Chapter 1: Building a hyperconverged router, nas, home-server

I've started self hosting a lot of tools for my daily life years ago on a raspberry pi.

I slowly started upgrading to an NUC skull canyon and then after a while purchased an Asustor AS6706T. I manage my docker compose files in a private git repo + deploy two stacks to the NUC + nas via custom deploy scripts which basically pull the repo on remote + trigger some re-deploy commands.

This works fine and honestly surprisingly smooth. That being said, I still have some painpoints which I hope to address with this new build:

• Power consumption: Currently I have an overall average consumption of around 110 watts (NAS + NUC) plus router of 20 watts totaling a whopping 130 watt. ideally the new setup with more power + more options would run around the same.
• Cpu vs Storage: I need to decide on each new application: do I prioritze computing power (then put it on the NUC), or storage (then put on the NAS)
• Multiple machines to maintain: updates, deployment process, uptime monitoring, etc.
• No GPU: while the NUC has a small gpu, it's limited to the NUC
• Firewall: I want better control over my network traffic
• 25 Gbit/s: I'm an incredibly happy customer of init7, which currently provide me with a 10Gbit/s connection which I've been using happily. Next up: 25Gbits 🚀
• Router sucks: I've never liked my current router (Zyxel AX7501-B0). I've come from turris omnia, which I quite liked, to this box which is barely configurable, through a horrible UI, and receives few to none updates 🤨
• I want to learn something new: I'm excited to check out vyos, trueNas and proxmox and a completely new hardware adventure.
• Storage: I've currently hit the ceiling of 6 installed hard drives on the NAS. The future setup should be able to connect a lot more HDs.
• Scaling/Adapting: I major takeaway from the journey the last couple years have been: back to the roots. Not only from a self hosting perspective, but also hardware: These pre-built boxes make it very hard to address upgrading a single aspect of your application (for example GPU).

Next up

I will try to write about my hardware shopping list, the targeted OS/software stack, and the current tests I've already run.

Want to help? Let me know if I'm on the wrong path, or how I could improve this setup. Thanks