Alright, this may be a bit of a loaded question. But I figured it may provide good insight to both myself and to others. I just came into a pretty beefy server - dual Xeon E5 2699 v3’s (18 cores each), 768 gigs of RAM. Ten front drive bays, 6 of which have 7.68T NVMes and 4 of which have 15.36T SAS drives. I’m thinking the NVMe drives will go into a single RAID 5 or 6 (thoughts?), and the 15360s I plan to use for more sensitive stuff so I’m planning dual RAID 1’s there. Boot drives will be a hardware RAID 1 of dual 1920G SATA SSDs. So again… pretty beefy. I believe this server would cost me ~$100/month to run, although I may try something where I keep it off 6/7 days of the week and only turn it on if I need it otherwise, I’m not sure yet. Thoughts on that are welcome too.
All of that said. I’ve got the power & the storage for some pretty neat projects. But I’ve not delved into anything of this nature before. I’ve heard of Plex, I’ve heard of Jellyfin, but I don’t really know what it all means past that. And I think it would be pretty neat to be able to dump some streaming service subscriptions and make up for a bit of the coin I’d be dumping to power this thing (may also host a Minecraft server with it, lol).
I’m very familiar with Linux/console, so that’s not really an issue. I’m erring towards either Arch or Ubuntu (fight me, I like both).
Thoughts? Ideas? I figured this was a good community to post this in but can remove if it isn’t.
Another thing - any recommendations, ideas, or tips for home setup would also be much appreciated. E.g. do y’all usually set up your own VPN? Haven’t done that before. Host anything locally that you think is a must-have? Thanks again!
Depends on how safe you want to get but you could look into VLANing off all your piracy stuff, then VLANing IoT, then the rest on another for security purposes.
If that’s the case you’d want a good router (Mikrotik for best bang for your buck but most difficult to use, Ubiquiti for the opposite), and a managed switch (I personally love HPE for switches. Their enterprise brand is much better than their consumer stuff). Then you can set that all up in whatever Hypervisor or OS, or whatever you choose to move those all around on the NICs to keep your precious stuff safe.
For set up, you’ll want to look at the *arr stack. Check out trash guides for a getting started, there’s also servarr for even more info. But with those you can set it to auto download movies, comics, tv, books, audiobooks, all sorts of stuff. Then there’s all sorts of ways to feed it to devices and out into the net to others if you choose.
But be very very very cautious about that last part, not just for the obvious reasons of laws and whatnot, but when you start to poke holes for allowing stuff out, you could be allowing stuff in. And there’s lots of people who want in. So setting up your external access with credentials, MFA, certificates if you can, my opinion on those 3 is must, should, could respectfully.
Then you can thing about backups. You should backup your new server once you get it all the way you like of course, but now you can keep your backups of all your computers. So do you want single file backups, directory backups, drive backups, baremetal backups? Some combo? All the above? Who knows it’s all your choice!
Then you can host databases, services, your own smart tech whatever. It’s a blast. Enjoy it all. But I also recommend looking into docker as well! It’s huge as far as hosting a bunch of services.
For drive config, depends on how you plan on using your server, and how you plan in dividing up the data between ssd and platter drives, but if it were my set up I’d do raid-10 for both arrays. Reason? Speed and single fault tolerance. Bigger reason? I don’t trust anything with a single copy. 3-2-1 rule. If you have data you need to have protected that can’t stand an array failure, it shouldn’t only be in the array. But that’s just me. I run multiple servers and keep cloud storage.
That’s a lot to look into! Thank you much for all of the ideas!
My must have is searxng, although anyone can have that in their laptop, it doesn't take many resources nor configuration. I guess you may gift nextcloud accounts to family and friends too :)