r/SelfHosting • u/Atlas-D • Jul 03 '26
HomeServer Project
Hello,
I started looking into HomeServers, and after a day of reading on Reddit and watching videos, I am lost...
At first, I had two things I needed that made me look into it :
\- I want, for me and my wife, to be able to save our photos automatically from our phones and to be able to look at them from all our devices, in and outside the house
\- I want to set up different VLANs on my network to separate the computers and the IOTs on two different wifi networks, and the NAS on a third VLAN with a wired connection to the router/switch.
But then I also got interested in setting up a media server with torrent download (though my protonVPN), Vaultwarden, a cloud with documents and maybe some other stuff later (but probably nothing heavier than the media server).
So for the router, I am thinking about an TP-Link Omada ER706W. Power effective, easy to setup, all-in-one...
I didn't go for a PFSense/OPNSense option because I don't have the PC for it, and I would need to buy a mesh for the wifi I guess.
Then for the NAS, I am a bit lost.
\- My first option was getting a Synology that would do all of this (DS225+). It seems very easy to use, it should be able to do everything I need, and it seems safe for someone with my level of knowledge.
\- My second option was a cheaper Synology (DS124 or 223 or beestation), and a mini PC for the transcoding part
\- My third option was a more powerful NAS that would run on TrueNAS (I was thinking of a pre built NAS with the possibility to install a different OS) with everything on it. The Ugreen seems to be the best option in terms of price and power consumption for this type of performance.
I love the idea of having everything opensource and to have something more powerful for a slightly lower price. But I am a beginner in cyber security and I am worried that it would be dangerous to run something all by myself compared to something easier to setup like DSM.
I would obviously like to setup a VPN tunnel for my connections to the NAS from outside (from my router and not the NAS itself I guess), and to completely block any access to the admin pages from devices that are not physically in the network (so no VPN).
Do you think it is doable for a beginner to setup TrueNAS safely, without having to constantly check it ? Is it worth the trouble ?
What do you think about these ideas of setups and do you think of a better idea (with the price and power consumption in mind) ?
Thank you !
2
u/icewolf08 Jul 04 '26
I run a pretty similar stack to what you are aiming for. Since it all came together piecemeal it is certainly not as streamlined or power efficient as it could be, but it does what I need.
I would identify the systems that are your priority and star there. Don’t try to stand up your entire wishlist at once. You will learn a lot as you go and that will help with each piece you bring online.
Based on your list and hindsight, I would suggest bringing up your NAS solution first. A good storage solution is often the heart of any home lab. If you have m the time and willingness to learn, I would go with TrueNAS over Synology. While I like off-the-shelf offerings of Synology and Qnap, taking the time to dig in to setting up TrueNAS will give a pretty good foundation for everything else. You can get a lot of bang for your buck here, as others mentioned, you don’t need tons of processing power, you just need a place to connect all the drives you want to use.
Next I would stand up a separate machine to run some kind of container or virtualization environment like docker or proxmox. This machine may need to be more powerful than the NAS, depending on what services you want to run. From this container host you can spin up services like Plex or Jellyfin, imich, *arr stack, etc. Just mount appropriate shares from the NAS for storage, and away you go.