Hi all, just figured I’d put out there what I’ve currently got running, and see if there are any ideas on what else I can deploy.
Currently my haphazard “lab” consists of four old HP prodesk 400 clients that some office was tossing out. Originally I wanted to do more with virtual machines and playing around, but right now the main “functionality” is a Jellyfin instance for handling media. Since each box originally came with a 500gb hard drive (and at best there’s only space for 2 full size drives inside), storage space is what’s killing me right now.
So, as follows: Host1 (before I realised you could change the hostname to something cool): Setup running proxmox and truenas in a VM, should probably be more efficient to just put truenas bare metal, but originally I figured more VMS would be fun, and haven’t been bothered to fix it
Artemis: the brains of the operation, running one Ubuntu server VM (again, really overestimated how many times I’d need proxmox), which in turn runs containers to handle Jellyfin, and a Minecraft paper server whenever I need it. All the storage is directly mounted in Ubuntu, which was a bit of a learning curve for fiddling with /etc/fstab
Citrus: Truenas core finally on bare metal. Makes up half of my media storage (2x500gb drives as separate volumes).
Ziegler: Spare storage box I spun up when I needed space to dump things. Running truenas scale (I saw Linux and started drooling, but still have no idea what I’m doing and if there’s any real difference between core and scale for my use case). I keep it separate from the “Jellyfin boxes” right now, but will most likely end up roping it in if I run out of storage (currently too cheap to go out and buy 2tb drives just yet)
Any advice or ideas for other things I could deploy would be appreciated
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I’m a big fan of Dokuwiki. I use it to document and plan out my various hobbies and interests. Also listing future large projects and purchases. Installation is very simple.
I’ve also got Wordpress going as a home digital cookbook.
Oh the home cookbook sounds interesting
Is it basically a selfhosted blog you put recepies into?
Nice. I consolidated everything into an unRAID server I built in a Fractal XL case. 64TB of storage with a few empty bays still. Running Plex (gonna check out jellyfin one of these days) and the *arrs, NextCloud, PhotoPrism, and various network services. Pretty low power draw too!
Photoprism sounds like a handy idea, I used to take a lot of photos back in the day, so some way to store and manage them would be great
Yeah it’s pretty slick, also has a lot of modern features like facial recognition, so you can find all your pictures of a specific person and such.
My systems:
- Sunshine - file server and spillover host. Uses ZFS, provides GlusterFS and iSCSI
- Raspi - Raspberry pi 4 - network DHCP, DNS and control unit, spillover host
- Blizzard - Node, glusterfs 2nd server
- Toolbox / GamerStreamer - hybrid windows host with a linux node VM. Windows is used for running windows-only things and stream games via steam
- Cromie - chromebox converted to node
- AcerBox - An Acer box running as node
They’re all running in a kubernetes cluster. Nodes are primary deployment targets, sunshine / raspi is set as not preferred, but will be deployed to if there’s no other node with resources. Storage is done on glusterfs. Services are provided to network via metallb, and ssl cert handling is done via certbot. Ansible is used to set up and configure the cluster, making it pretty easy to add a new node.
In practice this means any one host can go down without services going down. It will take a 10-15 minute time for kubernetes to flag a node as down and not just rebooting or something and reschedule the services, but it’s more or less self healing and usually already fixed before I notice it’s been a problem.
As for services… Some game servers, jellyfin, specialized stream servers for a project, nextcloud, postgres cluster, node red, grafana, influxdb, gotify, proget, a web server, and about 5-10 smaller personal projects.
I’m in a similar boat with storage stress, I have a mini Dell Optiplex with a single nvme and 2.5in drive available.
I have bought a small m.2 to 2 x SATA card, but I really need a nice housing + power for internal 3.5in drives to make it useful.
Anyone have experience with this? All I see online are USB drive caddies, I’d really love it to be SATA.
I’m also toying with the VM route. I’ve got two servers at the minute, but one is sorely in need of an upgrade.
Mailer: My mail server. A Raspberry Pi 4 running dovecot / postfix / spamasassin / etc, with two RAID 1 500GB SSDs plugged into it via a powered hub. It was supposed to handle only four or five users over IMAP, but it’s been slowly growing much to my annoyance, and it’s now definitely struggling with over a dozen accounts and close to two dozen consecutive clients. I’ve got an i5 Lenovo mini-pc (and a spare!) on the way to replace it (new CPU architecture. All that setup needs to be done again!), but the other issue is let’s encrypt. Because I have a HTTP server on another box (and only one public IP), the let’s encrypt auto renewal can’t work for the mail server, hence the dreams of setting up VMs. Perhaps I can have the HTTP server share the mail server’s certificate over the network, but that sounds risky to me for some reason.
Nextcloud: As the name implies, this is my nextcloud box. An i3 with 32GB of ram because that’s what I had laying about! It’s got a touch over 6tb of storage, and all my eggs are in that basket. It does do periodic backups to a QNAP Nas (as does the mail server), but nextcloud is where all the user interaction is. The Nas is hardly touched. This machine is also a PLEX server, which is handy as I’m often travelling and like to access my (ahem) legally obtained movies and such.
Because I have a HTTP server on another box (and only one public IP), the let’s encrypt auto renewal can’t work for the mail server, hence the dreams of setting up VMs. Perhaps I can have the HTTP server share the mail server’s certificate over the network, but that sounds risky to me for some reason.
Use a proxy in front of them, and let that deal with the certificate. Traefik is relatively easy to set up for that, but you can also use others, like f.ex nginx or haproxy.
Hmm - that’s certainly interesting. I’ll look into it tonight. Thanks a bunch!