So it’s about time I documented what’s running on my home network and my plans for the future. I figure it may be interesting for my future self to look back on what past me was doing, and perhaps maybe other people will find it interesting as well.

Now, naturally, with any homelab, I need a naming scheme for my network devices, and for me, that is the celestial objects in our local solar system. Thus, my NAS’ hostname is jupiter, which I’ll be writing about in this first part of this series.

At the time of writing, I’m living in my girlfriend’s parent’s house while we wait for our new construction home to be completed, so the current setup is a bit stripped down, but once that’s completed (hopefully sooner rather than later), there should be more than enough room for activites. But for now, this will have to do.

The Machine #

So we have a rack mountable ATX case sitting on a dresser with an old monitor and keyboard sitting on top, next to a box and moving blankets. Perfect.

Specs #

jupiter has pretty okay hardware, consisting primarily of old desktop components, along with some more server-specific stuff:

• Rosewill RSV-R4000U 4U Rackmountable Chassis
• Ryzen 7 2700x CPU
• ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming II Motherboard
• 16 GB (2x8 I think) of some brand of DDR4 RAM I don’t recall
• A GT 710 video card solely for video output
• 3x 10 TB shucked WD external 3.5" hard drives for the bulk of the storage, using
• LSI 9240-8i SAS HBA flashed in IT Mode for more SATA interfaces, plus
• 2 TB Microcenter store brand NVMe drive for cache, along with
• 1 TB Samsung Evo SATA SSD for redundancy

What I’m running on it #

Unraid #

For the OS, I’m using what many would start off with for a first time with a NAS: Unraid. If you’re not familiar, Unraid is a proprietary slackware-based Linux distribution primarily serves as a NAS operating system, handling RAID (or rather, Unraid’s kinda weird version of RAID), hosting Docker containers and virtual machines, and, of course, network shares.

For a first “real” RAID setup, Unraid was relatively painless to setup. Put all the files on a cheap flash drive, stick it in the computer and away we go. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but there is plenty of community support to make it smoother. Overall, 8/10. Pretty good.

Self-hosted software #

For non-default Unraid stuff, most of my self-hosted software is running in Docker containers. Currently, I’m running Gitea, for a purpose I’ll describe later; Duplicati for backup to Backblaze B2; and ddclient, which I use for dynamic DNS with Cloudflare. The sole exception is Home Assistant, which runs in a virtual machine, as it runs its own Docker containers for its plugin/extension system.

There’s also some miscellaneous services turned off as a result of my aforementioned living situation, like the unifi-controller container - as I’m currently just plugged in to the ISP-provided router-modem-access-point-switch combo provided by Comcast to my girlfriend’s parents - and a Minecraft server for whenever my friends feel the urge to return to when we were 14.

What is it all used for? #

Of course, being a NAS, the primary purpose of jupiter is to store lots and lots of files. 30 TB of raw storage across three 10 TB drives; one used for parity by Unraid, so 20 TB of usable storage. At the time of writing, 7.23 TB of 20 has been filled, mostly consisting of raw and exported photos, backups, and - most of all - my girlfriend’s texture files.

Textures, textures, textures #

While I do spend a lot of time tinkering with this server, the primary user of the disk space is my girlfriend, who spends her free time upscaling (i.e. increasing the resolution) of textures for games developed for older, more resource constrained platforms using AI. Her process produces a very large amount of data, sometimes octupling resolutions, so her hobby gave me an excuse to spend $400+ on hard drives and engage in mine. It is for her I set up this NAS in the first place, and she is the primary user of the Gitea instance running on it, using Git LFS to version control her textures. At some point, I’ll write up on how I used Backblaze and Cloudflare to distribute her files for only the cost of storage.

Plans #

As I’ve continued to tinker with this machine and my setup in general, I’ve had thoughts as to what I can improve.

First and foremost, I’m probably going to be migrating this machine to TrueNAS for ZFS and its resulting performance benefits. While Unraid is nice for its flexibilty, it comes at the opportunity cost of read and write, as its implementation of “RAID” only really provides parity checking and not any of the performance benefits of reading from multiple drives at once.

Speaking of performance, the next thing I’ll probably upgrade is my network. Currently, I’m using Unifi network hardware, which I will describe in a later post, but in its current state, it’s all 1 gigabit hardware. While 1 gigabit download speeds may seem fast when downloading from the Internet, it’s not really that fast when you’re transfering dozens or even hundreds of gigabytes of files between comptuers on a local network. I’m currently speccing out what a 10 gig network would look like, to be upgraded at some point in the next year.

In addition to the TrueNAS migration, I also plan on adding an additional machine soley for compute. While Unraid has been great as an all-in-one batteries-included setup, I think the things I want to do with my homelab are better suited for something more custom, perhaps with a used enterprise-grade server running Proxmox or just Linux.

Goodbye #

That’s it for now. Let’s hope I actually keep this up and continue writing things here.