Just scotch taped to a piece of cardboard inside a bubble mailer. No protection on top at all, and rubbing on the neighboring contacts the entire way.
My new server arrives soon. We'll see if any this even works.
Any tech whizz's out here? Looking at building a home server for archiving my physical media collection, but not sure how to go about it, but I do know that I will need some form of Network Attached Storage Device, for my media and associated data. What NAS is the cheapest and how do I go about setting up a home media server.
Preference for Plex or Jellyfin
Help and advice is greatly appreciated in this area.
Greetings,
I plan to set up a home server with an old laptop (a windows surface pro 7 with ubuntu installed), to serve as a proxy by using the residential IP while I'm overseas for a few months. However, I have 2 problems:
1). I don't have access to an ethernet cable. My router is a plug in the wall kind, and nowhere in my house is there an ethernet cable, nor does my laptop have a port for it. I know I can do it through WiFi, but I heard it's not that stable. Would it be okay for my purposes?
2). This is the bigger problem. I currently live with my parents, and they will be moving to another city while I'm overseas. The current house will he rented out, and so inevitably, they will have to being my setup with them. I'm quite sure this will mess everything up with the IP address especially. Is there anything I can do to make sure things run as usual, or will I have to teach my parents how to setup everything?
Please help, I'm quite new to this and have never dabbled in any other matter regarding electronics besides the surface level stuff that everyone knows. I really need this to work, and getting a commercially available VPS is not as desireable.
Salam Alikom everyone,
So I got this old laptop from a family member. It's an HP 430 G5 with an i5 7th gen, 12 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD. I also have a 2 TB hard drive for storage.
I want to run something on it that doesn't affect the performance too much. I tried Umbrel OS but it didn't click for me, so what OS would you recommend?
I've considered running Debian on it and then something to manage it, but I don't know tbh. My main server is running TrueNAS, but it would eat too many resources on this laptop.
What I'll mainly use the laptop for:
Family backup for photos and videos (Immich)
Password manager (Vaultwarden)
Rclone to back up the data to the cloud
DNS ad blocker (AdGuard)
I asked the Ai for recommendation and it give me ZimaOS and Debian ?
So, like with everyone else in this hobby, the rabbit hole was very very deep!
I'm at the point now when I need to increase ram (yay for me...) - likely to 16gb or 32gb, but nothing special. (current motherboard only has one RAM slot which is an issue.
My current setup also requires a significant amount of space, and I'm thinking that means another drive (total of 3). However, the big issue with that is my motherboard isn't rated for more than two, as far as I can tell.
So, do I upgrade my motherboard and ram (and future proof getting even more drives?
If so, what similar sized motherboard would be an appropriate step up? My requirements would be a slightly better CPU as the work I do does tend to stress it a little.
- Though it would be great to keep passive cooling. But, if not then I guess just a suuuuuper quite cooler on top?
Thanks for the help, and please let me know if there's anything else that would be good to know!
Backups made off-site.
Here are my current specs:
Homelab specs (Proxmox VE 8.4, kernel 6.8)
- Board: ASRock N100DC-ITX (mini-ITX, DC-in)
- CPU: Intel N100, 4 cores / 4 threads, up to 3.4 GHz, 6 W TDP, UHD graphics (Quick Sync)
- RAM: 8 GB DDR4-2133, a single SO-DIMM. The board has one slot, max 32 GB.
- Boot / VM storage: Kingston NV2 1 TB NVMe (DRAM-less)
- LVM: 94 GB root, 590 GB Immich cache, the rest for containers
- Data: 2× WD Red Pro / Ultrastar 16 TB (WD161KFGX), SATA, not in RAID, separate ext4 disks
- Disk 1, 6.1 / 15 TB used
- Disk 2, 11 / 15 TB used
- Network: 1× Realtek RTL8111 gigabit Ethernet, plus Tailscale
- Swap: 7.6 GB on the NVMe, currently mostly full
Running workload: 24 LXC containers and 1 VM.
- Media: Plex, Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, Profilarr, Jellyseerr, SABnzbd
- Photos and documents: Immich (with machine learning), Paperless-ngx, Mealie, Actual Budget
- Home and network: Home Assistant OS (VM, 2 GB), Pi-hole, Tailscale, Samba NAS
- Other: RomM, Kiwix, Glance dashboard, BirdNET-Go, a Playwright/Chromium scraper,
and a few small apps
6gen or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 or 11 ?
