natew

I did a similar setup and got pretty far into Mac OS Server for many year. But when Apple gave up on building server hardware and essentially made Mac OS Server a forgotten afterthought I gave up on it as well.

I have switched all of my home storage to a Freenas on some older hardware desktop hardware. A few months ago, I did a (what I thought would be terrifying) transplant to some newer equipment and it didn't even skip a beat. Freenas and specifically ZFS is incredible resilient. Additionally, I back up the important stuff to Backblaze B2.

Being that I am a Network Admin, I had another desktop hanging around with 32GB of memory that I dedicated for virtualization. I started out doing Nutanix, but the Community version of that is pretty terrible and poorly documented. I switched a few months ago to vmware because I was very surprised that I can sign up for a VMUG (vmware user group) membership and up to 6 cores of licenses of vmware enterprise plus, along with a lot of other software including the latest of vmware fusion and vmware workstation. I think I paid $360 for 3 years which is a pretty incredible value.

Now I run plex, seafile, a ghost blog and some other services via docker. I thought about building a single vm to run it on, but now if I want to update or reboot plex, I don't take everything else down. Docker is such a cool technology and gets better and better all the time.

Granted, I do this for my day job, but my point is there is a lot out there these days. And I found Apple products are expensive and not worth the effort for a home network. When I had my Mac OS Server, and a service would crash, it wasn't as simple as Apple makes it by turning off and on a button to get it working. It usually turned out to be very difficult and sometimes requiring rebuilding the whole thing to get it working again.

That's not to say we completely abandoned Apple. My wife and I each have Macbook Pros, iphones and at least 3 ipads kicking around the kids us.

With IOT being the new hotness, I have recently build a raspberry pi running Home Assistant to control and integrate the Hue and ikea lights, Plex, and Echo Dot. That community is rapidly expanding and integrating some pretty cool tech.