DITCHING my Homelab software for UNRAID

hello everybody this is techa in this video I'm going to be talking about my Nas software I've used a bunch of different things in the last couple months of course I have a Synology machine so that's just kind of been running in the background I've tried true Nas core true Nas scale open media Vault and after trying all of that I'm finally deciding to settle on this right here this is unrate but before we get ahead of ourselves why didn't I go with one of those other options first being a true Nest true Nas is absolutely wonderful it is a great piece of software free and open source but on the user experience and kind of personal preference side I wasn't really feeling the user interface and there was a issue when it comes to network shares and Docker containers for example my media server I have a huge collection of media that I have shared out so I can add files remove files edit it from other machines and on true Nas I had a container running the actual media server but for security reasons or whatever it just did not like that and that is just the workflow that I'm used to and I ended up having to do like weird workarounds where the machine restarted I had to temporarily disable the share to actually launch the media server container and then re-enable the share it was just a bunch of extra work granted when it comes to actually setting up a raid using containers and all that it is a real top-notch experience and I do recommend it from there I try it out open media Vault primarily because it's simply Debian with a really nice set of tools to go ahead and actually set up manage raids and just interact with the system over a web GUI just like with true Nas I wasn't really a fan of the overall dashboard and kind of user experience of the thing plus I had a real hell of a time getting the Intel Hardware acceleration to work properly with a Docker I did manage to go to the work kind of but just overall there's better things out there if you're looking for something that's incredibly simple free and open source you're used to using Debian and you just want to use that as your server with some extra tools to help you out it is a great option real quick I do have to mention this video is sponsored by La node use the node to spin up your very own Linux server in the cloud whether that be a wide variety of Linux distributions or something from their one click Marketplace they also have storage servers vlans guides in a whole lot more make sure you check out the node there'll be a link down below for a hundred dollar sixty day credit and then that takes us to unraid thanks to this awesome subscriber here Greg he basically went ahead and donated a license to me to go ahead and use and try out and play with the software so big thank you for that and that alone the word license may be what kind of turns most of you guys off of this product if we go over to pricing here you can see it is not cheap cool thing is it's not some monthly subscription thing so when you buy a license the license is yours and for me I ended up needing to get this plus one for ninety dollars mostly because I have six storage drives but I also have an nvme which I'm going to talk about in a second so just a heads up this is paid software but with paid software comes kind of better support it's just overall a good experience granted I would have preferred something free and open source so when it comes to the overall user experience it's really nice for installation it does work a little differently you don't actually install it onto a drive on your computer navs whatever you happen to be using you have a flash drive that you go ahead and install unraid onto and then every time it boots up it loads the operating system into the system memory and you need to have that USB plugged in all the time so it can work because that is essentially your boot drive and another weird thing if you have a USB like this one the actual license you buy is attached to the USB so you better use a good one when you decide to install it I think you can switch it if you contact customer support but it's not something that is encouraged so with that we're going to kind of go over the dashboard go over some of the things I like about it there are definitely some cons that I'm going to be talking about and I'm just going to go over my typical setup here on the dashboard we have actual information about the server I'm running we have our processor and the load that is running including the memory the interface so we can see the inbound outbound speeds and connections we have a little bit of outbound going because my wife is watching The Leaky blinders power I do have a UPS but I'm in the process of kind of figuring that out and setting it up GPU this is a plug-in this isn't the default thing right here and actually probably won't be using it anymore I switched the actual Plex container to its own dedicated box with a better CPU and Hardware acceleration but this was really handy helping me make sure that it was actually working and then if we go up here we have our Docker containers I'll be diving into that in a little bit we have our Network shares which the ones that say secure are the ones that I created and then the app data domains isos and systems are the kind of default setup here we have our users and then over here we have information about our actual raid so we have the parity and then all the devices in the array with their status utilization and whether or not if they're active or not so now we're going to kind of dive into more specifics of all these so we're going to start off by going to main which this is my array of devices so in my array you can see I have six four terabyte hard drives as well as a nvme SSD my boot device like I mentioned earlier is The Flash it's a data traveler 3.0 31 gig and then we have the operation parity is valid here we can completely stop the array check it check the history spin it up spent down reboot and shut down the entire system from here when you first start up the system it's going to kind of list off your devices and have you kind of create that array and actually do that and then scan it properly it takes like a day or two depending on how much space you have but overall this has been a absolutely phenomenal experience and then if I want more information on this specific Drive I could go ahead and