State of the Homelab
My homelab has undergone some pretty massive changes since Christmas. I got some gifts that really bolstered my homelab, and expanded my capability to self-host various services and tinker with different kinds of hardware. There will be a few posts on this considering the additional hardware, software, and organizational changes I’ve made. But for this post, we’ll start with my new media server, which while lackluster in the hardware department, is still pretty cool in my opinion. It’s an energy efficient portable network storage solution that runs debian and has a built in UPS and crash cart.
To be honest it’s just an old ThinkPad that I got from my in-laws. They didn’t want/need it so they gave it to me because they knew I liked computers and in return I offer IT support for the family. I actually love this little laptop. It was my daily driver a while back, and I was able to upgrade it since Lenovo USED to make (emphasis on past tense) it so easy. It had 8GB of RAM, but I upped it to 12GB and added a 128GB M.2 SSD. Shortly after that I decided on an upgrade in laptop overall and bought a Dell XPS 15, and ever since then it’s been sitting on the bench metaphorically speaking. Over Christmas I acquired a 1TB Samsung 870 EVO 2.5in SSD courtesy of my parents, so I put that in there in place of the 256GB SSD it came with and gave it new life as my open media vault NAS and Jellyfin server.
My initial plan was to build out a media server using a raspberry pi. I was inspired by a YouTube video from Network Chuck where he made a NAS and installed plex on a pi. There were a few issues with his setup and what I wanted out of a media server. The first was that Plex is not open source and I always try to go with open source projects when I can. That was fine since I could still install Jellyfin on the pi, and I could still go with open media vault as the NAS. But the second is that the pi couldn’t handle really ANY transcoding/ encoding and while the pi is portable, there was an even more portable solution available to me.
The ThinkPad still isn’t the best for hardware encoding/transcoding, but it’s better than the pi. It could also be a really handy portable media player if I needed it to be. There is a chance that I replace this media server with another setup due to some of the new homelab configuration. I’ll definitely stick with JellyFin as the media server, and probably OPM for the NAS. Stay tuned for more homelab news!