doubletwist

doubletwist , 3 months ago

The only stuff, that’s popular, that I have no opinion on is Babylon 5, mainly because I have not watched any of it

I highly recommend you watch it. Just keep in mind the first season (esp the first half) is tough, some bad dialog and acting. But it has important character and setting development.

The end of season 1 things get better, and by the first few episodes of season 2 you’ll be hooked.

At the end of the day, I bet you’ll acknowledge that B5 has BOTH some of the worst writing/acting you’ll see in a TV show, AND some of the best writing/acting you’ll ever see anywhere.

doubletwist , 6 months ago

I like Futurama. But I can’t stand Lower Decks. I don’t know what it is, I just find it annoying and wildly unfunny.

doubletwist , 9 months ago

Mostly in a state of stability at the moment.

I recently migrated off of a pair of ESXi servers, and consolidated down to just put my VMs on my TrueNAS Scale server, primarily to save power and generation so that I would only be running two servers instead of four. It’s not as fancy or flexible, but the VMs run and do what I need.

So now my lab consists of:

• 1 Dell R620 w/8x 1TB HDD in RAIDZ2 - backups (backuppc)
• 1 Dell R620 w/8x 2TB SSD in RAIDZ2 + JBOD w/16x 3TB HDD in 2xRAIDZ2 pool - NAS + VMs for Plex, k8s, ansible/terraform, etc. (TrueNAS Scale)
• Unifi UDMPro + 3APs
• Unifi 10Gb Aggregation Switch
• Unifi 24-port POE switch standard

I then have another pair of R620s, plus 2 more JBOD trays and disks as cold spares. I may run the servers some during the winter, but it’s too hot in the garage closet in the summer to run them all without additional cooling.

doubletwist , 10 months ago

That’s assuming you can afford the storage to store multiple copies of your media.

doubletwist , 10 months ago

The problem isn’t 4k vs 1080p. I have a separate library for my 4k items which isn’t accessible remotely.

The problem is twofold:

1. My uplink speeds suck, so often a 1080p file can’t stream remotely without being transcoded down to 720p.
2. Almost everything I have is encoded to x265, and many Roku devices don’t support that, thus causing media to be transcoded even locally. (The device I use for 4k stuff does but other TVs in the house currently use devices such don’t)

Also, I’m not just running this on a raspberry pi with a single disc. I have over 1500 movies, and 200 TV series already taking up over 30 terabytes on a RAIDZ2 server. So it’s not just a simple matter of throwing an " extra fifty bucks" at it.

Frankly, with everything that’s running in my home lab, the added electricity in CPU power to transcode is barely a rounding error.

Is it possible for me to arrange things so that nothing ever needs to transcode? Sure, but it would be far more trouble and cost than it’s worth at this time.

Not everyone has the same needs or restrictions.

doubletwist , 10 months ago

Does anyone NOT use old equipment for a homelab?

I’ve got 4 x Dell R620 servers, though I’ve recently shut down 2 of them because they are running in an unconditioned garage closet and it’s been absolutely hot this summer.

Also have 4 old 16-disk trays from a Nimble SAN, but again only running one of them (16 x 3TB SAS) for heat reasons.

I also have the Nimble controller but the firmware is borked and I can’t get a copy without a service contract and you can’t get a service contract on this old hardware. I briefly had it working running Linux on the two controllers, which works but is a bit tricky since shutting down one side causes the other side to shut down unexpectedly. So I’m leaving it unused until I can either sell it or find a copy of the proper firmware.