Hey, folks. The Jellyfin and Komga media servers running on my NAS are going great locally. I invested in a firewall and some managed switches, and from preliminary VLAN tests, I’m confident that I’ve got what I need to section off the self hosted services from my primary network. I was hoping to get a recommendation for the next couple of steps.
I’ve got a mini PC running Bazzite that had been a portable console/fighting game setup that I’m ready to retire from that role so that it can serve as a server and reverse proxy. I’m not sure what OS to put on it. If I have to manage it entirely by command line, it will take 10 times longer for me to do anything I want to do, and I’d really prefer a GUI. That said, I know it also takes resources to power a GUI that I won’t be touching most hours of the day. I was curious what distro you folks might recommend for this purpose. In some of my research, I also came across Apache Guacamole, but I’m not sure if that requires a proper desktop environment to already be present in order to get that kind of remote access with a GUI. Am I overthinking this? Is this going to be just fine with a normal desktop distro installed on it? If normal desktop distros work just fine, I need something that can sit there without updating until I tell it to; since introducing snaps, this is something Ubuntu has been a pain about, so I might want something else.
The next thing I was curious about was order of operations for the reverse proxy. There are SSL/TLS certificates that are needed for HTTPS, but I need a domain for that, and a lot of tutorials just skip on past this step in the domain configuration screens where you “enter your DNS servers” as though I know why I’d need other DNS servers, where to get them, how to select them, etc. And ideally, I’d want to test that the reverse proxy is working locally with HTTPS and all before it’s exposed to the internet in the first place, so I’m not sure what order to do those steps in: DNS servers, buying a domain, getting certs, configuring reverse proxy.
As with most things, I’m sure this is far less complicated than it looks to me right now, and once it’s in the rearview, it will make a lot more sense, but I’d appreciate any advice folks here can offer.
I plan on putting just about everything I can in Docker containers, but I don’t think what I’m doing requires VMs, unless you spotted something that’s eluding me.
dont discount the utility of running containers in an abstracted Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) away from your physical hardware. it expands your testing surfaces and sandboxes immeasurably.
Why do I need that? From my perspective, it seems like it would be more useful if I had far more services that I intended to run than what I’m actually planning for.
It depends on your goal. If it’s to learn (to say get a different job) you want/need as much flexibility as you can get. If it’s just to have a media server then you probably want to optimize in favor of that.
Yeah, I’ve only got a handful of services I want to run. It’s possible that the bug bites me and I want to go deeper into this stuff, but for the here and now, I’m only eyeing 8-10 things I want to host, and they ought to work across a mini PC and a NAS.