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’m guessing you want an all-in-one server setup for NAS duties and services?
UnRAID is probably the simplest from a management point of view for storage and docker.
If you’d prefer something free, then OpenMediaVault works great. It can handle storage (Linux MD-RAID, BTRFS, ZFS, or mergerfs + SnapRAID) and compute tasks like VMs and Docker/Docker Compose all from a web interface. The only problems I’ve encountered with OMV is trying to click through configuration changes too fast and getting ‘stuck’ in a loop of applying conflicting changes. As long as you wait a second or two after hitting OK/apply on things, then you’re good.
I use TrueNAS SCALE myself with docker and other services running in systemd-nspawn containers. I have a separate Intel NUC running Proxmox.