Infrastructure/Case study 01
Personal server on TrueNAS
A server running around the clock that hosts my documents, my media and several automation tools.
- Internet
- Reverse proxy
- Authentication
- Application
What the server does
The server has three jobs: storing my data, hosting applications and running language models locally. It is on all the time.
Applications
Services run in containers: Paperless-ngx for documents, n8n for automation, Ollama for local models, and a few tools for media, DNS filtering and lightweight databases. Home Assistant reads the server's state through the TrueNAS integration.
Access
Services reachable from outside go through a reverse proxy and an authentication layer. Remote access to the private network goes through a VPN.
Updates
Applications update automatically. Updating the host system is excluded from automation and done by hand, because an automatic update once gave me an outage. You only learn that once. Applications stopped on purpose are ignored.
Resources
The server has 32 GB of RAM, shared between many services. Ollama is limited to 8 GB. Energy management counts the server as a 55 W base load (see the Home Assistant case study). Power spikes linked to disks waking up were fixed with a community patch.