mosiacmango

The app points back to always on servers you have setup to automatically download media on their own.

It wont do anything for you if you fire up a torrent client and go download media manually.

Wazuh is popular. It’s in use by name brand companies, FOSS and relatively turnkey.

Graylog is also a popular option.

Look into podman quadlets. Its containers as systemd services, and its excellent. They run as root by default, but can be run at a user level pretty easily. Ive had no permissions issues as long as you define the user/group in the config and ensure they habe the correct rights to the required folders.

It does take translation from docker compose files, but it’s entirely doable. Most of the environmental variables translate straight across.

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Honestly glad to help. We all start somewhere.

You should be able to access idrac, if it’s licensed, by pointing your browser at the ip address that its dedicated nic has. Find that address from your router or whatever else you have that is handing out dhcp. It is a management portal, yes. You can control power, fans, get info about the servers state, set up logs and monitoring, and even use its “virtual screen” to see what you would if you hooked a monitor up to the server. The above is a great way to remotely add an OS or troubleshoot a server.

Idrac will either have a default password you can google or the server will have a little plastic pull out tab with a unique password you can reset on login.

If your server doesn’t have it, as you generally have to pay a fee to have it on, it’s okay. A monitor is a good stand in for one server. Less convenient and feature packed, but that’s homelabbing sometimes.

Well, the first step is realizing it’s okay not to use it. My homelab is a mix of salvaged mini PCs and prosumer networking gear. It has nothing to do with the 6/7 figure gear I use at work, and I prefer it that way. Its simpler and lower stakes, is quieter, and uses way less power.

That all said, it’s a great server. if you do want to use it, there are many ways to start. First, you don’t need to plug both power supplies in, but you can. The server can run entirely on one of them. It has two in case one fails it can keep running, not because it needs 2x the power. For the monitor, yes you will likely need VGA. Servers rarely have modern video ports, because vga just works, costs nothing to add to a server, and is almost never used. Most of your physical interaction with a server should be though “out of band,” which dell calls “idrac.” This is a seperate networking port labeled on the server that lets you connect to a local website, put in a password, and then fully control the server. That includes powering it on, reboots, loading disc image iso files, on and on. The idrac will stay powered even when the server is off.

You may or may not have qn idrac license for that server. If you dont and your boss can’t give you one, you can use something like jetkvm instead when it’s released.

As to what to do either it, i would recommend installing different hypervisors or kubernetes suites and playing around. Proxmox, xcp-ng, k3s, harvestor, on and on. Once you find one you like, figure out how to use automation software to setup VMs and containers, like cloudinit, terraform, ansible, or nixOS.

Good luck, and enjoy. Getting started from scratch can be a lot, but it can also be a lot of fun. Go into it expecting to fail, fail a lot and try to learn what you like. That’s the best thing a homelab can do for you.

Amen to the weird network quirks. I was trying to use the Tailscale docker sidecar examples, but could not work put how to use them in quadlets.

I expect i need to make a .pod or .network file and comingle the quadlets that way, but just setting up a dedicated tailscale subnet router VM with /32 allowed addresses was about 10x easier.

I disagree, as kodi syncs jellyfin DB without issue for me and I much prefer its UX.

The nice part of jellyfin is that they support both kodi and a “jellyfin on kodi” experience natively. Plex has neither, with both being 3rd party apps where the support is hit or miss. I used “plexkodiconnect” for years and was glad for it, but it was a journey to keep working at times.

Here’s a pretty good list to get started with:

Awesome Jellyfin

Plex was bought out by venture capital and has been enshittifing for years. “Free” media stream sources added riddled with ads that you have to opt out of, opt out “everyone can see what everyone is watching” features, nebulous “we need to upload hashes of your media to skip credits” privacy issues, abandoning apps for various platforms like kodi, on and on.

I have a lifetime pass, but no longer consider plex a viable platform. The issues are not baseless, but rather based on what plex has decided to do to make money.

Meanwhile, jellyfin is FOSS with no profit motive, no privacy issues, skips intros and credits with no issue, pulls subtitles down and indexes media flawlessly, and has native kodi clients with Database sync support so a show paused in one room can be resumed at the same point in another room.

Hard to beat “slick, private and free.”

The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.

Not when you charge monthly subscription fees, your app no longer fully supports the platform, and you haven’t pushed a single change in 12 months.

It’s acceptable to have 2 of the above issues, but not all 3 at once.

Its no longer actively supported. It likely still works, but redhat is moving away from it in favor of quadlets.

Quadlets use systemd files to manage containers, which is excellent, its just a departure from compose.

This changes a bit when you start using podman quadlets instead of docker compose, but most compose commands have an analog in the quadlet syntax.

Ive yet to run into any compose files that I couldn’t translate, but some functions took a bit. The quadlet docs from redhat really help there.

I had the hardest time with this. What I ended up doing instead was provisioning a dedicated vm to run as a tailscale subnet router, then just advertise my gateway and the applicable container IPs via /32 CIDRs. Tailscale will let you do multiple comma separated IPs when advertising routes, so it’s easy to append a new service via IP.

If youre using podman quadlets, this config in the systemd service file does the same:

[Service]

Restart=always

Id be pretty wary of using any system that “cooked” an nvme. That not the sign of an actual healthy system.

Was the failure just heat damage?

They sent out a lot of review samples to different serious tech youtubers like wendal at level1 and jeff geerling. They were all big fans.

Not just per core, but with a core minimum. We had some edge servers that are low power hosts that we now pay 5x on because of the core minimum.

Our main vmware license is still under the old pricing due to lock in, but that expires in a few years. We will be moving off vmwaew, and by then hopefully improvements like this bring proxmox into the competition.

Good to see proxmox adding a vsphere style interface. It should help adoption in the enterprise, especially as broadcom continues to turbo fuck vmware.