My Homelab
My Homelab
Reason
The reason I decided that I needed to have a homelab is for fun! Thats the real answer. but my corprate answer would be so I can get hands on with many different technologies and put my skills to the test.
How I started
Not having a lot of money for an actual server to work with I took bits and pieces from old desktop parts I had lying around, and parts given to me by friends that had upgraded their gaming PC’s. all together I was able to get a decent starting system together.
Specs
CPU
- Intel Quad Core i5-6500 @ 3.2 GHz
RAM
- 2x DDR4 Corsair vengeance (2 x 8GB)
- 1x DDR4 Ballistics (1 x 8GB)
- 1x DDR4 Unnamed Chinese knockoff ram (1 x 8GB)
- 32GB Total
Storage
- 2TB crucial ssd
- 1TB WD blue x 2
- 512GB WD M.2 SSD
- 128GB Kingston M.2 SSD
Graphics Card
- MSI Radeon R9 390x
Mother Board
- gigabyte ( cant remember the name )
Networking
they way my network will be handled will be unorthodox and not ideal at all, but given limited resources and funds. gotta think a little outside the box.
as you can see im needing to use a wireless extender to give a “Wired” connection to my proxmox server. now i could go about it multiple ways such as running ethernet in the wall or across the house in the open to get from one room to another. Or i could even use Powerline adapters to do the same and be more reliable than a cheap little wireless extender. I would highly recomend doing it a different way than me for much less of a headache.
What will be done
This is now the 3rd rendition of this lab, and I have narrowed it down to the few essentials I want added.
To start I would like to have a NAS, and a media server. While looking at different solutions I found 2 options I wanted to try out. For the NAS I wanted to try out TrueNAS. Seeing all the videos and reviews it seemed like a fantastic option. For the Media Server I wanted to use Plex since I have used it in the past, and it has a great user interface.
Now having only 1 PC I needed a way to have VMs other than Virtualbox and able to use a minimal amount of the resources available. I looked at different options such as ESXI, Windows Hyper V, and such, but they all used to much of my resources or “cost me money!” (As Mr. Crabs would say). With this I settled on Proxmox. It ticked all my boxes, and came recomended by alot of other homelabers.
The Process
The steps I took consisted of the following:
- Install Proxmox
- Install TrueNAS
- Install Plex
Seams simple. Lets Begin.
I started by getting the Proxmox iso and burning it to a USB. installed proxmox onto my makeshift server by going into the bios and setting the boot order to have it boot from the USB drive first. Once booted I went through the instilation wizard and made the 128GB SSD the boot drive.
After install I went to the web portal to mangage it at 192.168.0.181:8006 for me. Logged in and added the rest of the drives to the system under the names:
- 2TB_SSD
- 1TB_WD
- 1TB_WD_USB
- 512GB_NVME
Now I needed to upload the ISOs I wanted to install.
At first I thought I would need to install plex in a docker container however, I found out that you can install and host plex from TrueNAS!
So I created a TrueNAS VM on the 512GB giving it:
- 2 cpu cores
- 16gb ram (I know its overkill but I want to eventualy increase storage
- 32gb allocated from the 512GB for the VM
- add all the TB drives as storage for it
Once booted I created 2 seprate ZFS pools.
- media (2TB_SSD used for my videos and movies )
- main (1TB_WD, 1TB_WD_USB used for my genaric files and other stuff )
I then went to the plugins and added plex from the ixsystems repo instead of community. I connected the media drive to the plex server loaded with all my movies and shows, formated to be shown.
Now when I browse to the IP of the Plex machine I can see all my movies!