Some context: my friend has an absolute monster of a machine at his place. He went from ‘I have an old computer for plex’ to like… a giant rack that we all had to make a special trip for to move as a group when he moved into his new place over like 10 years.
It always seemed kinda cool that he had this setup but kind of, I don’t know, overkill?
Anyway, I got to talking with him recently about how annoying it was to move books from my storage drive to my reader and he offered to set up a server for me to use. So I spent an afternoon setting up a book download-to-hosted pipeline, and then I realized my manga doesn’t really play well with Calibre-Web, so I added a Komga container. But then I wanted something to sort them so I could just dump all the files in the same place and just have them sent to where they needed to be, but I wanted to make sure that it could handle audiobooks, and video too, because Jellyfin sounds kinda cool and it would be nice to have an organized Anime archive somewhere.
I guess I just mean that I understand it now. My friend is being super generous at the moment, but he’s already sending me links for some starter hardware that I can build out once I can set aside a little more money for it. I’m so pumped to see what else is out there.
So uh… what are y’all’s setups like? :3
Welcome to the club. Enjoy the journey. Learn and explore.
Honestly, unless you are just hardcore with a lot of disposable income, or you do remote administration for a company from home, a rack full of enterprise equipment is a bit of overkill. Not throwing shade at all, and I drool on them too when I see selfhosters with them. Thing is, modern, consumer grade equipment with some minor modifications like a dual nic, larger HDD/SSD, etc will get you very far down the road. Now days, it doesn’t take a lot to get a lot out of your equipment.
my manga doesn’t really play well with Calibre-Web
Yeah I had that problem with all my tentacle porn. /s
You don’t need much to self host and don’t let people online gatekeep or exclude you or intimidate you with complex racks. An old PC repurposed to a home server gets you started and is enough for a lot of stuff. You can always expand as needed in the future.
Here’s my setup:
Storage is on a NAS: synology 2 bay NAS with 8TB (media: photos, movies, TV shows, books, comics) and 2 TB HDD (Kopia backup snapshots). I don’t need RAID configurations. Important data is already 3-2-1 backed up and if an HDD fails then I’ll just replace it when I get to that point.
Server: Headless mini PC with Debian with a 12th gen intel, 16gb ram, 1tb NVME (mostly live data, shared folder, game saves, etc). I’m building a new machine and have yet to decide if I want to replace the server or use that as a gaming machine, but the has a Core 5 Ultra 125H processor and LPDDR5 RAM and is super power efficient and silent.
Docker containers:
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actual (budgeting)
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affine (note taking)
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bentopdf (PDF editing)
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beszel (server status monitoring)
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dockge (Docker management)
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guacamole (server remote desktop access)
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immich (photo application, backup, gallery and Al tagging)
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jellyfin (video and music server)
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jotty (quick notes and task/shopping lists)
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kavita (comic books and ebooks)
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kopia (backups)
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floccus (bookmark backup and sync across browsers)
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mattermost (used solo for sharing text, links, files, etc to myself)
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papra (document scanning and OCR)
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opodsync (gpodder podcast sync backend)
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prunemate (automated scheduled docker pruning)
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samba (file sharing on the local netwrok)
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syncthing (mostly used to keep retro/emulated games in sync across devices)
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tiny tiny rss (RSS platform)
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vpn-torrent-stack (conatining gbittorrent, prowlarr, flaresolverr, radarr, sonarr, all running through gluetun VPN on a VPN server)
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watchtower (automatic docker updates)
Synology Cloud Sync sends the Kopia backup snapshots to my Backblaze online storage and also keeps a local folder synced with my Mailbox.org cloud drive.
Synology also handles the reverse proxy access.
So jellyfin runs on the server but the movies are stored on the nas? Sorry I was interested in running a similar set up but I wasn’t sure if it could work that way.
Yup works great. The NAS drive auto mounts as an NTFS drive on the server with read/write access. All works smoothly.
How well does it handle streaming multiple devices in the same network?
It works fine with 2 simultaneous direct play streams. Haven’t tested beyond that.
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