For the past month or so my big box general purpose server has been running Truenas. That has been fine and all. I liked the interface, I can appreciate ZFS, and it was nice to have an opinionated system. But I need more out of my big box.
I have a few servers. There are a few ARM boards, one Synology, and the main event is this old dell optiplex with a bunch of drives in it. I prefer for it to be "general purpose", so I can run VMs, ssh into the system, use it as both a storage appliance, remote desktop, VM host, and the like. I also like configuring the drives exactly as I see fit.
Currently the drive configuration is a cheap SSD for /, an auto-unlocking encrypted BTRFS RAID1 out of 2 big HDDs, and another auto-unlocking encrypted drive, but nvme and ext4, as a VM disk. Then I expose a few places on the mirror via NFS, mount those into one of the VMs, and share them via nginx on the host.
After wiping Truenas last night and getting this server reconfigured with Alpine Linux (because what else would I use?)
I felt really satisfied about how the disks are set up. Getting alpine to auto-unlock disks with keys is easy with the dmcrypt service. BTRFS is less easy but it's fine. Being able to control libvirt machines with virt-manager from my laptop is very comfy. The last thing to do is get the firewall in order, which I already had mostly figured out a while back. It's kind of tricky for libvirt VMs but nftables is fairly easy to understand.
It's good to be back to a server I can actually control, instead of the locked-down appliance-like nature of Truenas. It'd be ideal if I only used this thing as a storage server, but I only have one, so it has to pull double/triple duty.