Anybody using Aurora or Bluefin as a server?

General
1

So, about three years ago I built my server, which handles my ZFS pool and all my container apps, running on Debian Trixie. Probably a bit nuts, but it’s also my main desktop machine (and my occasional gaming rig, since it’s got my nice GPU).

I do like Debian, but that last upgrade… yeah, I really don’t want to go through that again. So now I’m thinking about switching over to Aurora since I’ve really enjoyed using that on my laptop.
Does anyone else run their NAS and server containers on the same box as their gaming PC? Is this a common thing?

Changing images is SO much easier than individually upgrading a million packages for a major while number upgrade..

2

Changing images is way easier. It’s the reason behind kubernetes. I came back to Fedora after the pain of Debian upgrades… I don’t run a gaming, but it sounds like what you might want is to run your server containers in a distrobox. @j0rge wrote a blog post on how to automate distroboxes and even mentions creating systemd Unit files for them.

HTH

3

Actually, I run most of my services in docker and that should be easy, but it looks like I’ll have to fork Aurora and add stuff like Samba since I use it. I know the samba server is available in linux brew, but I’m not sure if using that is a good idea over a fedora supported package added to the image.

4

I use a Aurora on a spare desktop to host a hacked-together Jellyfin quadlet. It’s not the cleanest (or easiest) setup, but it works. I do plan on looking into uCore in the future.

A few major notes I can add for anyone wanting to go this route:

  • Consider if you actually need full-disk encryption. tpm-unlock is not advisable for certain processors, so you will want/need a keyboard and monitor handy.
  • Be sure to set the power profile to where it’s not going to sleep. Great function for a desktop, not so much for an always-on server. This may or may not persist across power cycles.
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5

Could you run a Debian LXC using incus?. This might be exactly what you want. You can run samba and your other server software in the LXC managed by incus. You could even bind mount the relevant ZFS datasets into the LXC.

Hopefully with this setup, your Debian LXC could stick with software in the “main” archive area (like you would not change the apt sources). Therefore, it would be easier to upgrade from debian 13 to 14.

This approach might be easier because your Debian configurations could carry over to some degree.

(for what it’s worth I like Debian too; but my laptop runs bluefin)

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6

I discovered that all was not what I thought, for some reason I thought that Samba was not there,but it is. So, no issues :wink: Haven’t messed with LXC/Incus/LXD in a while though. Would be a good solution if I needed it.

That being said, I dove into BlueBuild and I know have a forked version that I can build both via github and locally, so if I need to add anything else I will. - thanks!

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7

ublue sometimes has a more updated ZFS version and therefore if you are doing zpool upgrade you could activate new zfs features that aren’t available in older ZFS versions that you’d find in a server OS

8

Samba runs just fine over Podman/Docker.

Here is an example of how I do it on Podman

[Unit]
Description=Samba file share in a container.
After=network-online.target local-fs.target

[Container]
AutoUpdate=registry
EnvironmentFile=/some/path/samba/users.env
EnvironmentFile=/some/path/samba/config.env
Image=registry.opensuse.org/opensuse/samba:latest
Network=host
Timezone=local
Volume=/mnt/files:/files
Volume=/home:/home:ro

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target

Then users.env

USER=user:encoded_pass:1000:group:1000

And config.env

HOSTNAME=my.host.tld
SHARE_DOWNLOADS=MyShare:/files:yes:no:no:user:group
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9

Yea, but it’s not official. Its ok though. It comes with Aurora so no need for the container version. Looks like I shouldn’t have any problem just running Aurora as a server too. Thanks!

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