Lol. I feel your pain.

I setup a 2.5TB RAID box in 2011, thought it was going to last a while.

Now my server has a single 8TB data drive, my NAS is 7TB, and I have 2 4TB drives and everything is replicated between them.

Now I need to build another NAS as all this stuff is aging.

Cool, thanks!

I’ve had the opposite experience with Mikrotik.

I really wanted to like it, but (I say this as a former Cisco instructor) their approach to UI and documentation is terrible (the docs don’t tell you what’s what, just tell you how to setup a specific config, without explaining what they’re doing or why, even worse, they start numbering their eth interfaces from 1 - it took me a while to figure this out).

Worse, it was unstable as hell. I setup one just as a test, with one laptop connected via ethernet. Every couple days I wouldn’t be able to even ping the laptop - I’d have to reboot the router, manually, since it had become unresponsive.

This with a simple config (just eth2 is LAN, eth1 is external), and no rules.

It may have been a faulty unit, but as a consumer I can’t risk assuming this, especially given the very poor docs and clumsy UI/config approach - it all indicates this is a very immature product, definitely not something I’d recommend to a newbie.

I hope they can really improve - the form factor is excellent, the price point is unbeatable, the capabilites of the hardware are extensive.

port scanning is not authorized traffic

Hahahahahaha

And?

So what card are you using?

50TB?

Dang, thought I was doing well at about 5TB,haha

I was surprised to find a Jellyfin client for Samsung Tizen tv’s at all (despite it being a major brand) - I hadn’t considered this may be a client issue. I’ll take a look, thanks!

I’ve seen that error, so I re-encoded without subs. Now it says it’s transcoding because the device doesn’t support the codec, which I know isn’t correct.

Thanks!

It’s transcoding because Jellyfin decided it needs to transcode for some reason, frustratingly. I’ve converted to formats/codecs I know the TV supports, and yet Jellyfin still transcodes, with a message about the TV not supporting the codec (yet if I play the file on the TV from a thumb drive, it works fine with the crappy built-in media player). I’m using the Jellyfin client on the TV because it’s easy to install without a Samsung account, and I don’t think I can get Kodi on it (besides my experience with Kodi is not great, it’s sluggish on real hardware, I can only imagine how bad it would be on an underpowered garbage TV and I don’t know if a client exists).

From a bigger picture perspective, I think Jellyfin as a client will be better for my family. It’s a simpler interface with less to get them in trouble.

I’ll need transcoding for other/non-local devices anyway, so I still have to address the issue (annoying iPad for example).

If you have any advice about troubleshooting why it’s transcoding, I’m all ears. This is the first I’ve gotten Jellyfin to work after multiple attempts over the years, across multiple servers and clients, so my experience with it is limited. I’m just glad it works at all - it’s the first I’ve gotten to work other than Plex.

Thanks - at least now I know it shouldn’t be transcoding.

Wish I could upvote you more.

Any time I take out a slotted screw, I throw the fucker away and replace with (preferably) torx, but I’ll settle for Phillips.

And given the lack of strength in these screws, cam-out is likely a positive (which is what the Phillips what’s designed to do).

How much video is really needed for transcoding?

I ask because I need to get a video card for transcoding to a 65" 4k TV. I’m converting all my DVDs to MKV and using Jellyfin as my server and client. It transcodes lighter stuff fine (cartoons, old TV shows), but better movies get some artifacts that don’t occur if I have the TV play the same file from a thumb drive.

I’ve read Jellyfin’s recommendation, but it’s really just “use at least this video chipset”, not a particular card, so I’m trying to determine what card I should get.

Oh god, P4? Yea, those were just 100 watt light bulbs.

All that power was a huge driver for me - my old desktop that I used as a server was pulling 120w constantly.

Now between the SFF and NAS it’s about 35w. That’s a significant difference, plus the office doesn’t get as hot.

And I’d love to run ZFS again, kind of hard to beat it for redundancy and failure resistance. Maybe the next NAS I build will be Proxmox again.

Oh, I hear ya on the space issue - there’s almost no space in this SFF, but I like it’s form factor so I’m willing to compromise.

