Every single time I talk to my friends, whom also want an *arr/Plex/VPN/Home Assistant setup like I’ve got, I can see the fear in their eyes when I mention Debian, Docker, and the terminal. It could be a case of “git gud”, but I want to help them out with a setup like this, but with as low friction as possible. Ideally something completely GUI based, and very low maintenance.
I know of unRAID, and Portainer, but does anyone have any experience in setting up something like this for people whose knowledge of self hosting and networking aren’t as good as yours?
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The moment you help them set it up you also agree to being their IT Support when anything goes wrong. Do you really want to deal with that?
The thing is, many people will show some interest in this but ultimately don’t want to do it themselves. It does require varying amounts of time to learn & most importantly to fix it. Many people are time poor or would use their spare time on other stuff.
You should ask whether they’re genuinely interested in setting this up & if so what the concerns are.Agreed with this, they may want the setup but have no interest in managing it, no matter how simple you get it. If you do it for them you might be setting yourself up as their permanent support.
I’d gauge how interested they actually are, and make sure they’re willing to learn enough to follow basic maintenance routines.
Make them an unraid usb and then they can just stick in a spare pc and they should be good to go. Then they can use the gui to download and install docker images. Would be the path of least resistance IMO.
then you can show them how to depmod their nvidia card for passthrough and configure their raid array and enable docker and know which repositories are good and which magic numbers to put in the docker file then how to configure the first run of the servers and hope it all doesn’t blow up. It’s not that easy for people with no technical experience.
I’ve set up unraid, truenas, proxmox so far. Unraid is my current and favorite solution. I don’t think any of them are ready to be installed and setup by normal users, but any of them can be setup by someone knowledgeable and then used/updated by a normal user.
Not that I don’t agree with encouraging learning and welcoming more people to self hosting, but at some point there’s just a differentiating factor between paying for access to services for convenience and simplicity sake versus the higher friction process of learning to self host.
Even finding tools that can do this in more convenient or UI friendly ways shouldn’t be spoon fed. I can’t foresee a self hosted setup that at no point would ever need basic terminal knowledge. What happens when they want to migrate to a new server?
You should continue to wear your wizard’s hat with pride. 🧙♂️
If you’re going to do something, do it well.
