them out with a setup like this, but with as low friction as possible. Ideally something completely GUI based, and very low maintenance.
I know of unRAID, and Portainer, but does anyone have any experience in setting up something like this for people whose knowledge of self hosting and networking aren’t as good as yours?
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If you want to host on a vps use linode it was auto install scripts from community so you won’t have to use the term
Check out https://casaos.io/
Oh my god, what is that website?
“just execute this oneliner as root, so easy”
Modern Web trash
https://www.openmediavault.org/ or https://yunohost.org have a nice web-gui that allows you to control most things.
But to be honest, these are only to make the entry easier and convenient for maintenance. Sooner or later something will likely break and then you will have to be at least a tiny bit comfortable with the terminal. If you are unwilling to learn that, then self-hosting is probably not the right thing for you.
Not that I don’t agree with encouraging learning and welcoming more people to self hosting, but at some point there’s just a differentiating factor between paying for access to services for convenience and simplicity sake versus the higher friction process of learning to self host.
Even finding tools that can do this in more convenient or UI friendly ways shouldn’t be spoon fed. I can’t foresee a self hosted setup that at no point would ever need basic terminal knowledge. What happens when they want to migrate to a new server?
Simple answer: yunohost or true nas
Other answer: webmin, and prayer.
My recommendation would be help them learn, ask them if they really want to do it, and then teach them the basics and help them with what to search for, and teach them how to google properly, because though most people use google, most people don’t know how to really find something on google because they don’t understand the basics of how it works
Well, TrueCharts (with TrueNAS Scale). The problem with TrueCharts (and IX-system’s implementation of Kubernetes) is that it likes to break itself often, for no reason and with very little you can do to fix it. I’m actively moving away from TrueCharts.
I’ve set up unraid, truenas, proxmox so far. Unraid is my current and favorite solution. I don’t think any of them are ready to be installed and setup by normal users, but any of them can be setup by someone knowledgeable and then used/updated by a normal user.
It’s only 1 command but here they have all they ever wanted with a nice web interface: https://yunohost.org
You should continue to wear your wizard’s hat with pride. 🧙♂️
If you’re going to do something, do it well.
I know this is not the answer you are looking for, but if they happen to have a spare Windoze license laying around (or willing to shell out) then all that stuff can be done on an OS they are probably comfortable with. Yes, it still means learning some stuff, but there is no overwhelming need to learn an entire OS to do it.
Another option is to use a Synology NAS. All those things you are talking about are packages, point and click install and setup from the NAS browser. Again pricey, but far more intuitive for non-techos. This also has an advantage of being able to upgrade as their media store gets larger.
(I don’t do either of these things, but I know we support a lot of people radarr/sonarr/lidarr/nzbget/plex/emby/HA/openHAB etc in a win environ.)
But I would teach them how to git gud, and learn FOSS and read HOWTO’s to install all that stuff (without the need for Docker, so they actually learn). Honestly after the first 5 installs on a VM (which can be deleted and recreated if fscked up) running
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgradeand git clone … etc. with you looking over their shoulder while reading the HOWTO with them. That would be quite rewarding for them, probably make you feel good too.Make them an unraid usb and then they can just stick in a spare pc and they should be good to go. Then they can use the gui to download and install docker images. Would be the path of least resistance IMO.
then you can show them how to depmod their nvidia card for passthrough and configure their raid array and enable docker and know which repositories are good and which magic numbers to put in the docker file then how to configure the first run of the servers and hope it all doesn’t blow up. It’s not that easy for people with no technical experience.
Well I mean if they want a home server they will have to learn something.
Personally I just set my friends and family up with a stremio/torrentio/real-debrid setup. Nothing to host, I just pre-configure Stremio for them. Then they can just login on any device and it’s good to go.
The moment you help them set it up you also agree to being their IT Support when anything goes wrong. Do you really want to deal with that?
The thing is, many people will show some interest in this but ultimately don’t want to do it themselves. It does require varying amounts of time to learn & most importantly to fix it. Many people are time poor or would use their spare time on other stuff.
You should ask whether they’re genuinely interested in setting this up & if so what the concerns are.Agreed with this, they may want the setup but have no interest in managing it, no matter how simple you get it. If you do it for them you might be setting yourself up as their permanent support.
I’d gauge how interested they actually are, and make sure they’re willing to learn enough to follow basic maintenance routines.
