How are you using your unRAID server?


Living Legend

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On 8/9/2017 at 5:43 PM, Squid said:

You're living the dream.

 

I've got the garage only for tool storage, and my office I have to share with our freezer and furnace.  >:(

 

When the last of the kids moved out I started making plans to relocate the office to one of the extra bedrooms and was told in no uncertain terms "No".

HaHa I had the same thought but low and behold as they moved out my wife broke out the tools and disassembled the beds so they had nowhere to sleep should they consider coming back, but I still didn't get my office I share my space with the chest freezer and several clothes storage closets :(

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3 hours ago, Living Legend said:

 

Are all PC's attached at a close proximity to the server, or do you have some sort of method for running/extending USB/HDMI and other necessary cables?

 

Nothing fancy - two desks next to each other in an 'L' with the chassis in the middle.  Three GPUs:

  • GPU 1/VM1-->connected to Mon 1: My lad's VM
  • GPU 2/VM2-->connected to Mon 1 & Mon 2: My VM - if my lad is using VM1 next to me then I swivel Mon 1 round to him, otherwise I use both.  He's only 4 so he doesn't use it more than 1hr/day and he can't read as he only started school this week , so he's next to me so I can help him spell out what he's looking for, typically in minecraft!
  • GPU 3/VM3-->connected to Mon 3: My daughter's VM on the other desk

In the future when they get older, I will probably run USB and HDMI over ethernet to put in their rooms or keep the screens in one room as it's fun using the PCs together, especially for gaming.

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Built my unRaid server originally to consolidate both hardware and personal data to a central server, while adding some fault tolerance to saved data.

Primarily a media server at the moment, managing using a stack of

  • Couchpotato
  • Sickrage
  • Headphones
  • Daapd (main music library is iTunes)

With the help of:

  • Deluge
  • Jackett
  • Maria DB + LibreELEC VM (Kodi library central management)
  • Musicbrainz

Between work and university, I’ll be soon setting up some windows server VMs for learning and basic dev work. I’ve added on the GitLab-CE docker to see how I go with managing my code through there. Future will be to create separate VMs for work, study & gaming to replace another PC (or create another unRaid instance).

  • Work DEV VM (typically SQL and business applications config)
  • Dedicated CAD drafting work VM (2nd job)
  • uni study based VM (computer science)
  • 2x gaming vm 

My old N36L will soon be retired from HTPC duties, which I’ll probably setup with unRaid as a dedicated backup server to help me sleep better at night for that hard to replace data. Replacement HTPC is 50/50 to be unRaid or bare metal Win10. Up in the air as I want to be a couch gaming rig also, otherwise I’d stick with the rock solid LibreELEC.

Would like to extend usage of my unRaid to extend data availability from outside local network (OpenVPN, nextCloud, libresonic etc), but not there yet.

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On 9/14/2017 at 9:18 AM, Living Legend said:

For people operating multiple VMs, what are you using to connect to these VMs?  Do you have some sort of thin client, or is your monitor and peripherals attached directly to your server?

My VMs are mostly Windows so I use RDP to connect to them.  For a Linux VM I use VNC.  I have NO video cards passed through (any more at least). 

 

My experiment with passing through a iGPU failed - not because of the iGPU pass through as that appeared to work the short time I had it installed.  MB had other problems with unRAID so I had to switch it out and lost iGPU capability.

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  • 2 months later...
On 9/16/2017 at 7:24 AM, BobPhoenix said:

My VMs are mostly Windows so I use RDP to connect to them.  For a Linux VM I use VNC.  I have NO video cards passed through (any more at least). 

 

My experiment with passing through a iGPU failed - not because of the iGPU pass through as that appeared to work the short time I had it installed.  MB had other problems with unRAID so I had to switch it out and lost iGPU capability.

 

Hi BobPhoenix -- Which VNC server are you using on the Linux side? And *if* you're on the Mac, which VNC client?

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I like installing XRDP on Linux VMs and also use RDP for Linux machines.  I find it makes it easier to just use one RDP client - in this case Windows Remote Desktop from my workstation.

 

There was a bit of a trick to installing XRDP on recent versions of Ubuntu, but it wasn't too painful.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/12/2017 at 2:07 PM, daze said:

 

Hi BobPhoenix -- Which VNC server are you using on the Linux side? And *if* you're on the Mac, which VNC client?

To be perfectly honest I'm using the unRAID supplied VNC server currently as I don't use my linux VM much now.  Even when I was using it more I only needed to connect to it to configure/install/reboot - so the unRAID VNC server was ok for me.  I ran software on it that served up media files to extenders so never needed to access the actual OS much.

