Initial Thoughts

Hello friends!

This is something that’s been muddling around in my mind for a bit, in part because I now have a decent collection of DVDs, and I am starting get a digital collection of shows that are a bit hard to find. I’m also interested in the fact that there’s a TubeArchivist plugin for Jellyfin, as media archival interests me and YouTube is starting to suck with Google’s position on ad-blocking. It would be nice to be able to access this stuff anywhere as well, so creating a media/Jellyfin server seems like a good solution.

Thing is I’d rather have a physical server than pay a bunch of monthly fees for VPS hosting. Not knocking it of course, but on top of monthly fees I also have my skepticism about VPS hosts and if they’re sharing data with people regarding my use of their service.

Completely wishful thinking setup

I’m not so much of a hardware guy as I am a software guy, funnily enough, but to give you an idea of what I would like here’s my admittedly wishful thinking of what I’d like for a setup:

  • DragonflyBSD as the server OS, utilizing it’s HAMMER2 filesystem and swapcache as I’ve heard great things about those.
  • Jellyfin, obviously.
  • NVMe SSD storage with some level of RAID.
  • Intel GPU, as I’ve heard they’re very good at video decoding, but I’ve not looked into evidence of this.
  • Whatever CPU and RAM I can get good performance out of without wasting money.
  • Add it to the Wireguard network so I can watch stuff anywhere.

A few things with this:

  1. I don’t know how up-to-date DragonflyBSD’s dport of Jellyfin is, but maybe this is something worth contributing to.
  2. God only knows if the new Intel graphics card drivers work well on the BSDs. I know all of the BSDs basically just pull from the official Linux firmware for graphics (I think?).
  3. I’d have to figure out if any other hardware would not play well with DragonflyBSD, probably not too big of an issue but it’s still something to look out for.
  4. Cost of hardware.

Wrap up

Overall it probably be just me and my wife who would use the server, mostly me. Maybe some immediate family, a few friends, maybe down the line use it for kids when we have them.

What are your recommendations?

  • lightrushEnglish
    4•8 months ago
    • Lenovo ThinkCentre / Dell OptiPlex USFF machine like the M710q.
    • Secondary NVMe or SATA SSD for a RAID1 mirror
      • Use LVMRAID for this. It uses mdraid underneath but it’s easier to manage
    • External USB disks for storage
      • WD Elements generally work well when well ventilated
      • OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad has a very well implemented USB path and has been problem-free in my testing
    • Debian / Ubuntu LTS
    • ZFS for the disk storage
    • Backups may require a second copy or similar of this setup so keep that in mind when thinking about the storage space and cost

    Here’s a visual inspiration:

    • @AlecStewart1stOPEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      Is ZFS on Linux getting better? I’ve heard mixed things. I use BTRFS on my daily driver, and I really like (ab)using the file compression with zstd.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•8 months ago

        I’ve been using ZFS for the past 3 years without any major issues. For my server, all my media is stored on a group of HDDs in an external HDD enclosure using RAIDz2. I currently use Proxmox, since I wanted a stable OS and it has support for ZFS baked-in.

        My personal laptop has root on ZFS, running Arch. ZFS is a kernel module installed separately in this case. Since Arch is a rolling distro and I like messing around with it, I appreciate running a FS with snapshots where I can easily rollback when something breaks. Plus, ZFS supports native encryption!

        • @AlecStewart1stOPEnglish
          1•8 months ago

          Plus, ZFS supports native encryption!

          Hmm, I think that was the one I was wondering about. I use Gentoo, and when I was initially setting everything up on my machine, I saw there were a lot of caveats for using ZFS on linux from the Gentoo wiki entry on it. Maybe that’s changed or those issues are no longer related to native encryption specifically.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•8 months ago

            Those caveats/issues are definitely worrying. I don’t think I have enough expertise to comment on them, unfortunately.

            The wiki also says that native encryption is “unofficially discouraged by the community” and I’d be interested in learning more about that, but there’s no source for that statement.

            If you’re interested in ZFS, I think it’s definitely worth trying out on a secondary machine. There’s a lot to learn, but I’ve found it worthwhile.