Why TrueNAS
TrueNAS provides a solid base for ZFS storage, virtualisation, and containerised applications. For a home lab that also hosts a public portfolio, reliability and clear recovery paths matter more than maximum feature count.
Design principles
- Separate storage, application, and exposure concerns
- Prefer simple, rebuildable services
- Document the topology
- Assume that the public-facing path (Pangolin / tunnel) is owned by infrastructure outside any single container
Portfolio container
The portfolio itself is a static site generated by Zola and served by nginx. The container only needs to answer HTTP on a local port. Everything else — DNS, TLS, reverse proxy, WAN access — is handled upstream.
This keeps the application image small and the failure domain narrow.
Ongoing work
- Monitoring and alerting
- Backup verification
- Network segmentation refinements