Edited by BobPhoenix
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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 years later...

Hi Guys,

 

Looking at all that guys here have done with their Unraid servers which have NAS, VMs, Media Servers among other things is it safe to say that all 1 may need, in addition to making the server a router/firewall for the network with pfsense, is a switch(PoE preferrably), UPS and offsite backup solution when it comes to hardware for a home lab setup? Given that the Unraid server hardware is solid enuff in terms of processor, ram, storage and sufficient PCIe slots for various passthroughs.

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  • 9 months later...
On 7/10/2020 at 1:30 AM, Kich902 said:

Hi Guys,

 

Looking at all that guys here have done with their Unraid servers which have NAS, VMs, Media Servers among other things is it safe to say that all 1 may need, in addition to making the server a router/firewall for the network with pfsense, is a switch(PoE preferrably), UPS and offsite backup solution when it comes to hardware for a home lab setup? Given that the Unraid server hardware is solid enuff in terms of processor, ram, storage and sufficient PCIe slots for various passthroughs.

I know this is close to a year old, but still--my two cents? Spend the little extra (or use parts you have) to build a separate dedicated PF/OPNsense box. The first time you have to take your server down for more than 20 minutes you'll be glad you did.

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This seems to be a interessting topic 🙂

 

I use my Unraid Server heavily for VMs, Big Sur 11.3.1 heavily for graphic design and video edition (passedthrough RX 580, 8 Cores and 16GB of RAM), Windows 10 for normal Workflows like maintaining my works Servers (RDP) and sorting my Unraid Server shares (passedthrough GT630, 4Cores, 8GB RAM).

And a ton of Dockers, AdGuard Home, AdGuard Home Sync (for my Pi as Backup), JDownloader, Plex, Krusader, putty, Confluence (Atlassian), mysql-servers, MKVToolNix, Handbrake, Firefox (normal Browsing), Firefox-Facebook (just for Facebook, Instagram...), Firefox-Sync-Server, sabnzbd, heimdall and thunderbird.

It seems to be alot and yes it maybe is but I like the fact using my already configured machine for such things. Around my wattage usage is 140-180 Watts.

 

I will in the near future just use SSDs instead of normal HDDs because faster and silent. For Backups I'll use my HDDs then in my Synology-NAS. My Synology just now bring me my DDNS for my Unraid stuff. xD It works a lot nicer then duckddns and all others because I like the Synology UI for setting up reverse proxies and it is build in why not use it.

 

Yeah also a lot, but more efficant then my normal Workstation with an i9-9900K and a RTX 2080Ti (around 200-450Watts nearly at idle xD yes no coreparking and all energy saving things are turned off, because I want to game and it should always be fluid as possible while gaming...).

 

I already switched most of my workflows to my Unraid VMs and use my "workstation" sometimes just for gaming purposes. (Cuz many games kick or and will ban you if you use VMs as Gaming-Stations "sad").

 

My energy-provider loves me because I pay them a lot but what I can do for my private and selfhosted life I do. Also I like the fact to be free as possible when it goes to hosted things like "cloud-storage, Sync-Servers and so on....".

Edited by RiDDiX
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On 5/7/2021 at 2:17 PM, RiDDiX said:

This seems to be a interessting topic 🙂

 

I use my Unraid Server heavily for VMs, Big Sur 11.3.1 heavily for graphic design and video edition (passedthrough RX 580, 8 Cores and 16GB of RAM), Windows 10 for normal Workflows like maintaining my works Servers (RDP) and sorting my Unraid Server shares (passedthrough GT630, 4Cores, 8GB RAM).

And a ton of Dockers, AdGuard Home, AdGuard Home Sync (for my Pi as Backup), JDownloader, Plex, Krusader, putty, Confluence (Atlassian), mysql-servers, MKVToolNix, Handbrake, Firefox (normal Browsing), Firefox-Facebook (just for Facebook, Instagram...), Firefox-Sync-Server, sabnzbd, heimdall and thunderbird.

It seems to be alot and yes it maybe is but I like the fact using my already configured machine for such things. Around my wattage usage is 140-180 Watts.

 

I will in the near future just use SSDs instead of normal HDDs because faster and silent. For Backups I'll use my HDDs then in my Synology-NAS. My Synology just now bring me my DDNS for my Unraid stuff. xD It works a lot nicer then duckddns and all others because I like the Synology UI for setting up reverse proxies and it is build in why not use it.

