Some context: my friend has an absolute monster of a machine at his place. He went from ‘I have an old computer for plex’ to like… a giant rack that we all had to make a special trip for to move as a group when he moved into his new place over like 10 years.

It always seemed kinda cool that he had this setup but kind of, I don’t know, overkill?

Anyway, I got to talking with him recently about how annoying it was to move books from my storage drive to my reader and he offered to set up a server for me to use. So I spent an afternoon setting up a book download-to-hosted pipeline, and then I realized my manga doesn’t really play well with Calibre-Web, so I added a Komga container. But then I wanted something to sort them so I could just dump all the files in the same place and just have them sent to where they needed to be, but I wanted to make sure that it could handle audiobooks, and video too, because Jellyfin sounds kinda cool and it would be nice to have an organized Anime archive somewhere.

I guess I just mean that I understand it now. My friend is being super generous at the moment, but he’s already sending me links for some starter hardware that I can build out once I can set aside a little more money for it. I’m so pumped to see what else is out there.

So uh… what are y’all’s setups like? :3

  • tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.gardenEnglish
    4·
    22 hours ago

    There’s not much of it on lemmy yet, but smaller racks (10") have become popular in homelabs for some years now. Many people print encasings for their mini PCs etc. It’s /r/minilab on reddit, on lemmy there’s the not very active lemmy.world/c/minilab

    I built one myself a year ago. I have a small pcengine APU Box for OpnSense firewall, two Lenovo tiny boxes as Proxmox hosts that run as a high available cluster, and a Mini PC with a JBOD as NAS.

    • MissesAutumnRains@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      22 hours ago

      Ooh, thanks for the tip and the link, I’ll join that community as well! As far as I can tell, just based on what my friend has taught and what I’ve read, these smaller racks are basically all I’d ever need. I’m just a weeb who likes to read… and maybe host a PDS. Possibly a Lemmy instance. And you know, it would be nice to handle my own password manager… (I promise I’ll stop).

      I built one myself a year ago. I have a small pcengine APU Box for OpnSense firewall, two Lenovo tiny boxes as Proxmox hosts that run as a high available cluster, and a Mini PC with a JBOD as NAS.

      I understand some of these things now! :D (Also, that is such a cool setup. That’s exactly what I wanna end up with!)