I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for helping me plan, build and setup my first unRAID server during the three weeks I've had a live system, and prior to that when I was planning my build.  You're a great community and I've had none of the arrogant crap you get on other forums from know-it-alls who don't want to help, and just want to flame all the time.

 

I've built a new system, the first one I've built from scratch in 11 years, that I'm very proud of that puts my old i5-3450 system to shame, that in 3 weeks has already delivered against my initial goals and more thanks to your help:

 

- Chosen the right components on a reasonable budget that's flying through anything I throw at it, that I can see being the core of a new 10 year system with a few small upgrades along the way

- successfully identified that a drive I'd been using for 6 months that I was going to use for Parity was faulty and RMAd - saved me a lot of potential pain in the future thanks to unRAID

- Setup 2 Windows 10 VMs that with only 4 cores each and without CPU pinning deliver 7.5k passmarks (my old PC was 6.5k!).  Seeing my kids not arguing and using the VM concurrently for the first time was brilliant.  I just need to buy another monitor and keyboard now as they want to use 'my PC' too often now!

- Purchased and passed through a ATI card in first GPU slot without having to make any tweaks after finding this advice on forum

- resolved audio issues with Nvidia card (main problem turned out to be had card in a PCIe 2.0 slot that was only running at x1 not a 3.0 slot at x16!!!  read motherboard manual)

- support more concurrent Plex streams.  I did a dry-run and got up to 7 within my network - I think I could have done more but I think my wi-fi network gave up and not my server (server is on a media bridge) which was only at 50% usage

-setup all my dockers, so I have no need to leave a VM on to do any background tasks.  Had some brilliant help doing this, including members connecting to my PC to fix - can't say thanks enough for this!

- Setup a non CA docker Duplicati to encrypt backups to ACD (Thanks CHBMB)

- backing up my VMs using a custom script and my appdata, so I don't need a cache pool

 

I'm sure there's more to come in the future, and I'm looking forward to helping onboard other users going forwards.

 

Thanks again everyone.

Great to see somebody making full use of the unRAID system. What license do you use?

 

My server config is pretty crappy, and slow. An A4-3400 powering the entire three drives - one parity, one data, one cache. I only have 500GB of storage and the 128GB of cache SSD is going to be taken out in the future to be reused in a new workstation build.

 

Use cases:

- Plex for media

- SMB for file transfer

- MineOS for minecraft server

- CouchPotato (unused because Kickass torrents went down) and Transmission (used frequently with my new private tracker)

- Crashplan for backups (but this has been unused for some time now... I suspect removing this would be good because I don't need backups anymore)

- I'm thinking about making a web server for my blog... but I'm pending on this decision because of security problems.

- OwnCloud planned for the future

 

 

Hope you got some more ideas - although it seems like you have plenty set up. I don't have any VMs installed because our household is on a one-PC-per-user basis and we don't need a centralized workstation. (and the fact that my specs are more crappy than dog food)

 

Your new docker Duplicati sounds interesting. Any way you can upload it to CA so we can all use it?

 

Once again, congratulations from a fellow newbie user!

Great to see somebody making full use of the unRAID system. What license do you use?

 

 

I've gone Plus - I've got 6 drives in currently and once my Parity drive (6TB Toshiba) comes back and my M.2 is in stock, I'll have eight

 

Hope you got some more ideas - although it seems like you have plenty set up. I don't have any VMs installed because our household is on a one-PC-per-user basis and we don't need a centralized workstation. (and the fact that my specs are more crappy than dog food)

when any of the PCs are up for an upgrade, I'd look at putting the cash towards beefing up your unRAID server and building VMs.  You can run HDMI and USB over ethernet/wireless, so VMs can be in other rooms.  That way you'd save money by having one powerful machine rather than lots of little ones, and all the VMs will probably be more powerful.

 

Re more ideas:

 

- I want to start looking at home automation - alarms, lights, heating etc. 

- My TVs are a mixture of Amazon Fire, Chromecast and Smart TVs - considering doing an OpenELEC, but might get an nvidia shield for the kids

- might add folding@home as my server is on 24/7

 

Your new docker Duplicati sounds interesting. Any way you can upload it to CA so we can all use it?

I might have a go - I'm not sure how to do this and I'm not the man to support as I'm not very technical.