view it here and you could see the actual shares and files that are associated with it for example something we're about to talk about is right here this nvme actually we'll go ahead and Skip to shares here are the shares so we have app data that's default when app data is their default and preferred way to kind of set up your or the place where like your Docker configurations and things like that go data is the one I created which has all my media library on it Docker it's just what I wanted to do here is instead of using app data which is kind of default on the whole array of hard drives I created my own share for my Docker configs which is specifically on the nvme SSD and this was really helpful before I switched it over for something like Plex because Plex has a lot of very small files that it needs to pull and look through and relying on spinning disks to do that kind of slows down the UI and user experience so putting all the Plex configuration files onto an nvme SSD definitely does kind of improve the performance of the Plex UI domains saved VM instances I'm not really using this as my VM so I can't really speak on VMS in this instance I'm still kind of preferring Synology for that just because it's what I'm used to and then we have ISO images and system data and you can see here if I go to this Docker for example click on that we can see all my Docker configuration files here and you're able to kind of browse through this on here you can't make any edits or anything but it does give you an overview of your system files and of course if you do want kind of a web graphical way to manage and edit your files there are plugins and Docker containers that you could use just for that purpose and if I go back to main real quick I can kind of show you what I was talking about this Lenovo SSD here if I open this up you can see the real only thing associated with it is that Docker share so it's cool that you can even though you have a whole raid that are all connected you can still set specific drives for specific shares really handy so if I go back to shares for example I click on Docker here you have the name we have the comment we have the allocation method which I believe high water kind of fills things up to about 50 and then kind of tapers off into other drives the allocation method is completely up to you we have included disk switch disk 6 which is that SSD and we have excluded disks which are all the other drives and that's kind of where you set that up and specify this and then of course we have the SMB and the SMB user access I gave my personal user access and if I go over to users we have the root user and then we have my actual user that I use to connect to all the shares you can see I give this user access to the data and Docker for read and write which is really nice because then when I actually launched Docker containers and set permissions I associate this user to them so then if the docker containers themselves make any configuration files or anything like that this user automatically has privileges to go ahead and edit and configure those other settings we have a whole bunch of fun stuff we have CPU pinning time and date disk settings and if I go in here you can see really how many settings and how configurable this actually is we are currently using xfs as our default file system and here actually I'm going to change this a little bit uh warning temperature the nvme gets a little warm sometimes that's because I have a proper heat sinks or anything on it so I'm just gonna bump this up a little bit so I don't get as many notifications that was one of the things I was going to complain about but I should have Dove through these settings just a little more before I started complaining maybe go 65 before it's absolutely critical to apply that there we go and that's how easy it is to change a setting then we have Smart settings here I'm not going to dive through every single setting but there is definitely a lot we have the UPS settings our VM manager settings which you can see they're currently enabled this is the virta i o kind of drivers for Windows like I said I haven't really played around or used that so I can't really speak on it we have all of our Network Services so NFS SMB FTP servers you can configure all those the permissions for those and how those work and then under user utilities these are kind of things are plugins I installed such as this GPU statistics here and exactly how I want it to work so it works for NVIDIA Intel and AMD super handy and then Community applications are here so that's enabled and that's what we're going to dive into right now so first we have plugins now plugins are just simple additions such as the GPU statistics Intel top it's kind of like actual base system applications in a way and there's a lot of different plugins that do a lot of different things and you can install plugins from file here if you would like to and if we go over to Docker these are our actual Docker containers you can see I definitely have a lot of them here most thumb kind of lean towards the media management because this server is technically my hopkey media server which we see right here we have a bunch of different things and it's really nice because a lot of these well all of these I pulled from apps over here watch the community the underrated Community is has some phenomenal people that do a lot of awesome work in terms of making these kind of community Docker templates that are just designed to work really good out of the box making installing applications like this incredibly easy here we have the application name we have the version the network Port mappings volume mappings auto start options and uptime you can see there's a mix some of these are 28 minutes because I just updated a lot of these up to 11 days I think is last time I restarted the or 12 days goes when I restarted the actual system so basically all the information that you're going to want for a basic overview of your containers and if we go into version here you can see they're all up to date if I go ahead and click on apply update you can see how easy it is to update one of these this is home page nominal little kind of server dashboard application I'm going to be doing a video soon actually going in and covering everything that you see here in what I have on other machines an updated home lamp tour so do make sure you subscribe ring