Greetings from Scotland. First time posting. Just wanted to post about my server and get peoples thoughts
So I’ve been slowly building a home server over the past year, mainly to manage my media and share it with my family. I worked in IT many years ago but kind of fell out of touch with it, so this has been a huge learning curve for me!
As much as I’ve enjoyed building it (and the endless hours of troubleshooting) I’ve kind of got to a point where it’s working well and I can’t think of anything else that it needs. Just wanted to explain my setup and see if anyone has any ideas for improvements or feedback. All comments welcome!
Heres the setup:
I have 4 Dell micro PC's running Windows. I picked these up cheap from an office closure and have upgraded a few components in them. All have 9th or 10th gen Intel CPU’s, 64GB RAM and 500GB NVME drives
- The first PC is running Plex. The OS and Plex are installed on the NVME drive. I've installed a 500GB SSD for Plex metadata. I’ve also made a small partition on the NVME drive for transcoding.
- The second machine is running Radarr, Sonarr, Qbittorrent, Readarr, PPM, Prowlarr & Jackett. I've added a 1TB SSD to use as a download cache. Qbittorrent downloads all content to the cache before moving it onto the NAS drives.
- The third PC is running Homebridge for my home automations. It is also running Homepage for my external display unit.
- The forth PC is inactive and kept as a spare, in case any of the 3 active machines fail.
In the NAS & DAS there are 8 10TB HDD’s. Western Digital & Seagate.
I also have 4 Raspberry Pi’s running. The 4 Pi’s are mounted in a 1U rack mount kit that I picked up on Amazon for cheap.
- Pi 1 is a Pi 4b, 1GB, which is running Pihole and PiVPN.
- Pi 2 is a Pi 4b, 1GB, which is running Uptime Kuma and Homarr in Docker containers.
- Pi 3 is a Pi 4b, 4GB, which is running Ombi, Tautulli in Docker containers & my cloudflare tunnel.
- Pi 4 is a Pi 3b, 1 GB, which is running a secondary install of Homebridge. This is solely used to send wake on lan/ shutdown commands to the Windows machines.
The Pi’s were installed in an attempt to reduce power consumption, so I can shut down the Windows PC’s when not in use while keeping some essential services running 24/7 on the Pi’s. The PC's are set on a schedule to power on/off throughout the day.
Some other things I’ve got set up:
- I have a UPS connected to the QNAP NAS via USB. I’ve connected the NAS to the 3 PC’s via the 3 additional ethernet interfaces on the NAS and am running WIN-NUT on the PC’s. The NAS sends shutdown commands to the PC's if the UPS kicks in, then powers itself down. These connections are made direct from device to device without going through the router, as the router isnt plugged in to the UPS.
- I have an old Android display unit. I think it may have been used in a hotel reception or something. The device loads a web page on boot, so I have this set up with Homepage as a status page for my apps and services.
- There’s a 3 in 1 out HDMI switch, just in case I need to physically connect to one of the Windows PC’s. So far, I’ve never had use this, as I have always been able to connect to the devices via Teamviewer & SSH.
- I have a temperature sensor inside the cabinet and fans installed, which are connected to another smart plug. I have automations set so that if the temperature rises above a certain threshold, the fans turn on.
- I have a smart plug with energy monitoring connected to the main power output from the cabinet.
- 1 final smart plug is connected to the PSU for my Raspberry Pi’s, so I can reboot them if needed.
- I’m using a Plex webhooks plugin for Homebridge and have each of my Plex users configured as individual occupancy sensors. There’s a light strip inside the cabinet which lights up red when someone is streaming. I did this so I have a quick way to see if someone is streaming before I pull a cable.
So there it is. Let me know what you think! Have I reached the end of this project? Or is there more I can do?
u/hannsr u/nolo_me u/phidauex u/Raithmir Cheers for your comments all!
It seems like Proxmox is the way to go here.
I've been doing some research this morning and I have an idea of how I'd configure this.
3 nodes running in a high availability cluster. All apps running in containers. I could then set 2 of the nodes to power down during non-peak times and only power the other 2 up at busier times. For example, on an evening when more of my plex users are streaming & transcoding.
I'd also run proxmox backup server on the 4th PC, set to only power on for a short time each day to take a backup.
Some things that I'd need to look into further:
- Setting up a NUT client on each machine, so they receive shutdown commands from my UPS.
- Mapping the NAS drives correctly.
- Mounting my drives for download cache and plex metadata
- Setting up wake on lan/ shutdown commands from my Pi thats running homebridge, so I can automate the times that the nodes power on via the iOS home app.
This all sounds possible to me (which a lot more research and tinkering!) but if anyone has any thoughts, or can see a glaring error in my logic, then please let me know your thoughts!
Thanks again.