 

To install search for 'duplicati' on CA (it's in the dockerHub results) and add the missing fields that CHBMB pointed out here:

 

https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=44361.msg503191#msg503191

 

It's working fine for me and is easy to setup.  It's missing the 'WebUI' link in the context menu so you just have to go straight to 192.168.1.10:8200

I've gone Plus - I've got 6 drives in currently and once my Parity drive (6TB Toshiba) comes back and my M.2 is in stock, I'll have eight

 

Cool, I use the Basic. Currently I have no use for the next level license, I think I will look more into that once I hit the drive limits.

 

when any of the PCs are up for an upgrade, I'd look at putting the cash towards beefing up your unRAID server and building VMs.  You can run HDMI and USB over ethernet/wireless, so VMs can be in other rooms.  That way you'd save money by having one powerful machine rather than lots of little ones, and all the VMs will probably be more powerful.

 

That is a good idea, but nobody at my household need powerful computers (they use them to surf Youtube) and therefore building multiple low-powered PCs are significantly cheaper than building a good server and distributing it to multiple users.

 

And by the way, what do you mean by HDMI over ethernet/wireless? Wouldn't it be cheaper to set up Raspberry Pis, to VNC into the VMs individually?

 

Re more ideas:

 

- I want to start looking at home automation - alarms, lights, heating etc. 

- My TVs are a mixture of Amazon Fire, Chromecast and Smart TVs - considering doing an OpenELEC, but might get an nvidia shield for the kids

- might add folding@home as my server is on 24/7

 

All the ideas are okay except for the third one. folding@home may reduce your server's lifespan because it incurs CPU usage and it'll burn the silicon out faster. Most people say this is rubbish but I like to stay on the safe side. It's similar to bitcoin mining, only they put a wrapper on top to say it's being put into 'good use'. What constitutes a 'good use' if it damages your hardware anyway? IMHO BTW, you may have a different thinking in mind,

 

I might have a go - I'm not sure how to do this and I'm not the man to support as I'm not very technical.

 

To install search for 'duplicati' on CA (it's in the dockerHub results) and add the missing fields that CHBMB pointed out here:

 

https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=44361.msg503191#msg503191

 

It's working fine for me and is easy to setup.  It's missing the 'WebUI' link in the context menu so you just have to go straight to 192.168.1.10:8200

 

I think I can get it working with a couple more tweaks, would be good if it's up on CA.... along with a OneDrive docker binhex mentioned a few weeks ago. I have a free 1TB storage on the cloud I can backup my servers (for now) until I get a redundant backup system in place.

 

That is a good idea, but nobody at my household need powerful computers (they use them to surf Youtube) and therefore building multiple low-powered PCs are significantly cheaper than building a good server and distributing it to multiple users.

 

And by the way, what do you mean by HDMI over ethernet/wireless? Wouldn't it be cheaper to set up Raspberry Pis, to VNC into the VMs individually?

 

I'd say even more reasons to centralise.  Even cheap PCs need a mobo, ram, PSU, chassis, fans - all of that can be ditched and the cash saved put towards a central CPU, motherboard and RAM.  Even more so if the family aren't doing anything intensive - VMs are ideal for this, and a not very powerful CPU can handle a handful of light VMs.

 

That is a good idea, but nobody at my household need powerful computers (they use them to surf Youtube) and therefore building multiple low-powered PCs are significantly cheaper than building a good server and distributing it to multiple users.

 

And by the way, what do you mean by HDMI over ethernet/wireless? Wouldn't it be cheaper to set up Raspberry Pis, to VNC into the VMs individually?

 

I'd say even more reasons to centralise.  Even cheap PCs need a mobo, ram, PSU, chassis, fans - all of that can be ditched and the cash saved put towards a central CPU, motherboard and RAM.  Even more so if the family aren't doing anything intensive - VMs are ideal for this, and a not very powerful CPU can handle a handful of light VMs.

 

Good point. But what device were you mentioning about when you said I could use the internal network to send display and USB to my desk? Or did you not mean that at all?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002ECYEYA/ref=twister_B00I0WHPPS?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-Gigabit-Ethernet-Network-Adapter/dp/B0095EFXMC

 

Probably cheaper options (like drilling a hole in a wall and passing cable through -. Done in the past) but this is what I'm researching