ArborNode

I appreciate the refresher. Thanks for sharing the link!

I run a self hosted server for my household and my family gets a lot out of it. I’m not quite sure I’d consider it a gift as much as I do a way to save money and have more privacy and control. To be more blunt, I do not expect my wife would feel happy with me telling her it is a “gift” for her as it is clearly a hobby of mine.

For your question on OS, truenas scale has worked really well for me. If you have comfort running Debian server, that’s a great way to go as well. I think truenas scale would fit you well for one of your specific notes, “Having a simple container interface for future features like homeassistant and jellyfin et al is great too.” I love how easy my containers are to work on and maintain in truenas.

Ultimately, I think you should spin up every OS you are considering and look around first. It would only take a few hours of your time and it’s a very personal choice to a certain degree.

For those of us behind double NAT (CGNAT) forwarding ports is not an option as we do not control forwarding on the second gateway. This will limit you to any of the solutions that include a device outside your network with a public port that tunnels traffic into your server.

If you don’t mind me asking, which model did you have these issues with? I’m sorry to hear you had a bad experience.

I like your idea, but minisforum has much better platforms for self hosting. The better options do cost twice as much. Not sure they are cost effective as far as purchase price goes.

I run one with an AMD chip set and very much like it. Its fairly low power usage, but I haven’t measured in a while. For what it’s worth, I really like mine.