Edit2: OK Per feedback I am going to have a dedicated external NAS and a separate homeserver. The NAS will probably run TrueNAS. The homeserver will use an immutable os like fedora silverblue. I am doing a dedicated NAS because it can be good at doing one thing - serving files and making backups. Then my homeserver can be good at doing whatever I want it to do without accidentally torching my data.
I haven’t found any good information on which distro to use for the NAS I am building. Sure, there are a few out there. But as far as I can tell, none are immutable and that seems to be the new thing for long term durability.
Edit: One requirement is it will run a media server with hardware transcoding. I’m not quite sure if I can containerize jellyfin and still easily hardware transcode without a more expensive processor that supports hyper-v.
That sounds pretty slick. I envy your scripting prowess. You really have to know your system top to bottom to be able to boil it all down like that.
I’m just beginning my journey into this whole space, and it’s really interesting how many different ways people have to deal with the same basic things.
I’m also incredibly lazy, so maybe more scripting is in my future! Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply!
I certainly wasn’t just born good at this. Unironically if you want to learn how something works, try to automate it. By the time it’s automated you’ll understand basically every part of it at at least a basic high-level.