Path to Unraid

Let me start with a bit of meta-blogging since it has been awhile since I’ve edited my website…

This is really just a test post to get my feet wet with editing my site again after all this time.

It seems that I don’t write here anymore, like I used to.

When creating this blog site my goal was to keep it purely technical and apolitical.

This has been mostly a success, but as our political climate grows more tumultuous, this site grows silent. Why?

This is due in part to the realization that even the technical work is political, and growing fear that kept me silent (apolitical) in my writing goals from the outset.

I’ll focus only on the former briefly, and segue to the main thrust of this post.

For example, when it comes to choosing where to store my (~ 10 TB) data – do I put it on Google? DropBox?

What causes do they support? Do I support them? Do I trust them? Even if I did, do I trust their provider to keep them online? To secure my data? What about my own ISP?

Of course if you really follow the plot you realize you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Instead, I’ll self-host and then that’s fodder for a blog post to help others.

I’m currently investigating this problem and am excited to buy into Unraid.

The biggest selling point of Unraid (and there are many) is the community application system.

This system is what I dreamed for around 2015 when I learned Docker.

But let’s be clear that the Docker Hub is for developers; using it or pushing it onto home users is a corruption of its intended purpose.

This is why you have such a rich ecosystem around Docker (and by rich I mean complicated and hard to understand, case in point: k8s).

I think the community application system within Unraid understands and addresses this gap, and so I’ll begin documenting this process here as it unfolds.