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Cutting it pretty close this month. Sitting down this Saturday afternoon and just trying to get this out real quick.
Site changes and New Homelab
I think I’ve mentioned in other posts before that I do a little bit of server stuff at my house. Obviously I have this server here hosting this site, but I had an old computer that I got gifted and turned into a Plex server for my movie collection. I liked Plex, it worked well enough and it was easy to have my movies outside of my house when I was on the road or something. My grandmother could also use it for her Gunsmoke and other westerns, and my sisters could watch movies at their house. Recently they had some changes to their payment plans and decided to stop supporting remote access, which was going to be an issue. The lifetime license also jumped from around $120 to $250, and that gave me the push to just switch everything entirely. Plex is nice, and $250 really isn’t that bad for all the features you get with it (remote access, transcoding, their media collection, etc), but I’ve been eyeballing Jellyfin for a long time.
I had already bought some new parts to rebuild my server (minus the hard drives and the case) from scratch, so it was time to do it. I had been dreading it for a couple months because I knew it was going to be very physically demanding for my back and generally annoying (I hate hardware and I hate building it). The week after Plex announced their changes I started the build, and I was right it was annoying and hurt my back super bad (nothing lasting though). I picked the worst weekend to do it because we were going to be keeping 2 of my nephews who are 3 and 4 years old and don’t listen to directions the best lol. They actually were both really good though, they let me do my thing and watched tv.
I generally struggled at every step. It’s hard to see, it’s hard to bend over and do stuff, my hands don’t fit in the small spots. The cpu cooler attaching to the motherboard was such a pain in the ass especially. Cable management was terrible. But I got it all together after about 3 or 4 hours. And… it didn’t turn on. Took me a few times of checking every connection, testing different parts, different monitors, everything. Long story short, I had to get a new motherboard. The ram light kept coming on with the old one, so I guess some connection from there to the board was jank. Which was a shame because it was an almost $200 board, but because I had waited so long to do anything with it the return window was up.
The new motherboard I bought was pretty similar, I think the same model was sold out so that’s why i went with a different one. I bought it off of amazon and this new one came inside a brown paper envelope with literally 0 packing material. AND IT WAS A RENEWED ONE, which that fact wasn’t on the listing. It’s not like I got scammed too bad, it was cheaper than the other one which should’ve been my first clue By this point I’m 4 days into this project that takes most people like 3 hours max, and I’m so over it and pissed beyond belief, I’m like “there’s no way this thing works, I’m gonna have to return it.”, but it actually worked. The boot cycle is a little strange, but I don’t have to deal with that too often. It’s been about a month or 2 now and I haven’t had any issues with it yet. I imagine that’ll be the first part to go bad if one does go bad.
I installed proxmox on it, and I have a total of 5 hard drivess that total to 64TB of raw storage. I have 2x18TB drives in a mirror, and then 2x12TB drives in another mirror, and 1x4TB drive. I don’t really have any use for that amount of space since my media and files take up about 4TB, but it’s nice to have.
In proxmox right now I have 10 different containers running apps like Jellyfin, Cockpit, Ngninx proxy manager, Gitea, and an admin panel called Crafty Controller for minecraft servers. I’ve also got tailscale running in a container so that way I can access the services when I’m outside my house without having to port forward. I had to buy my sisters some chromecasts to install jellyfin and tailscale on for them to be able to access my server, and that was a cool learning experience. I followed a tutorial from from Wolfgang on youtube on how to get letsencrypt certs for a domain I have that I use for all my services, so I can go to this domain name inside of my network or on tailscale via a domain name and I have SSL! Very cool!
That sorta leads me into the site changes I’m wanting to implement here. I used to run some services on this server that required some extra cpu and extra hard drive space. But these were mostly for me, so I’m able to host these on my new server and access them whenever without them having to be on a beefy and expensive vps. So I’m going to significantly downsize and start paying like 1/5th of the price. This site however may not live on that new VPS. “What?? Where will it live then? Are you getting rid of it?”, no I’m not getting rid of it. I’m not sure how I want to handle it. This site is written in static hugo, so the html can live anywhere. I’m toying with the idea of having it be served by github, but that’s a little lame. I’m also thinking about amazon S3 buckets, but that’s also lame. For the time being when I do switch, it probably will live on the new VPS until I can figure something else out.
That’s all to say there may be some downtime for when you can access my sites in the next few weeks. Anyway, have a good weekend everyone! I hope you all had a good Easter last weekend. He is risen!