5 AWESOME Home Server/NAS Operating Systems

now running your very own Home Server is incredible there's so much you could do with it whether that be hosting your media setting up your own private backup solution using it to monitor data there is truly a lot you could do but that brings to question what should you use on the software side to actually run your setup in this video what we're going to do is go over the five operating systems that you are probably going to consider when making this decision what I'm going to do is go in order based on the first one that I used as my primary home lab software all the way up to what I'm currently using now and what is my current favorite and the very first thing I used and one of my favorite pieces of software has to be proxmox proxmox is really cool because it's not the typical operating system that you think of this is more of like a dedicated virtualization in hypervisor environment it uses w and Linux as the actual base operating system but what you get with the the web goey and all the uh containerization and virtualization uh features is absolutely remarkable all the way to the point that you could use this as like your base operating system and then use every other system that we're or any of the other systems we're going to mention in this video in addition to it if you would like to the installation process is real easy and straightforward I do have some separate videos on proxmox including that installation process and actually passing through hard drives to various virtual machines on your proxmox instance but when you first install it and you log into it you get a really beautiful dashboard going over some typical monitoring things that you would want to see and then actually setting up virtual machines is really easy you can set up like a server virtual machine and use that as its own dedicated like Ubuntu Fedora arch really whatever you want and then proceed to do whatever you want in that server whether that be install Docker put all your services and whatnot on there or you could even use their containerization options which uses way less system resources than an entire virtual machine and then you could put something on there like a single service and it makes it really nice to be able to separate out various different things and overall using proxmox to manage your network infrastructure when you do set it up properly and how you want to it is a wonderful thing to use and in addition just to using it as a home lab I used it for quite a while having like a Windows Virtual Machine in there and actually being able to remote into it because with this you can pass through dedicated gpus and whatnot directly to specific virtual machines so I actually used proxmox with Windows in it with da Vinci resolve in there with the GPU properly passed through and I used a virtualized environment for my main kind of video editing workflow for quite a while so the use cases for this are really limited based on your imagination now at the moment I'm not using proxmox anymore and that's not because it's not good or anything like that just my needs are being met by other software that's at least for me a little more user friendly and straightforward and we will be talking about those in just a sec but first I do need to thank the sponsor of today's video Nord pass one of the best password managers in the game with Nord pass you can save time and energy while boosting either your personal security or the security of your company and just beyond the typical password manager features you'd expect you could do a lot of things such as storing sensitive information in their encrypted Vault you can share credentials payment information and notes between people on your team securely all your passwords and information will sink across multiple devices with many applications and extensions for various web browsers and you can secure all this even more with two Factor authentication and even Biometrics one of my personal favorite features is the ability to implement strong passwords by default going beyond what some website might require you to do with a one capital and one letter or whatever and of course since they know what Services you're using if there is a data breach with one of those Services they will let you know immediately or at least as soon as they're able so overall lots of cool stuff going on and better yet if you want a thre Monon trial you go ahead and use my code tekka or check out the link down below so now back on to the video now next up we have traz scale you could also use traz core this is the traz website here so you have core and scale scale does provide a little bit more featur Fe this is a software specifically for Nas type environments network attached storage and overall when it comes to a Nas solution has everything you'd expect it's really easy to get set up various raid configurations so you have redundancy and if a drive fails you're going to be okay for the most part overall the dashboard is beautiful you can kind of see a little preview here again I'm not currently running this the reason I'm not currently running it is it kind of gets a little weird when you are using a volume that you're using a container as a shared volume it just kind of gets a little messy I could also just be an idiot that's probably more likely the case but here we can see some of the features of course it supports Docker containers and kubernetes which is nice being able to run Docker containers in your Nas software is almost essential and all of the operating systems going forward here have the availability and the opportunity to run Docker containers Docker is my main thing that I use to run all of my services it just makes everything super simple and easy there's no like dependency issues it's it's beautiful I'm not going to talk about all this but you can really see a lot of the various features it has openzfs is the main kind of file system structure that they got going on trunz gives you a lot of settings and whatnot to actually make configuring your setup really easy and they do actually support uh virtualization so you can spin up like a Windows Virtual Machine a Linux virtual machine and kind of still have these same features and accessibility that you would have