Self-Hosted NAS, Proxmox, Homelab, and Photos Server

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 26, 2025

• XDA ☛ I built an ultra-light NAS setup instead of using TrueNAS or Proxmox

  Considering the sheer number of NAS-centric distributions out there, choosing the right operating system for your storage server can seem rather tiresome. After all, unless you’re willing to wipe everything and start from scratch, you’ll be stuck with the distro once you’ve initialized the data pools. Modern NAS operating systems tend to ship with tons of packages and extra facilities to simplify your file transfer, backup, and data archival workloads.

  But what if you just want a no-nonsense NAS configuration – one that only features your favorite services? While there are a handful of simple distros out there, nothing beats the sheer flexibility of a custom NAS OS. Since I’ve cycled between most of the popular server-oriented operating systems out there, I figured I could try to set up an ultra-light NAS configuration – and it turned out to be a piece of cake!

• XDA ☛ I automated Proxmox VMs with Terraform, Ansible, and Semaphore — here's how

  Since I work on server experiments fairly often, I tend to create new virtual machines, many of which end up getting destroyed when I’m done tinkering with them. Although Proxmox’s built-in VM creation wizard works well for the most part, going through the same set of resource allocation tabs can get rather annoying after the umpteenth time. That’s where automation tools like Terraform and Ansible come in handy, as they let me deploy and configure virtual machines using reusable configuration files.

  But aside from requiring lengthy config files, I also have to run a handful of terminal commands to get the automation platforms to do my bidding. While executing these commands takes a lot less time than deploying a new VM, arming it with an OS, and setting up the right packages manually, I’ve always wanted a simpler way to run my automation workflows. That’s when I ran into Semaphore, a web UI for managing and executing automation scripts. After spending a few days using Terraform and Ansible in tandem with Semaphore, I managed to create a collection of scripts to automatically spin up and configure disposable VMs for my home lab.

• HowTo Geek ☛ 3 Raspberry Pi Projects to Try This Weekend (October 17 - 19)

  Don't waste your weekend on the couch—dust off that old Raspberry Pi and get to work! There's no better time to flex your nerdy muscles and build something that you can be proud of, so to help give you a head start, I've collected three Raspberry Pi projects that you can complete in a weekend.

• HowTo Geek ☛ My Homelab Was Never More Valuable Than It Was This Weekend

  This weekend, and continuing into the beginning of the week, many online services were dysfunctional or totally inaccessible. That happened because of a DNS bug on the part of Amazon. I avoided some of the issues though thanks to the homelabbing I do, meaning my hard work has paid off more than usual.

  My Services Weren't Affected

  Not surprisingly, Amazon Prime went offline thanks to the outage. HBO Max did as well, not to mention everyone's favorite ad platform, Roku. I honestly didn't even notice because these days, I do almost all of my movie and TV show streaming with my Jellyfin media server. Since I host it myself, there are no ads and, crucially, no third party servers that can bring it down.

  Apple Music and Tidal were also down, and fortunately for me, Jellyfin also supports audio playback. I've uploaded my entire music collection so I can stream it from wherever I am, and it doesn't matter what the status of Amazon's US-EAST-1 is. I use the Fintunes app on my phone to get a similar experience to that of Tidal or Spotify.

  While Microsoft Office 365 was down, my local Nextcloud service was still up. I primarily use it for cloud storage, but it has plugins to allow for collaborative office productivity too.

• HowTo Geek ☛ How Long Will a Self-Hosted Photos Server Take to Pay for Itself?

  Are you tired of paying Google or Apple for cloud storage just to back your photos up? You may have heard self-hosting a photo server recommended. That alternative has its own costs, though, so how much should you expect to pay?

  There are many ways to self-host a photo server, but it might take longer to pay for itself than you’d expect. Of the two methods I’ll talk about here, one takes nearly a decade, and the other is paid off in under a year—so it’s up to you on which route you choose.