Proxmox or Ubuntu - Advice for a noob please.

[rautz]

So I have a 7th or 8th gen intel i7 that I am running ubuntu on.

My question:
I want to retire this computer and leave it to soley serve jellyfin(+ other services -- EDITED BY bitmap) to the local network and remote clients.

I am not very experienced with setting these environments up but am usually quite good at following online guides and noticing discrepancies where i go wrong.

My current setup is caddy+duckdns and jellyfin running on Ubuntu 24.04. WIth a paltry 2tb of storage.
GFX card isnt really upto spec - r7 370. 
My media is stored on 2 separate ssds / media drives connected to my computer "internally" i have room for one more SSD. - I dont think my mobo has m.2 slots so just have the 4 sata slots to work with.

I would like to tweak my setup from work where required which is why I looked at proxmox though I am not sure how technical the remote connection sequence gets(if at all) versus remote access to a jellyfin server. 

So basically as the subject header states, would I be better to get out of my comfort zone and go the proxmox route or is Ubuntu enough to continue down the path Im on taking into consideration Im likely to want access to the OS remotely from time to time as well as loggin in locally.

Hopefully someone that has used both can point me into what they think is the more beneficial of setups to work with.

One thing that might throw this all out of kilter is that if I REALLY love the system, I will end up scrapping everything and get a Arc B card and suitable CPU setup on purpose acquired hardware..... which begs the question, with arc b card and a CPU would I be better off having experience building a proxmox server or again would Ubuntu be capable and ideal for me.

[I-G-1-1]

Best is to follow the Proxmox route.

For the forum rules (https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-jellyfin-forum-rules) you cannot speak of *arr services in the Jellyfin forum.

[bitmap]

You could easily set up Wireguard as a tunnel back to your home network to SSH in. More layers of abstraction are more things to break. Using a VPN tunnel to home would be my preferred route. If you use docker, there's a wireguard container that makes things a snap.

[rautz]

so go dow the proxmox path and setup wireguard - does wireguard tunnel me back to my local network, then i ssh to proxmox
or does wireguard make a direct tunnel to the server itself????

my question is really alluding to, does that mean duckdns+caddy reverse proxy become unuseable for other remote clients in that instance?

[bitmap]

The tunnel would allow you to SSH in like you were on your home network. Shouldn't break anything.

[nuke]

Some great advice so far. :smile:

I thought I would add another potential suggestion for you.

I have Jellyfin running as a Proxmox LXC container. I found this easy to set up in particular as I migrated from Plex (also an LXC instance on Proxmox) earlier this year. Proxmox has the benefit of allowing snapshots and backup of the containers easily. So when you update, you make a snapshot and if the update has any issues, you can easily roll back.

The Jellyfin LXC on Proxmox accesses all the media files on my NAS. The NAS (TrueNAS) has been running for many years serving files and media. I didn't want to add Jellyfin to the Truenas but it would have been an option.

Regarding the external access, I really don't like the idea of having my Jellyfin accessible directly from the internet. The old Plex server wasn't accessible from the internet either. Having all the containers running their own firewall was just too much work.

So in the end I got a small arm based device that runs OPNsense as firewall and VPN. It sits in front of everything on the home network and acts as a firewall & VPN provider for all devices on the network. With this set up I can VPN into the network and stream like I'm within the network but also access anything else in the network. And, I have only one firewall to manage rather than each container on Proxmox or TrueNAS or VOIP device. Adding the OPNsense box adds another level of complexity and maintenance but also flexibility in growing or changing/upgrading devices over time.

Hope this helps with your thinking. Should you have any specific questions, PM me.

[rautz]

Again thanks for the replies it gives me a bit of confidence to carry on down the proxmox route.
Ive got to pickup a couple of cheap hard drives and I'll set them up to make sure I know what I am doing. If anyone that happens upon this thread has other suggestions, by all means add your 2 cents. Im still fresh to all this and happy to hear what I should do to further tweak my setup for the better. I will need to do some reading on OPNsense, it looks beneficial to my setup