“I only wanted a media server”: A cautionary tale

Sup Nerds, been doing this Homelab stuff for many years but finally decided to make a post as I am at a stage that I am happy and content. Hindsight being what it is, "just run Plex" was a trap.

The journey went from a single HP Elitedesk and pfSense box, to multiple hosts, two Synology boxes, HA DNS, monitoring, photo backup and far too many containers.

The latest upgrade was replacing my media server (7500T (HD 630)) with a Dell OptiPlex 7010 SFF (i5-13500 (UHD 770)). Ebay had it refurbished for $620 AUD (~$440 USD). After 8 passes of MemTest86+ and an overnight stress-ng burn-in, it's been rock solid.

I have been running 3 hosts for a few years now and loosely split their duties. Monitoring, Media*, Infra.

Current HW: – UCG Fiber – Optiplex 7010 SFF (16GB – 13500) – Elitedesk 800 G3 (32GB – 6500T) – 2x Prodesk 400 G3 (32gb – 7500T) (1x offline) – DS418j – BigBertha (3x 10Tb WD Red Pro) – DS1825+ – Thiccabyte (4x 24Tb Seagate Exos)

Current Services: – 400 G3 (Infra) – AdGuard Home (Primary DNS – Keepalived) – adguardhome-sync – Immich – Node Exporter & cAdvisor – 800 G3 (Monitoring) – Grafana & Prometheus – Uptime Kuma – Node Exporter & cAdvisor – AdGuard Home (Secondary DNS – Keepalived) – 7010 SFF (Media*) – Plex & Tautulli – Deluge & NZBGet – Prowlarr, Radarr, Sonarr, Seerr – MeTube – Nginx Proxy Manager – Node Exporter & cAdvisor

Extras: – I have an x520-da2 in the 7010 which is working well. Have the 7010 and Thiccabyte NAS connected to the UCG Fiber via DAC. – Running an rsync cronjob on each host that backs up the docker configs to my NAS. Also have an rsync job to backup Immich content to other NAS nightly. – Portainer + agents running so I have a cenrtally managed stack. Still debating if I want to migrate to Kubernetes due to Portainer 3.0 update, keep Portainer at 2.45 LTS or find an alternative.

Ask any questions if you have them and I will try to answer. You're welcome for all the sources.

No AI was used for this post or its contents. Just a Reddit post formatter thing because we all hate formatting. It still took me 3 attempts at posting the correct formatting.