with something like prox MOX if you just want to run this for example our third mention is going to be cassa OS this is more of a newer addition to this uh kind of Niche category of operating systems this I'm pretty sure is another kind of Debian base with their own software dashboard and web UI plopped on top of it this is made by the same company that makes the zimma board and now a couple other products the zimma blade they're coming out with the zimma cube which I hope I get a check out but when it comes to user friendliness and just kind of beauty of the environment that you're placed and this is definitely up there and even their website here kind of reflects that you can see an example of dashboard there if I go back up I do believe there's a live demo so let's just jump into that real quick and here we go here's the demo so we have our storage here and you can see like most of the other or all of the other services we're going to be talking about there's your system status right there we have our apps which are just Docker containers and then you have some other Integrations such as some smart home stuff and integrated data synchronization tools if we go up here this is where you can have access to some of your settings this is more beautiful and more userfriendly but that does come at the expense of some features that you would get in something like traz or some of the other things that we're going to be talking about granted this is an abutu base so you can't just log into that auntu base and or not auntu Debian base apt whatever you go log into the base operating system and really do whatever you want I have a full separate video where I really dive into detail of some of the stuff that this has to offer including the installation that is something that is stupid easy the the one thing that is kind of limited too is they don't have a lot of applications in their store but you can install like protainer beside it if you want to and run Docker containers that way it just won't show up as well in here I'll say like unrelated Docker containers and But ultimately if you're really just looking for something just to get started that's really easy to manage out of the gate and has the smallest learning curb imaginable cassa OS is going to be a really good option for you to get started I'll link down below to the other video if you're interested more in an actual like walkthrough demo of this specific operating system next up we have open media Vault now this one is a little more simple again like a lot of these it's based on debb and Linux it provides you a really nice dashboard one of the things that makes this really nice is it's awesome when it comes to volume management just like with trz it's really easy to uh set up your raid configurations and if you're familiar working in the terminal working with Debian this is going to be a pretty good option for you definitely not the most um userfriendly approach especially if you are new to all this but if you do have some Linux Experience open media vault is going to be a good option and then it does help you with some of the more advanced things such as creating share shares creating snapshots of your shared folders again volume management things like that if I go over here to some of the more features we can see here it does really support a lot of things makes it really easy to set up things like SSH SMB services and there's various plugins to hook up into other services as well open media VA is pretty lightweight they don't have a ton of features but there's definitely a little bit more than something like cassa OS when it comes to setting things up and the overall configuration I enjoyed using this I I used this kind of the same amount of time as I used traz uh about two months or so but this one I did enjoy a little bit more just because of how accessible the Bas operating system is how easy it was to share for example my uh Intel Hardware transcoding with Docker and all that just overall this is a really good solution definitely worth checking out and finally what I'm currently using if you watched my uh last couple videos on like my home and all that you probably knew this unraid unraid unfortunately is the only one that is not freely accessible you can see it's going to cost you anywhere from like 50 bucks up to 130 if you have like a whole bunch of hard drives but I'm more than happy to make the argument that this is definitely worth the price tag this right here is my current unraid dashboard and you can see it gives me a lot of information a lot of live statistics data I have my UPS stuff right here various users my shares virtual machines which I currently don't use and that's one of the reasons why I don't use prox boox I don't have a need for virtual machines CU everything I need is running over here in the docker containers and this has a lot of the same functionality and everything as something like open media Vault truez so on so forth but the amount of settings and things that you could do just making this easy to use and upgrade is ridiculous there are things that you could do or there are settings to like move all the files from one particular drive if you want to upgrade that drive setting up mvme cast drives is really easy and using those for like specific share folders is easy they just make doing things that you would expect to be really complicated surprisingly easy to do for example right here under app data this is my kind of Docker share primary storage I have that set to cache and if I go over to main for example you can see my pool devices here my cache is a 2 terb mvme I should add another one so it can be mirrored so there's no data loss potential there if I go back to the dashboard that's why it's a different color there it's letting me know like hey there's a there's a potential risk associated with this specific share and that is because there's no uh raid or redundancy setup parody drives or anything like that which Speaking of parody drives if I go back over to main this right here is my parody and when I do want to upgrade it's going to be as simple as taking that out popping a new drive in and rebuilding that parody and all these are 4 tbte drives and I'm eventually going to want to upgrade those and like I said it's real