Teachings from Unraid
Running Unraid forced me to understand storage at a practical level instead of an abstract one. I learned the difference between harddrives built for capacity versus speed and why that distinction matters. Workloads like Minecraft servers need fast write performance and low latency, which pushed me toward NVMe storage. Other data, like photos and long-term files, live perfectly fine on HDDs where speed does not matter. Matching storage to workload became an architectural decision rather than a guess.
Unraid also became my platform for large-scale container management. I spun up over five hundred Docker containers and learned how to organize them using Docker Compose for my own systems. This taught me how services interact, how dependencies break, and how small configuration mistakes cascade. Managing that many containers changed how I think about reliability and observability.
Authentication and access control were another major learning area. I implemented Authentik to centralize authentication across services, which helped me understand identity flows, session handling, and trust boundaries. At the network level, I managed both WireGuard and OpenVPN connections to securely access my server. This gave me a strong appreciation for key management, routing, and exposure risk.
As my environment grew, I learned the importance of proper data flow and segmentation. I introduced Redis as an intermediate layer between databases to reduce load and improve performance. I also separated traffic using different VLANs to isolate services and limit blast radius. Network separation stopped being a theory and became a requirement for stability and security.
Security became unavoidable once the server was exposed. I deployed CrowdSec to manage hostile traffic and learned how constant automated login attempts really are. I implemented IP blocking for repeated failed authentication attempts and set up proper honeypots to observe attacker behavior. Watching real world intrusion attempts in real time sharpened my understanding of threat patterns and reinforced why layered security matters.