slabber

Welcome! You will certainly not regret it. I’ve been with Linux for over 20 years and only use Windows on my company laptop. I can only say that Windows gets worse on each release.

Anyhow. Don’t be afraid of the CLI / console. Seems complicated when starting but will make the whole experience so much better over time.

Enjoy!

If your server doesn’t rely on docker I would give FreeBSD a try. I’ve been using Debian for 20 years and moved to FreeBSD a few years ago. Now I can never go back. Not that I don’t like Debian anymore but FreeBSD is a true server system. Simple, fast and stable. And with their jails implementation (something like docker but less obscure) you can easily isolate your services from the rest of the system.

True. Getting a TB of storage is not affordable nowadays. And we know why. F*©k AI.

But here in Poland you can still find some used Q920 with the same specifications.

If you are located in Europe they would most likely send it even to your country.

This one would be like the one I have.

https://allegro.pl/oferta/solidny-i-kompaktowy-komputer-micro-fujitsu-q920-i5-16gb-2000-ssd-w11-praca-17993236542

I haven’t. They only provide docker deployment which I’m not fond of. If they would offer an alternative installation method I may would. Heard a lot of good things about it.

At present I use Nextcloud client on my phone to backup photos and the Memories app to nicely browse them.

I don’t know exactly what you want host but I have an old Fujitsu Q920 i5 with 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD drive which cost me around 200 Euro.

I’m serving around 20 services on it including Nextcloud, Navidrome, Paperless NG, Emby, Matrix, Friendica, Wireguard, Zabbix, DNS blocker and a few VMs. Processor utilization is around 5% most of the time and it uses about 8 GB of RAM.

I admit that Nextcloud could be more responsive and faster but for the family it is enough.

I haven’t exactly checked how much electricity I’m using but I would have noticed a bigger change on my bill.

For backups I have a remote node at another location that retrieves ZFS snapshots periodically.

Anyway. I have this setup for 2 years now and I’m happy. It does what I expect it to do.

As a side note. i use FreeBSD with jails and bhyve for this. A Proxmox running VMs with nested Docker apps may need something more performant so be aware.

Is IP forwarding enabled on your system?

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/network-gateway

Also check if Wireguard has a DNS that you can actually reach. Had this issue on my setup on the beginning. Lastly, set allowed IPs to 0.0.0.0/0

Second that. I don’t have another node that I can use for WoL at my backup location so I opted for the node to turn on every morning, run the backup and turn off using cron at a given time. Works perfectly!

I settled on a Fujitsu Q920 with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Runs FreeBSD 14.1 and each service has its own Jail.

Services:

DNSmasq - local DNS and adblocker Wireguard Navidrome MPD - Media server Vaultwarden - password save Radicale - cardav and caldav server TinyRSS - RSS aggregator Zabbix - server and service monitoring Postgresql Gitea - git repository Emby - jellyfin alternative Mariadb Bhyve VM with Debian running 2 apps (invoiceplane and leantime) which use a quite old php version and I never had time to port to Freebsd.

A second machine that starts daily and creates a backup of machine 1 by using ZFS autobackup.

Nothing fancy but it does what I need.