I think this is what I’m leaning towards as I have very briefly played around with Proxmox on an Optiplex micro and was impressed with it.
After some more research I realized that TrueNAS probably won’t work as I have drives of various sizes pooled together so maybe UnRAID, OMV, or something else. Do you know if Proxmox’s native NAS can handle that or does it also require you to have multiples of the same drive?
I would (read: does) keep it that way. When your server inevitably goes belly up because of a misconfigured firewall or whatever you’ll thank yourself when the lights still turn on and your robot vacuum keeps going.
I have considered that and am not 100% decided either way but would love the convenience of having everything in one place though this can also he a drawback like you mentioned and “in one place” is just a matter of opening a new browser tab even if it’s on a separate machine, so maybe not really worth it. The Pi actually boots off a SSD since I’ve been burned by faulty SD cards in the past so it should be solid.
What’s wrong with keeping your old hardware?
I would actually love to reuse as much as possible since a primarily media server doesn’t need a lot of horsepower. I am wanting to go to an Intel CPU with an iGPU so that I could ditch the 1080TI and I can get them for a discounted price, but another user suggested the 5700g which would allow me to keep the mobo and RAM. The case is actually fantastic for being quiet, and the PSU is a decent platinum grade from when it was originally built. So all is looking good here except for the data transfer aspect since I need an intermediary machine to transfer from but I do have a few SFF PCs, micro PCs and laptops sitting around collecting dust that might be up to the task.
As for the OS. “Not Windows” is probably a bit intimidating at first but you seem to be pretty technical so it isn’t really an issue as long as you can read and process information.
This is going to be another challenge as I have played around with Ubuntu in the past and have a basic understanding of CLI, but struggled with random issues and getting myself into trouble and not knowing how to get back out of it. “You don’t know what you don’t know” was really in play after stuff like an update would cause everything to come crashing down and not knowing why. With my hobbies, it seems like something I really should learn but have really struggled with. I’m sure a lot was hidden with editing magic but the video I watched on TrueNAS made it look easy to pick up with a nice GUI so that I’m not spending all my time pasting esoteric commands into a terminal.
I wouldn’t mind a mini rack but don’t have anywhere to put it. Maybe when we move to a new house someday, that’ll be one of the first things I get.
How’s transcoding on the 5700g? I know Intel is praised for their iGPU and recall AMDs being less universally compatible but this was with discrete GPUs and may be several years out of date.
I actually do have a couple Optiplex micro PCs sitting around so maybe I’ll try one of those out for my general PC needs. I had considered using them as the brains of a server in the past but there’s no logical HDD storage option outside of a NAS and I’m not going to drop $2k on a box to hold and control some HDDs. DAS boxes and other external drive enclosures just seem pretty risky and unreliable.
You’re right that the migration is going to be the biggest hurdle, especially without adding some new machine in the mix. If anyone wants to volunteer to come hold my hand while I fumble through it, let me know 😅
-I don’t have a set budget, but like I said, would prefer to spend the least amount while meeting my needs (I understand this is ambiguous). That could be $500 or $2k, but I don’t want to buy something like a Synology as I feel they’re a big waste of money especially with how many drives I have.
-Possibly. I have thought of hosting a Minecraft server for my daughter, Frigate as mentioned, and who knows what else. I think I have ADHD and pick up new projects left and right
-Physical space is actually a huge issue. I currently have my Fractal Define 6 sitting on my desk but my office is already jam packed with stuff and I can’t think of any other practical space in the house to keep an entire server plus all my networking stuff is in the office. The Define is actually quite silent for having 11 drives, a GPU and 6 fans inside of it.
-Electricity isn’t terribly expensive. I think it’s around $0.12KWh, though conserving energy would be a good thing, so I don’t think an old Xeon server would be a good fit.
-I think I have somewhere around 15TB free still. My storage is JBOD so some are only 8TB while the larger ones are 14TB (currently for parity). I plan on buying at least two more 14TB when I get this going so that I have plenty of space to condense things and form the new pool, and to phase out some of the smaller HDDs so that I can better utilize the storage and not waste TBs of space.
Pretty much. The system isn’t designed to run 24/7 and I wind up with lots of glitchyness, programs freezing, and just generally weird behavior as of late. I want something I can just tuck away and ignore for the most part.
Why don’t you look at the drive’s SMART data?
Actually some browsers also have issues with 4k and certain codecs. IIRC Edge is (or was) the most compatible surprisingly.
Can you get around this by changing your DNS? I thought that’s the primary way ISPs can control your traffic (though I only enough about this stuff to be dangerous)
Hmm I wonder if the game now is for Trump to ‘negotiate’ a deal where one of his cronies buys it and turns it into another right-wing propaganda machine just like Musk did with Twitter. I could see that as a reason why he’d backtrack on it so abruptly.
IMDB would probably be a good start.
I think it depends on what you’re storing. If it’s video then you’ll want bigger drives because you’ll fill your array of small drives up quickly and trying to manage 10 or 15 1TB HDDs will get out of hand quickly. Backing up isn’t super critical with large “Linux ISOs” since you can just torrent most everything again to replace missing files.
For fast throughput of small files, I think smaller drives in an array win out and if these are important files, it probably wouldn’t be too expensive to buy a couple of large HDDs to backup the entire array.
It’s interesting how old console tech comes back around to be useful for other stuff. I’ve used a couple Xbox Kinects to do 3D scanning and with an augmented reality sand box.
Especially right after everyone began retooling factories to produce them and the rest of the world leaves us behind in development. America will be producing the Yugos of the 1980s in a few short years.
That isn’t really possible to calculate for as you don’t know how many people will buy ‘XYZ’ until after the fact.
Say two separate movies cost $1M to make and only 5k people watch Movie A while 100 million people watch Movie B. According to this, Movie A would need to cost $200 per copy, while Movie B would cost $0.01. The “full price” would be constantly fluctuating so how could you apply it to the first hundred people who watch the movie? What about the last hundred to watch it?
Full price is just code for “what we want” not necessarily what it takes to recoup their investment. These companies want profit and they want every release to be as popular as something like End Game so they’re going to claim “full price” is whatever it takes to reach that $10 billion goal.
It turns out people don’t want to pay the full price for content, so streaming companies are experimenting with ads to fund the difference.
Who exactly determines what “full price” is? This reads like a statement from music executives in the 1990s when they were charging $25 for a CD with 10 songs on it and claiming piracy was costing them quadrillions of dollars. With inflation, that equates to just under $50 per CD today. Is that full price or is full price whatever people are willing to pay at any given time?
Another sleazy angle of this was that many of these large recipients somehow had their applications ready to submit literally the second the program became active. This means a lot of legitimate applicants who didn’t have access to the forms until the program went live were shut out due to all the funds being used up by the aforementioned individuals.
Trump gave these out as government welfare to his wealthy buddies
I think you’ll want to look into Wake On LAN to do this. I can’t give you instructions (tried once unsuccessfully on a Windows installation) but that should be enough to get you started.