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

  • I'm Hiding 🇦🇺English
    2•1 year ago

    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.

    • TerrasqueEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      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.