One thing i’ve learned over the years is the way I did something when I was learning is usually not the best way of doing it, and I later go back and redo everything now that I have gained experience and knowledge. I have decided to ditch google photos, and was lucky enough to snag a free rackmount 2017 server from work with an i7 installed and 2 6tb drives on the way. But now comes the hard part of deciding what software I am going to end up learning on and hopefully living with. First and foremost I want a photo backup service, and I have debated between immich and xpenology, I also know that I want to run Pihole and would really like to self host my own website documenting my projects, even if no one will ever look at it.
If you had to start from the beginning, which OS, which container manager and which containers would you build. I would love the recommendations from those who walked so that I can run
I’m going to go against the grain and say use K8s from the beginning, or maybe more broadly gitops. I now use a mix of nuc and pi with Talos Linux and deploy with argocd. My entire stack is run from git repos. For me thats really easy and makes running my lab and selfhosted parts a lot less work.
Though the learning experience going from vm management to docker, to compose, to K8s, to gitops has been valuable.
Do you have a guide you fomllowed to get started? I’d love to try and go in that same direction