Building a Home Server with TrueNAS

What I thought was going to be a relatively simple task turned into a huge amount of research… I spent most of my time on iXsystems’ community forum and /r/homelab on reddit. The people on iXsystems’ forum were very helpful and detailed. However, most of the information for iXsystems is based around used intel boards. Much less material is available if you’re like me and are interested in newer AMD cpus.

So how did I narrow it down? I did what I always do: make a spreadsheet. There are simply way too many options presented to figure what cpu/mobo to choose without spreadsheet analysis. Without further ado:

The total comes out to around $632. I don’t know why anyone would build a server without getting some sort of UPS/APC as well.

The total was $676 for these parts, with $291 for the memory alone. DDR4 ram with ecc isn’t cheap. For comparison, a Xeon E5-2650 V2 goes for around $70 on ebay, with significantly cheaper DDR3 ram.

So I was already at $1,300, before purchasing hard drives. I bought 6 Western Digital Red 4TB drives initially, @ $100. Later on I got 2 more drives, and another stick of ram.

Altogether, it was $1300 for the parts + $800 for the drives, or ~$2100 in total.

I didn’t go with a used intel board because of the higher power usage and less powerful specs. This made my build much more expensive, but also more future proof.

I adapted my jail setup and structure from this gist, and installed rancheros via this guide.

I currently have 20 jails running, and 5 docker containers running in RancherOS (which runs in a VM with 2 cpus and 4GB memory).

Why jails over docker? Convenience, I guess. It’s far easier for me to muck around in iocage jails than it is to inspect and debug docker containers. Unfortunately this does mean if I lose my server, I’d have to recreate all those jails… but setting them up in the first place was pretty easy once I learned how rc.d worked.

Services that I run:

Several services use databases, so I elected to set aside jails for them.

I also run 3 instances of minecraft via PaperMC, a high performance fork of Spigot. The main jail runs Waterfall (a fork of bungeecord) along with a hub instance. Waterfall acts as a proxy and lets one access multiple servers within a network.

My docker services:

Once I built the server, I had no use for my raspberry pi3 and 4. Until I learned about prometheus and grafana.

Having metrics and a dashboard is awesome, but if my server crashes, I no longer have access to the metrics… So they have to be run somewhere else! This is where the raspberry pi comes in- it just sits on my local network ingesting traffic.

Unfortunately, node_exporter doesn’t seem to export hdd temperature values, which is pretty important. I’ll probably have to write a simple script to pull those values and host another metrics target for prometheus.