Some of you told me that the three servers I was originally looking at were pretty bad, so I went back to eBay and searched again.
I found this Dell PowerEdge R610 for €90 + €20 shipping:
- 1U rack server
- Intel Xeon E5530 (4C/8T, 2.4 GHz)
- 24 GB ECC DDR3 RAM
- PERC RAID controller
- iDRAC 6
- 2× hot-swap PSUs
- 2.5" front bays
- Caddies/blanks according to the photos
- Used/refurbished, tested and working
- Business seller
My budget is now €100 max for the server itself (shipping can be a little extra).
For anyone who didn't see my original post, I was previously looking at:
- HP ProLiant DL320 G6 — €60, Xeon E5506, 4 GB DDR3
- Dell PowerEdge 1950 — €40, 2 GB DDR2, 3 GHz Xeon
- Intel SR1530SH — €60, Celeron 440, 2 GB RAM
A lot of people told me those were too old / not worth buying, so I increased my budget and started looking for something better.
I already have much newer hardware for my productive homelab and local AI, so I don't need this to be my main server. I specifically want a real 1U 19" enterprise server because I think they're cool and I want to experiment with one.
So… is this finally a decent choice, or should I keep looking?
If this is good enough for a first 1U homelab server, I'll probably just stop searching and buy it.
I finally finished upgrading my home server the other day. The old ddr3 hardware was showing its age. Now I have a ddr4 system with a 22 core xeon and room to add a second cpu. I split 8 of my disk drives into 2 separate zpools, and another 2 disk drives in a mirror, and 3 more ssd's for the host os, vm's, and my software development workspaces.
I don't have a 10 gigabit switch yet, so for now, I have a dedicated 10 gigabit link directly to my desktop. File transfers barely go faster than 1 gigabit, cuz my desktop is so old. But, I just started a scrub on all 3 zpools, and I've seen it hit 3.7 gigabytes per second. Having some fun playing with things.
blinky lights: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JqljnZZ45Zo
I built this wooden cabinet about 20 years ago, to have a high voltage ion air filter built in. You'd think having a bunch of aluminum plates charged to thousands of volts, and occasionally sparking, this could be a bad idea to have near expensive computer equipment. I've never had a problem with it, works great. But, I took it apart a few years ago and never finished rebuilding it. I used to put cd's inside the cabinet facing up, and they would still be clean years later.
fyi, I have dusted everything well since that photo was taken. Gotta get the ion filters going again.
The UPS is a new/old stock 1000va Eaton double conversion UPS, which I got a great deal on. It came in the mail with the batteries already connected. Who knows how long it was sitting in the box like that, but probably 4 years later now, I am still using the same original batteries. But, I have added 2 more sets of batteries on the side, and they are all starting to show their age. I still get more than 30 minutes of run time at half load, running my desktop and server and network equipment and everything. I do love double conversion. It will take any kind of dirty power and give you a nice clean power. I found it will even take 60 volts from the wall and boost it right up to 120 without using the battery. At 55 volts, it will switch over to battery. Neat stuff.
I’ve recently done a significant upgrade and have some stuff no longer needed and way too good to trash that could be quite useful to someone.
I’m not sure if I should sell as bits and pieces, or buy some more parts and assemble a running server.
I have:
Desktop tower case, with 11 hot swap 3.5 bays. (Case natively has 8, but have a 3 into 2 caddy in the dual optical drive bay.) In ok condition.
9x WD Red 4TB drives, age varies from 1 to 7 years, but all pass smart tests.
LSI 9200 8i card, with breakout cables.
I could grab a mobo/CPU/RAM/PSU from marketplace and put it all together with OMV/TruNAS or similar and sell as a NAS/server.
What’s the best option here?
I’m in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia if you’re interested in any of the gear, or a NAS/Server.
I have a Dell OptiPlex 7010 with Ubuntu Server, CPU Intel Core i5-3470 @ 3,20 GHz and 8 GB RAM (2x 4 GB DDR3-1600) and like 400gb storage. I run mainly pelican panel and jellyfin on it. I recently got an old pc with intel pentium g620@2.60ghz, 3,9 gb ram and 1,8tb storage. But I dont know what to do with it. Do yall have an idea?