Why is damn near everything in Chinese?

Fucking christ, now the mini PC I cart around to look at drawings and schematics at work is going to freeze up and be slow even more than it already is for some crap I don’t need

One thing I’d add is a whole house surge suppressor.

I saw the power lines arcing to either each other or the bamboo outside our house last week during a bad storm.

A whole house surge suppressor is only like $100, I’m gonna get one soon and install it. I saw it’s best to install it as close as possible to the main incoming power lugs, one lead on each leg of the split phase 120/240.

A UPS will protect against surges but it’s just a good idea with how many appliances and devices have circuit boards in homes these days. Like your furnace, oven, washing machine, game console, TV, etc.

I had an insane surge last winter so it’s a long time coming haha. I woke up and half my circuits were off. I measured 170v to gnd on one of the legs. Power company and fire dept had to show up to fix it.

Power is ehh not great where I live.

Edit: for your point about a NAS failure. If that were to happen, since I use unRAID, I could just throw the disks on any Linux PC and my data would be fine.

I just work a trade. Nobody is trying to network with the guy there to rewire an electrical system in a steel mill. Unless it’s to poach to jump ship to a different job haha

There never used to be tornadoes in my area. Now there are. With climate change, anything’s possible!

My friends don’t have it set up. Some of them are friends of friends, and people I don’t talk to regularly. I’m not going to try and convert them. It’s also a bit more complicated via tailscale or VPN reverse proxies and Plex “just werks”. If there’s anything beyond just installing an app and clicking an invite, a bunch of people who use my library are going to have a hard time. Like my dad, he’s pushing 70. My friends would also have to do the goofy networking setup for it to work for me.

I’m also not even sure if people I share with have means of installing. My one friend who uses my library a lot does it through a Samsung TV. That involves sideloading the app to install jellyfin.

Lastly, like I said, music. Plexamp is one of my #1 used apps. There’s a lot that goes into that beyond just being able to play media. It curates playlists depending on what you just listened to or gives you similar artists, similar to how Spotify makes a “radio” after playing something.

Something that’s getting glossed over in these comments is the ability to easily watch or listen to friends’ media.

I have my own library with about 1k movies, a bunch of anime and TV, and 10k albums. But I have like 6 or 7 friends with libraries even larger. My one friend has 37k albums, they all have thousands of movies I never even heard of, etc. It really makes it like my own mini streaming service, and I love throwing on a huge music library on shuffle via plexamp while driving to/from work.

I paid like $70 for a lifetime pass years ago, so I’m along for the ride I guess. I really rely on the music aspect of it, I haven’t had a spotify subscription in like 7 years.

I know they changed a lot lately, and particularly what pisses me off is how vague and how they intentionally obfuscate how their model works now. I have friends that for years used my library, and recently have been like “I saw Plex started charging now so I stopped using it” and I have to be like “no it’s still free because I have a lifetime pass”. It’s definitely just to trick people into getting monthly subscriptions.

I don’t have this issue with proton either but I can’t imagine that’s the best solution. I can’t exactly tell my insurance or customer service at a company to whitelist my email.

Yeah agreed. What’s going on in my state of Pennsylvania is they’re reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant out near Harrisburg for the sole reason of powering Microsoft’s AI data centers. This will be Unit 1 which was closed in 2019. Unit 2 was the one that was permanently closed after the meltdown in 1979.

I’m all for nuclear power. I think it’s our best option for an alternative energy source. But the only reason they’re opening the plant again is because our grid can’t keep up with AI. I believe the data centers is the only thing the nuke plant will power.

I’ve also seen the scale of things in my work in terms of power demands. I’m an industrial electrical technician, and part of our business is the control panels for cooling the server racks for Amazon data centers. They just keep buying more more and more of them, projected til at least 2035 right now. All these big tech companies are totally revamping everything for AI. Like before a typical rack section might have drawn let’s say 1000 watts, now it’s more like 10,000 watts. Again, just for AI.

A few suggestions:

Going from a 4 bay to a 6 bay is not that big of a jump. Especially if you are already at 95% full, you’re gonna fill up those other two drives quick. I used to have a 4 bay little off-brand NAS I found on eBay. I sold it and upgraded to a 14 bay rosewill 4U rack-mounted chassis. For parts I just repurposed some old PC parts and bought a few open box ones. The chassis is like $139 but I suggest getting better rails as the rosewill ones can be kinda crappy. You’d be amazed how quickly storage can fill up and accumulate, so plan for the future.

I also glanced at the NAS you listed, and it’s $1000. You can build something way more customizable with way more storage capabilities for like 1/3 of the cost of that. Was there a reason you wanted to go with this one? Generally it seems to be selling the software that comes with it, and “AI” which… I’m not sure what the idea of that is with it being a data storage device.

Which brings me to my next point, I would highly suggest unRAID for an operating system. Reason being is you said that the idea of constantly adding to your pool and being flexible with sizes and different types of drives appeals to you. This is unRAID’s bread and butter. Throw one large drive in there as your parity, and whatever other random drives you want (different sizes, brands, whatever) are your pool and they are all protected in case of a failure.

It may be controversial in a FOSS sense, but unRAID does have a one-time license fee. I paid like $80 four years ago. Worth it for how easy and configurable the software is, but it’s still Linux at its core so if you want to get your hands dirty all it takes is one click and you’re in the shell or spinning up VM’s and of course docker for your “core” software. Just don’t overspend on a crazy M.2 SSD for your cache disk or a high capacity one. I promise you don’t need the best one to load Plex thumbnails .001 seconds faster. Whether this is better than the prepackaged Zima OS is up to you.

My fiance triggers his all the time by air drumming or throwing his phone around haha.

It’ll be like “were you in a crash?? Do you wanna call 911??”

Metube docker image worked pretty great for me as a downloader

As in watch the media not on my own network or have other users do the same from their homes.

Music is another big one that jellyfin can’t compete with Plex with in its current state. I currently have 718 GB of music that I stream with plexamp when I’m driving.

I get that it may be technically possible but that is leaps and bounds different than having my senior dad make a Plex account on his fire stick so he can watch movies with his niece, or my fiance’s boss is in the hospital with cancer right now and is watching things on his iPad.

I already have a hard time getting people to just make a Plex account and watch on my server and that’s the “easy” route.

Do you have a guide somewhere on how to set it up? I’ve poked around online and didn’t see anything short of tailscaling your container to a web browser which I don’t want to do for a few different reasons (opening ports / security mostly)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think jellyfin offers remote access to your media

I used the names of the eldrazi from magic the gathering:

Ulamog: desktop PC Emrakul: NAS / Plex server name Kozilek: NUC mini PC

Oh my god who gives a shit

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