that Bell so you do not miss that we can see here it's now extracting pull rolling all of these stopping the container it's going to run this command to actually restart it with the new uh images it just downloaded it's removed to the open images and just like that it is now up to date super easy to do super easy to manage an example of some of this configuration if we go ahead and click on any of these such as divulge VPN right here this is my BitTorrent client but what I'm doing in addition to actually running this as my BitTorrent client as a built-in VPN I just removed my username and password here so I don't accidentally link that see I'm using a Pia at the moment with the openvpn but what's real nice about this and real nice about these container images is they're just built to work for example right here we have the VPN input ports now this is really nice because then I can set this specific container as my network with the VPN running and then set this as the network and then set this container as the network for other containers funneling the traffic through it thus funneling it through a VPN so these right here are the ports of 200 other containers that I kind of want to have a VPN and it just kind of works so I'm going to go back to Docker here and you can see we have nzb git as well as Prowler using the network of this container so these two containers are funneled through the divulge VPN thus giving the VPN to multiple containers without having to set up separate vpns for every single one which depending on your VPN provider some of them have limits to the amount of devices and this makes it so it's only taking up one device additionally if I go ahead and open up a fresh RSS go to show more settings Here app data I mentioned earlier that's kind of the default where they prefer you to put your Docker configurations I have mine in Docker and fresh RSS but for example if I were to get rid of this you can see we still have that app data share but the docker is the one I added and then I'd add fresh RSS so you can still customize it and do whatever you want with these containers so basically is Docker just with these kind of community templates which you can find over here under and this is a really great system for discovering new dock containers and new services that you want to run on your home lab because they have the Recently Added here but they also have Spotlight applications that's how I discovered this right here it's a phenomenal little eBook reader that I've been using quite a bit just kind of loading my textbooks on there and using it for school retro Nas they have cops if we go to top trending we got a proxy manager here web hook we have a Sab nzb extended top new installs random applications so they really make it easy to kind of find and discover things and like if I go with two media servers here for example here I can even see some applications I've covered in the past such as audiobook shelf which again is another phenomenal application we have NB Plex and you can see a lot of these are Community hosted so we have this one just Plex this one with Plex pass and if I were to for example install this it would bring up all the recommended variables and things to change right here so by default it's assuming I kind of have a Nvidia GPU which I don't but if I did that's really easy if I don't have a Nvidia GPU I can remove the those and then obviously Add A New Path port or container and then set that to Intel GPU or whatever I needed to do we have all the permissions here so in my instance I keep the group ID at 100 but this I always end up changing to a thousand so then that default user I created will have access and then you could just configure this to how you want so technically I would want this to be under data and really that's it so on so forth really easy to set up I have been having a wonderful time and also in here you can find plugins so if I go over here go down to plugins you can see we have things like the AMD vendor reset Community applications which is what's allowing us to install a lot of the things that you've been seeing Corsair PCU statistics we've got Docker folder and really a whole bunch you can see there are 124 different plugins to help you kind of add more features and usability to your containers if I sort this by downloads for example Radeon top so just monitors python packages Prometheus pie hole export I just started using Prometheus adguard exporter open RGB if you happen to have RGB on your Nas nut Network UPS tools which I'm probably going to end up needing to grab just really a lot of different stuff and then if we go over here under Tools you have some basic stuff such as your Diagnostics new permissions processes system devices page map language vars a bunch of stuff and then last but not least some of the extra tools we have here if we go over here I can open up a terminal and then have full root access to whatever I needed to do so for example LS I want a CD into my Mount user directory see what's in there and then I can go ahead and continue and do whatever I need to do and yeah overall it's just a really great system I haven't been having any issues with it at all it's been running phenomenally for the price it's up there but at least the license is Perpetual so you're not on a monthly subscription for me it's definitely worth the cost of it and honestly if I were to set up like a freshness or something this is for sure the software that I would purchase and put on it and I would note that this has not been sponsored by unraid they've never reached out to me it's just overall a great piece of tech and another great piece of tech is the note if you happen to not have access to physical Hardware like this you can get a lot of these Services spun up using the node they have a one-click Marketplace in which you can easily spin up a uh a Docker server pre-installed and then add whatever containers install protein or do whatever you need to do but with all that big thank you for watching check out our newsletter if you are interested every week we have a fresh newsletter with the latest and Linux and open source news uh and with all that I do hope you have an absolutely beautiful day and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 42,242

Keywords: linux, nas, truenas, unraid, homelab

Id: ahOXQM4416Q

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023