Anymore I don’t find RAID very useful, except for mirroring a drive. As I say this, I do have a NAS with 5 drives, but it’s used as one of my replicators as it’s too slow for anything else. I did run Proxmox with RAID for a while, that was pretty cool, I just don’t need all it’s capability.

These days I can get a large enough single drive for a box - I considered getting a 12TB but the price on the 8 was hard to beat and I won’t be filling it anytime soon.

My experience after 35 years in IT: I’ve had 10x more outages caused by automatic updates than everything else combined.

Also after 35 years of running my own stuff at home, and practically never updating anything, I’ve never had an outage caused by a lack of updates.

Let’s not act like auto updates is without risk. Just look at how often Microsoft has to roll out a fix for something an update broke. Inexperienced users are going to be clueless when an update breaks something.

We should be teaching new people how to manage systems, this includes proper update checks on a cycle, with appropriate validation that everything works afterwards, and the ability to roll back if there’s an issue.

This isn’t an Enterprise where you simply can’t manually manage updates across hundreds or thousands of servers, and tens of thousands of workstations - this is a single admin, small environment.

I do monthly update checks, update where I feel it’s warranted, and verify systems afterwards.

Two requirements stand out: Media streaming (jellyfin) and multiple hard drives.

In the video front, Jellyfin has documented what you want to look for if you’re building “new” (that is, not just using what you have lying about). Discrete video card is very much recommended for tranacoding (which will invariably happen). Check their docs here. They also cover which processor to use and why.

Let’s consider drives now: what’s the reasoning for multiple drives? I had this requirement too, then had a Dell OptiPlex SFF (Small Form Factor) fall in my lap. Because it can only handle 2 drives (in addition to the M2 OS drive), it made me rethink things. At first I added a 4 port SATA card and four 2.5" drives I had lying around. It worked, but what I realized was my media server needed enough storage to hold my library, but it didn’t need internal redundancy. So currently it has an 8TB drive for my library, and an M2 drive for the OS (which is how this machine comes anyway). That drive is duplicated to a NAS and two other drives on different machines (to protect against drive failure).

I run a monthly host OS backup to my NAS, just in case (but it’s a simple rebuild as my services/tools run in VM’s).

I had a cooling issue at first, then realized it was an old machine (2017), and the cooler paste was likely hard. Cleaned it off and put on new and the fan now runs quietly, even when converting. At idle it hardly makes any noise at all.

One nice thing is it has a relatively small power supply, so it peaks at 80w while converting, and idles about 15w.

It lacks a discrete video card, so when it does transcoding the quality suffers a little. I’ll need to upgrade the power supply to add a video card.

I’m really impressed with this little box - I’d buy another in a heartbeat.

Hahaha, that’s the point of a password manager. If remembering worked, we wouldn’t need any of this.

Also, I have 300+ unique logins.

Pretty much every car today IS AWD - a better version of plain old 4WD. So even your analogy doesn’t work.

Just use the OptiPlex for everything. The RPi lacks the horsepower, and storage capability.

I’m currently using a 7 year old OptiPlex SFF as a NAS, backup point, media converter, and media server. I’ve upgraded the storage drive to 8TB.

I do have another old NAS I use only to duplicate my data store locally (I keep 3 local copies of data, and a cloud backup).

The OptiPlex draws 15w at idle, about 85w when converting video. My NAS draws about 5w at idle. I initially tried serving media from the NAS, but it’s performance is frankly abysmal. Instead I run Media Monkey, Jellyfin, and another media server on the Dell, which has no problem streaming to my crappy Samsung TV (not using an app, just the crappy built-in DLNA client) It works even better with decent devices, like my phone, laptop, iPad.

Your biggest concern with that Dell is the power consumption. As I said, mine happens to draw 15w at idle - I got lucky

What are the specs on your OptiPlex? Is it a mini tower or SFF? That would help more than just telling us the model.

Depending on your sensitivity to failures (drives die) I’d get 2 data drives for the Dell and mirror them, using the current drive just for the OS.