I recently decided to get more serious about self hosting and gotta say, use TrueNAS scale, just do it, literally everything is 1 click... While it can be complicated, it is most definitely worth it, not just to stick it to big tech, but because some of the selfhosted apps genuinely provide a better experience than centralized alternatives. NextCloud surprised me especially with how genuinely nice it is. Installed it, got an SSL certificate and replaced google services almost entirely in a few hours of work.
I've still got a few things I wanna do which look very complicated... Stuff like a mail server and pfsense (the stuff of nightmares) are among the 1st on my list...
genuine advice, i recommend you get into the nitty gritty of linux someday.
Guis, especially complex guis are just hell on earth. Actually sitting down and learning about what you're doing, and familiarizing yourself with the underlying tools, is an incredibly good way to get around that problem.
It's really hard to fuck up a CLI, and it's really easy with a certain level of knowledge, to navigate more complex topics and concepts. It's very worthwhile.
I am very much into the nitty gritty of Linux (I use Alpine fyi) the problem is, pf/opnsense aren't based on Linux...
And I also don't really know how to set them up... Yk as routers, mainly because my internet comes through PPPoE and I just cannot for the life of me figure out how to pass that through to a VM. I bound the VM to its own NIC, did everything, did not work....
Honestly, I found it really easy. I don't have a background in IT or anything either.
What did you find difficult? Setting custom firewall rules is harder to understand, but the general functionality of setting up a NAT and even installing and configuring ZenArmor were super super easy.
the problem is, pf/opnsense aren’t based on Linux…
oh, well in that case you should fuck around with BSD someday, i've been meaning to do so, just haven't gotten around to it. the various BSDs are the siblings of linux.
as for all of the networking side of things, networking is just a nightmare, that's just something you have to learn about. Setting up your own local network to figure out how things work in a sterile controlled environment would be good.
I already have my own network with stuff and things... it's mostly just the simple stuff (TrueNAS scale, pihole, wireguard, nextcloud and other things like that). But yeah, outside my mac, I have literally 0 experience with BSD...
yeah, pretty much the same for me, just a little more primitive by nature.
I hear BSD is pretty nice since it's one system, instead of a modular system, it makes the actual functionality of the system a little nicer, as well a improving security quite a bit.
I can't imagine it's much different than linux, they're both unix related, and unix shares heavy ties with most unix related OSs these days.