Alright, this may be a bit of a loaded question. But I figured it may provide good insight to both myself and to others. I just came into a pretty beefy server - dual Xeon E5 2699 v3’s (18 cores each), 768 gigs of RAM. Ten front drive bays, 6 of which have 7.68T NVMes and 4 of which have 15.36T SAS drives. I’m thinking the NVMe drives will go into a single RAID 5 or 6 (thoughts?), and the 15360s I plan to use for more sensitive stuff so I’m planning dual RAID 1’s there. Boot drives will be a hardware RAID 1 of dual 1920G SATA SSDs. So again… pretty beefy. I believe this server would cost me ~$100/month to run, although I may try something where I keep it off 6/7 days of the week and only turn it on if I need it otherwise, I’m not sure yet. Thoughts on that are welcome too.

All of that said. I’ve got the power & the storage for some pretty neat projects. But I’ve not delved into anything of this nature before. I’ve heard of Plex, I’ve heard of Jellyfin, but I don’t really know what it all means past that. And I think it would be pretty neat to be able to dump some streaming service subscriptions and make up for a bit of the coin I’d be dumping to power this thing (may also host a Minecraft server with it, lol).

I’m very familiar with Linux/console, so that’s not really an issue. I’m erring towards either Arch or Ubuntu (fight me, I like both).

Thoughts? Ideas? I figured this was a good community to post this in but can remove if it isn’t.

  • Vaggumon@lemm.eeEnglish
    582·
    1 year ago

    Plex recently blacklisted one of the best hosting companies in the world, so strongly suggest using Jellyfin instead if you go that route.

  • shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lolEnglish
    272·
    1 year ago

    Unraid is a wonderful OS that will let you explore the world of containerized applications and however many VMs you feel like configuring. Spin up and spin down whatever as you please. Terraria. Valheim. Starbound. CounterStrike.

    First thing, though: you’re going to want your whole goddamn network hooked through that thing. Run CAT 6. Do it right. Buy a Uninterruptible Power Supply that can keep that server humming through the first 10 minutes of a blackout (to gracefully shut down).

    Time to look at things like Tailscale, Pihole, Plex. If you’re going to run Minecraft then Google “Paper MC”. You can replace Google Docs with nextcloud. Play D&D? It’s Foundry time. Roll your own Lemmy. Roll your own Mastodon. (Back up your volumes.) Host your own website. Host other people’s websites. (Back up your volumes elsewhere.)

    All the people in the selfhosting and homelab communities will tell you what to do with that beef.

    • Skies5394@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      The biggest reason I personally use and would recommend Unraid is it simplifies everything, specifically around docker.

      Deploying docker containers? There are community apps where people have set up scripts so all you have to do is fill in the blanks for your set up and bam, your container is deployed and running.

      Managing you can add your own items and fill in your own blanks, or change them and it’ll deploy and remove the old container.

      I’ve used portainer, compose, and looked into runtipi for docker management, and tried out windows server, Ubuntu, proxmox, truenas for HV/VE/OS, and while they all had bits I liked they all lacked something, and unraid had it all or a way to have it.

      The initial reason was ragged arrays for why I chose it ever the others, but now I like its simplicity, and don’t find myself wanting for more control over anything.

      • zzzzz@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Yes, for someone with limited Linux experience, Unraid is a better choice than Proxmox. And, the experience gained through configuring Unraid will be applicable should you want to move to Proxmox later.

      • shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lolEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Ragged arrays was also why I chose Unraid. They initially didn’t have docker-compose support, you had to jam it in the boot script! Now, they have that very nice Docker management dashboard that I completely bypass because I prefer the CLI.

    • Neve8028@lemm.eeEnglish
      31·
      1 year ago

      If you’re going to run Minecraft then Google “Paper MC”.

      Honestly would much rather recommend Fabric unless you’re looking to host a large scale public server. Serverside optimization mods like Lithium and Starlight are great and preserve the vanilla gameplay unlike Paper which breaks or disables a lot of mechanics by default.

    • Doombot1@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I wish I could run CAT6, but I rent ! But someday, for sure. Internet speed is absolutely going to be my biggest bottleneck here. But Unraid is a great idea. And somehow, I never even thought of hosting my own website… that’s definitely one of the many moves here. Thanks!

  • phanto@lemmy.caEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    I second the proxmox nomination! I use a fair amount of Ubuntu and Fedora, and with Proxmox, you just spin up whatever you want, whenever you want it. I currently have a machine with a few % of your machine’s specs, and I’m running WordPress, jellyfin, pihole, LMDE, and a couple Ubuntu desktops (Mate and Gnome) on different VMs, all at once, like they’re running on bare metal.

    • Doombot1@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Is proxmox essentially the consumer equivalent of Hypervisor/ESXi? I’ve used the latter at work a bunch.

      • phanto@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Kinda, yeah. It’s an open source but commercial product. The stable releases are paid, the beta is free. I’ve only been running a three machine cluster for a few months now, but it’s been absolutely solid despite power outages, internet outages, a hard drive going pop…

  • downhomechunk@midwest.socialEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    That seems like a pretty substantial investment for something you don’t have much experience with or a plan for what you’ll do with it. I’m not criticizing. I’m actually kind of jealous. Maybe figure out how to host your own lemmy instance!

      • downhomechunk@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, and he’s got plenty of room to let his logs get completely out of control! My home instance has trouble with that sometimes.

    • Doombot1@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Lemmy instance would be cool - my biggest concern there is the whole issue Lemmy had w/ CP a few months ago where one person posts it & of course, due to how the fediverse works, that gets downloaded onto everyone’s servers. Seems like it could be a problem.

      Otherwise - I do have quite a load of experience on the hardware-side of things, and do love me a good setup. It was more of “I know I’ll do things with it, I just don’t know exactly what just yet”, and after years of lusting after something like this, I’ve finally got the capital to pull it off. Plus a handful of really good deals I got, of course.

  • Morgikan@lemm.eeEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    I used to have a 16 drive bay DAS and HP Procurve modular switch I scraped from an old managed IT employer. They make really good space heaters in the winter and are good year round as white noise machines for when you sleep.

  • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Holy hell, and here I am with my 6core “beefy” server lol!

    What a beast!

    If you like a specific art genre you could fill it up with that like an internet archive (say 1980 hip hop or Italian 1960 films) but that won’t put a dent in it I guess!

    Good luck to whatever you do.

    • Doombot1@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      In all fairness, the CPUs were actually the cheapest part, lol. Only 80 bucks a few weeks back for the pair off of eBay. I could’ve technically gone with the 2699 v4’s but the perf gain over the v3s for the price really just wasn’t worth it. Not a bad idea… internet archives are always a good move! Thanks!

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comMEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    What kind of GPU do you have? If you are looking into utilizing using the GPU power as well, you can consider joining the AI Horde

    • Doombot1@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Unfortunately? Just the internal one, lol. Biggest bummer about this server is that it’s a 1U blade, and all of the PCIe slots are only x8 as the rest of the lanes are more or less consumed by the NVMe slots.

  • SchizoDenji@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Run a public jellyfin instance?

    The only time I remember someone building such a beefy server was big startup opting out of cloud services like aws/azure and working on their own server since they still require devops manpower to deal with cloud anyway and it’s cheaper this way for them.

  • SALT@lemmy.my.idEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Fedora/Alma/RHEL, it’s more versitile than ubuntu and secure using selinux.