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.
Plex recently blacklisted one of the best hosting companies in the world, so strongly suggest using Jellyfin instead if you go that route.
I’m OOTL on this, who’d they blacklist?
They announced a couple weeks ago that they would be blocking Hetzner hosting.
https://torrentfreak.com/plex-will-block-media-servers-at-prevalent-hosting-company-230915/
Home seedbox for a start. How much did it cost? You’ve got like $5000 of drives at least…
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!
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.
Oh, self-hosted would be another good place to ask.
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.
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.
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.
Is proxmox essentially the consumer equivalent of Hypervisor/ESXi? I’ve used the latter at work a bunch.
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…
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.
Folding@home? BOINC?
Those are CPU from, like, 2014… they are definitely “beefy” (ie. needlessly powerful regardless of what you plan to do with them) but not more powerful than modern mid-range CPUs (which have way lower TDP).
This is not to mean that the server is necessarily a bad deal (how much is it?)… there’s lot of stuff on top of the CPU, but you should definitely factor in the electricity cost (especially if you are not the one paying for it and/or are sensitive to climate issues) and see if you can maybe buy a more “humble” server with a modern CPU and fewer, bigger drives (each hdd consumes more or less the same amount of power, regardless of capacity).
Oh, make sure to check if those old CPUs have hardware-accelearted video codecs if you plan to do transcoding!
Also, make sure to compare prices from ebay.
