Alex's PMS Stack¶

A big upgrade this month. The venerable i5-8500 based system has been upgraded to an i5-13600k and a Supermicro X13SAE-F motherboard. The existing HBA, an LSI 8 port variant, has been replaced with an LSI 16 port card as I added 3x 4tb 2.5" SSDs for download unpacking and other IOP intensive duties.

I've replaced Proxmox with NixOS for the past 2-3 months and am still very much in the experimenting phase. However, it's been quite stable and a very pleasant administration experience so far.

May 2024¶

Hardware¶

Device	Model	Reason
CPU	Intel i5-13600k	iGPU with built-in Quicksync transcoding hardware
Motherboard	SUPERMICRO MBD-X13SAE-F	IPMI + iGPU support. Motherboard upgrade video here
Case	Rosewill RSV-L4500	The baseline standard for 4u rack mount cases that can hold a ton of hard drives for relatively cheap
Memory	64GB Kingston 32GB DDR5 4800MT/s ECC CL40 2RX8	64GB is enough to run my entire production stack without being tempted to use it as a dev environment too
Boot Drive	2x Samsung 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD	Running in a ZFS mirror configuration.
HBA card	LSI 9300-16i HBA card	Connects up to 16 hard drives to a single PCIe 8x slot.
Power Supply	Seasonic PRIME 850 Gold	Electricity makes computer go brrrrrr. 850w is probably overkill for this use case. 5-600w would be adequate.
Hard Drives	A mix of drives from 12-20tb	See HDD purchasing methodology for more details

Software¶

Type	Product / Version	Reason
OS	NixOS	"I do declare my Linux system declaratively!"
Parity	SnapRAID	Increases uptime and fights bit-rot style corruption
Critical data	ZFS	Increasingly moving away from critical data on anything other than ZFS
Drive pooling	mergerfs	Presents many disks under one mountpoint
Container runtime	docker	Is there another way to run software?
VM(s)	Home Assistant	Hard to express how much utility Home Assitant provides

PMS wise the last 18 months have been very stable. The only changes have been cycling in and out a couple of hard drives. There's been a complete rebuild of the network around PMS with a 10 gigabit fiber upgrade in the Spring of 2023. January saw a "Jellyfin January" challenge on the Self-Hosted podcast which led to my ditching Plex almost entirely (except for Audiobooks for my wife). With the demise of Twitter and reddit, I've turned back to RSS - note the entry of FreshRSS and Wallbag in the containers section.

Goals for the next year are to build a new server with more PCIe lanes to add more NVME storage to take better advantage of the 10gig network in the house now I'm editing a lot more video!

August 2023¶

Hardware¶

Device	Model	Reason
CPU	Intel i5 8500	iGPU with built-in Quicksync transcoding hardware
Motherboard	ASRock Rack E3C246D4U	IPMI + iGPU support. Full write-up here
Case	Rosewill RSV-L4500	Pre-covid this case was often under $100 but at current prices of $200 and up, it's a tough recommendation
Memory	Corsair DDR4 64GB - Non ECC	64GB is enough to run my entire production stack without being tempted to use it as a dev environment too
Boot Drive	Samsung 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD
Power Supply	Seasonic PRIME 850 Gold	Electricity makes computer go brrrrrr. 850w is probably overkill for this use case. 5-600w would be adequate.
Hard Drives	A mix of drives from 8-16tb	See HDD purchasing methodology for more details

Software¶

Type	Product / Version	Reason
OS	Proxmox 8.0	ZFS support and VM UI is nice to have.
Parity	SnapRAID	Increases uptime and fights bit-rot style corruption
Drive pooling	mergerfs	Present many disks under one mountpoint
Container runtime	docker	Is there another way to run software?
VM(s)	Home Assistant	Because turning lights on and off at the switch is so 200-late

Containers¶

Container	Purpose	Relevant content link
Traefik	Reverse proxy	Traefik 101 Guide
Jellyfin	Media server - replacing Plex	Top 10 Apps - Jellyfin
Nextcloud	An awesome self-hosted dropbox alternative	Top 10 Apps - Nextcloud
Immich	Self-hosted photo and video backup	- tbd -
FreshRSS	Self-hosted RSS and Atom feed aggregator	- tbd -
Wallabag	Save and classify articles. Read them later.	- tbd -

See my infra repo for a full list here.

May 2022¶

Hardware¶

Device	Model	Reason
CPU	Intel i5 8500	iGPU with built-in Quicksync transcoding hardware
Motherboard	ASRock Rack E3C246D4U	IPMI + iGPU support. Full write-up here
Case	Rosewill RSV-L4500	Pre-covid this case was often under $100 but at current prices of $200 and up, it's a tough recommendation
Memory	Corsair DDR4 64GB - Non ECC	64GB is enough to run my entire production stack without being tempted to use it as a dev environment too
Boot Drive	Samsung 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD
Power Supply	Seasonic PRIME 850 Gold	Electricity makes computer go brrrrrr. 850w is probably overkill for this use case. 5-600w would be adequate.
Hard Drives	A mix of drives from 8-14tb	See HDD purchasing methodology for more details

Software¶

Type	Product / Version	Reason
OS	Proxmox 7.2	ZFS support and VM UI is nice to have.
Parity	SnapRAID	Increases uptime and fights bit-rot style corruption
Drive pooling	mergerfs	Present many disks under one mountpoint
Container runtime	docker	Is there another way to run software?
VM	Home Assistant	Because turning lights on and off at the switch is so 200-late

Containers¶

Container	Purpose	Relevant content link
Traefik	Reverse proxy	Traefik 101 Guide
Authelia	Basic auth frontend
Flame	Dashboard
Plex	Media server	Top 10 Apps - Plex
Tautulli	Plex analytics
Nextcloud	An awesome self-hosted dropbox alternative	Top 10 Apps - Nextcloud
Smokeping	Latency measurement and graphing tool	Top 10 Apps - Smokeping
Librespeed	Self-hosted speedtest tool	Top 10 Apps - Librespeed

See my infra repo for a full list here.