So I finally finished gathering the hardware for my first real homelab. I currently have a pi that I run nginx, searxng, and pihole, but I’m looking to move to something more hefty. I’ll probably leave pihole and nginx on the pi. I’m wanting to set up plex to host things for home use as well as a way to store photos, Documents, etc locally. Ideally my friends and I play games like valheim and icarus and I would like to be able to use a vm or container to host game servers when needed.
My hardware currently consists of an amd 4650g pro, 16gig ddr4, amd a520 mobo and 2 1tb m2s.
My question is I’m considering setting up proxmox for this but I wanted to see advice before I go to far. Is there a more preferred option? I’m not too hung up on cost but ideally I don’t want anything to run through like a host page off my network or something. And I would like something that will allow me to expand storage since 2tb isn’t really a lot
Prefer containers over VMs when possible, which is most of the time. You’d stretch your hardware much further than using VMs. I’m running 20 containers at the moment on an 1800X and I use the same machine as a gaming desktop. It’s vary rare I can tell that there are resource-hungry services running while I’m actively using it. I can be playing CS2 while several Plex streams are being serviced. Even with some transcoding.
I generally do prefer containers. But I’ll be sure to stick to them as much as possible. Thanks for the tips!
Proxmox is both easy and powerful so it’s a great choice for self-hosting. Your specs are fine, you’ll run out of disk space first if you want a media center and then you’ll run out of RAM way before your CPU can’t keep up with the work.
I recommend Jellyfin over Plex as well, as a small note.
How many SATA headers do you have on the mobo? If you just move that into an enclosure that can handle a couple of HDDs you’re probably golden. And I bet that Mobo can handle 32 GBs of RAM as well, if not 64? So you have a clear upgrade path before needing additional expensive hardware.
Overall I think it’ll be great! How’s your current network setup? Self-hosting stuff puts some demand on router and wiring that you don’t really have if you don’t selfhost anything.
Slap an HBA/SATA expander in there and the lack of SATA ports becomes a thing of the past.
Exactly, you can pick up pretty decent used ones on ebay. I grabbed an LSI 9207-8i for $41 shipped. Plenty of SATA ports now.
Yep! I’ve gotten both of my 16i’s for about $100 or so from eBay.
So, I know Jellyfin is the defacto recommendation, but I can’t get it to list anything other than movies and TV shows. It won’t list my comics or ebooks or audio books.
Emby does this right of out the box, but honestly I’d prefer the FOSS option
I’d recommend that you use other services for comics, ebooks, and audiobooks instead of preferring a monolithic service to handle everything. Calibre, Calibre Web, and Audiobookshelf are great places to start.
I’d do that if this was just for me, but this home server I’m setting up is going to be used by friends and family, so I’m trying to keep the points of entry limited.
If you’re worried about “entry holes” that isn’t a problem if you’re using a reverse proxy with SSL (which you absolutely should be using). If you’re worried about them getting confused where to go, set up a “homepage” app like Organizr, Homer, or any of the other ones. My preference is Organizr.
Ohh, thank you, I didn’t know about these options
Happy to help! This is a continual learning experience! 😉 Muximux is another “homepage” option, I forgot about that, I used to use that before I switched to Organizr.
You mean from the Internet? Put everything behind a VPN and you’re done.
I would not put Jellyfin on the Internet.
Thanks for the reply! Yes, having a clear upgrade path was a big part of this. Just being able to move forward when needed without replacing stuff for a bit.
I’ll have to look at jellyfin I haven’t dug too deep on the media host yet. Thanks for the heads up :))
Looks like 4 sata headers. So prolly gonna grab some hdds.
As for my network. I have a decent router, though I can’t remember the model at the moment. I’m using a 1gig switch at the moment to split everything through my network. I’m planning to get that upgraded to a 10g next.
Don’t spend money moving from 1G to 10G if you’re not close to saturating your 1G switch, given you’ve only got one real server then the limiting factor will be the NIC on the server and I can’t imagine an a520 Mobo with anything more than 1G. And buying a PCI NIC for it shouldn’t be a priority if it’s not strictly needed. You’re also going to be limited by your Internet speeds, the HDD speeds and a lot of other factors before you can actually really get good utilization on a 10G Port. I struggle saturating my 2.5G NIC and I run quite a bit of things and have done various benchmark tests and it’s not easy saturating even 1G with real world load. Not to mention all the new ethernet cables you’ll need since most don’t have 10G cables in their setup, but 1G capable cables are fairly standard at least.
Makes sense! Thanks for saving me some time and money. I have gig internet as is so I know both my router and switch can handle it. Should be good with what I’ve got then for a while. Thank you kindly :))
10g is of course only useful when all your devices have 10g ports. I have 2x 10g NICs in my server and a TP-Link switch that has 8x 1g ports and 2x 10g ports, the only time I would use 10g is between my server and my desktop, and that of course cost me like $100 just for the 10g NIC for my desktop. 10g isn’t really that useful in a home network since most things are limited to 1g. I still can’t believe that my $2700 flat screen from 2017 only has a 10/100 port on it…
Ahhh well then I should be good on 1g. Thanks for saving me some bucks though :)
No problem! 10g sounds great in theory and then you realize that 99% of your connected devices are limited to 1g and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Unraid (you pay for how many disks you have in your array, you can get the unlimited one for like $119 - would have to double-check but it’s around 100 bucks, it’s not subscription-based, so once you buy it you have it for good). Been using it for years, it’s great and is pretty easy to set up. If you have any questions let me know. They’re constantly improving it.
Fuck UnRAID and paying to use Debian with a webGUI slapped on top of it. Also they lock you into their platform once you start using their product. Their unRAID form of redundancy is proprietary, so you can’t just slap the same drives into another server and have them work.
Ohhh I may have to look into unraid then. Didn’t realize there was a one time deal. Thanks for the tips.
I’ve been starting my first homelab with proxmox and think it’s an excellent choice, but keep in mind even the best hypervisor software has a learning curve. Granted, I was having hardware issues, but it took me a long time to troubleshoot my setup when things were failing just because there’s a lot going on in the background.
I wouldn’t recommend anything else honestly, but just keep in mind you might not get it right the first time and that’s ok.
My only advice is to make sure you have backups of anything valuable, that way if you’re like me and something goes wrong, you don’t lose your media collection when the drive goes bad 🤡
Ohhh yes. If I wasn’t down for hiccups I would have given up with nginx haha. Figuring out how to make the damn admin place for pihole not require /admin took me waaay longer than I’d like to admit haha. At any rate though. Learning is half the fun :)
I am still dealing with lxc permission issues on my proxmox container lol
for anyone following along: I fixed it, at least until the next reboot 🫡
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Plex Brand of media server package SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPN Virtual Private Network
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
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