Building My Homelab - Part I

So, I decided to build a homelab. I’ve been dabling with setting a homelab on a cloud platform for a while. However, I always found it a tad annoying that I had to pay to simply host content when I had a PC lying around at home.

So, without any more delay, here is my Homelab.

Part I

In this first part, I will explain why I chose thte OS and underlying technology. Just know, these are my choices. They aren’t necessarily correct. If you find something wrong or a better way of how to do this, please leave me a comment, or reach out to me. I listen to all feedback.

Operating System

I tried 3 Operating Systems:

Ubuntu Server
Proxmox
TrueNAS

I heard a lot of good things about FreeNAS. And since my main goal was to serve my music collection to my local network, it felt like a good starting point.

I installed it and stared playing around with it. I tried to get Plex running on it. I kept getting errors installing Plex. I couldn’t create mounts. After a few hours, I gave up. This is nothing against the quality of the OS. I just didn’t have any patience.

Proxmox was my second choice. I had less luck with it than TrueNAS. I found it way too complex for my needs.

After trying TrueNAS and Proxmox, I decided to use a simple Linux server. It works, and is all I needed.