easy just to dump all the files from this one for example spread it out over the other drives and upgrade it granted unrate is not perfect the one thing I completely dislike about it is the boot device system it requires you to use a USB for the boot Drive which sucks you can see I have a 30 technically 31 gigabyte uh data traveler right here which I'm currently using as my boot drive and the license that you purchase is associated with that USB so if something were to happen to that USB you'd have to contact support and that's probably not the greatest thing especially if of you have a drive failure and it's the boot drive with a license and that's a time sensitive matter you don't want to have to contact support it just adds some potential risk having a USB boot drive like that granted I haven't had any issues but just knowing that that could be a problem is is not great being able to use like a small mvme SSD as the boot drive would definitely be preferred but when it comes to unraid overall I definitely just prefer it I prefer using their kind of app and Docker system here over something like a portainer they have a real nice system we have recently added here top trending apps top new installs so they have a good kind of marketplace to see everything that's going on definitely a lot more kind of apps versus verus something like cassa OS where in a lot of cases they actually have multiple options with multiple kind of configurations so for example if I search something relatively popular like Plex you can see there's 1 2 3 4 five different Plex images and you could kind of see the configuration options when you go ahead and click on them the Stars they get and all that and these are just kind of um basically customize Docker compose configurations based on what people think are best then overall it's really nice if I go to Docker and I click on something such as jelly fin for example if I click on this you can kind of see what I'm looking at it's all your typical Docker settings just in a really nice layout so here you can see the pass through of the Intel Hardware acceleration all my various ports for the web UI so on so forth and then we have some more settings here if you want to change any of that overall some really cool stuff and this makes it really easy to update anything so I don't have to install something like Watchtower I can actually see when an update's available and then I can click on update so if I apply update to this uh torrent client here yes update it it opens up like this and actually shows me live exactly what it is doing so you can see all the various layers and containers here it's going to go ahead and pull all of them runs through the whole process for you sets everything up removes removes the orphan image click done boom you're updated good to go and just with that and everything there are layers and layers of various settings and features to help you just manage and run everything just more efficiently and easier Shares are really easy to set up you can see kind of how we have everything set up here and actually in settings we have a whole dashboard of various things network settings nut settings various Network Services and then within every single one of these so like SMB for example you can see I have it enabled and some of the settings associated with that to actually change it I need to stop the array so we're not going to do that at the moment VPN manager build into here which is nice and we have Community applications of course you can go through and add various plugins and whatnot so you can see here these are the plugins I have which are different than actual like applications we have Intel GPU top so I could see the status of the actual GPU component of this uh nut tools unrate connect Community applications and the file manager so this is an add-on and this is real nice if I go to shares for example and here under data it adds this so if I click on on that I can actually browse and view everything and edit copy move delete do permissions a whole bunch of stuff through here so it it just makes everything really nice I personally recommend unraid I use it for me it is definitely worth the price if it was double the price i h no I wouldn't have bought it but at its current price that they do have it priced up accordingly so those are the five kind of Nas or virtualization operating system that you might want to consider installing on your Home Server software or Home Server Hardware quick little honorable mention this is just running on one of my machines on another one I actually just have a base Ubuntu Server install with portainer running you don't even need to necessarily use a specific kind of special Niche use case operating system like this you could really do and get a lot of what you need to out of just a regular base Linux server install granted if you want to do some like volume management you want to set up some raid configurations there's going to be some uh work that you're going to want to do in the terminal and definitely for something like this I do prefer a dashboard where it's a lot easier to kind of visualize what is going on but for example on the Nook which is what I have a Ubuntu Server installed on it is purely just a couple different Docker containers on there and if you're not setting up like volume management and a bunch of shares and whatnot from that server just running a Bas Linux install is probably going to be perfect but when you do start needing features like shares and you need to do things such as set up various raid configurations and you want to be able to easily upgrade things and whatnot that is when you are going to want to look into something like this so with all that I do hope you have a beautiful day everything I mentioned will be linked down below including additional videos where I kind of go a little bit more in depth into some of this soft where I haven't covered everything so I might post some other people's videos down below if you are interested again have a beautiful day and goodbye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 106,499

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, desktop enviorment, homelab, home server, nas

Id: 6nWiTA-tOOk

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2023