 

Yeah also a lot, but more efficant then my normal Workstation with an i9-9900K and a RTX 2080Ti (around 200-450Watts nearly at idle xD yes no coreparking and all energy saving things are turned off, because I want to game and it should always be fluid as possible while gaming...).

 

I already switched most of my workflows to my Unraid VMs and use my "workstation" sometimes just for gaming purposes. (Cuz many games kick or and will ban you if you use VMs as Gaming-Stations "sad").

 

My energy-provider loves me because I pay them a lot but what I can do for my private and selfhosted life I do. Also I like the fact to be free as possible when it goes to hosted things like "cloud-storage, Sync-Servers and so on....".

Neat😉 Though i don't get why the firefox docker🤔

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  • 2 weeks later...

I linked to this discussion in a recent thread I started in Hardware because I wanted to get a sense of how more experienced users were using their servers so I could make better decisions when upgrading mine. My server is currently a very basic 4 core 4670k z97 build from spare parts and a few newish drives. 2x 500GB SSD cache, 4x4TB array with one parity. GTX 1050Ti for transcoding and 16GB DDR3 RAM. As a media server (music and video) for my small (SO + teenager) household it does the job pretty well, despite its age and, by modern standards, low powered CPU. Then again, compared to most off the shelf NAS boxes it's quite respectable . . . all is relative.

 

Largely because I didn't properly understand how a VM can be used (still don't really) I've been running a much more modern AMD x570 & 3600x & RX580 GPU build as a multiboot machine: I use a 5.25" optical bay to hold 4 x 500GB SSDs with MacOS, Windows (occasional gaming) and KDE Neon (learning Linux). Not in use boot drives are ejected, largely to avoid Windows Boot Manager effing up my Opencore install. I do audio work - mixing and editing - and prefer MacOS for connection to my outboard audio gear. While this is now pretty old, it's RME gear and works flawlessly, and my PC's are built around it - used to be actual Macs 15 years ago, but hackintoshes for the last 10 years. For the kind of audio work I do this doesn't actually need to be all that powerful - well within the scope of assigning 4 or 6 multithreaded cores of any modern CPU with lots of breathing room left over.

 

I suspect, with an upgrade to a 3950x, I could be doing everything I'm currently doing on two machines with one, using unRAID, dockers and VMs - though I'm concerned about whether a Firewire PCIe card can be reliably passed through to a MacOS VM - unlike USB audio on Ryzen hackintoshes, Firewire seems to be pretty solid bare metal. It's been very difficult to find any info on this as obviously Firewire is now very old. That said, just because something is possible, doesn't make it the right decision - I'm just torn between frankly lusting after a 16 core CPU and the practicalities of having everything work reliably, which it does at the moment! (insert 'touchwood emoji' here!)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have a 44TB server that backs up to my 40TB
NAS. I need to upgrade the backup but it’s Synology and I’ll have to buy a whole expansion unit to do that. Been putting it off. Here’s an overview of what I’ve got running-

Dockers:
- Plex
- Deluge
- Sonarr
- Radarr
- Homebridge
- Bitwarden
- Jackett
- duckDNS
- swag (formerly LetsEncrypt)

So for Plex, I have a bunch of blu-ray backups. I just passed 2,000 of them- I think there’s around 125 different shows on there too.

Deluge- just what I use to download… oh. All my blu-ray backups.

Sonarr for TV. Main indexer is rarbg, but I have thepiratebay on there too, thanks to Jackett.

Radarr, same but for movies. I have a bunch of custom profiles so the right releases get grabbed.

Homebridge to add my Nest and some outlets to ios’ Home app.

Bitwarden to manage all my passwords. It has auto-fill for ios and chrome. Recently set this up and it’s fantastic.

Jackett just let’s you add extra indexers for sonarr and radarr

duckDNS to link my router’s dynamic ip to my domain

swag (letsencrypt) to use my own sub domains to access sonarr, radarr, and deluge through a reverse proxy.

Oh, and I also have openVPN to access my home network while I’m not home.

I want to set up NextCloud, but haven’t gotten the time.


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NAS,

Game server,

VM server,

MySQL server,

Web server,

Home manager,

Chia farmer,

 

I use it for a lot of stuff.

 

It's a 22 core Xeon with 64 gb of RAM, 17 SAS drives, and 4 SSDs used for cache. I have a 40gbit connection between it and my main workstation.

 

Unraid makes managing everything so dang easy.

 

Edited by supacupa
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  • 2 weeks later...

My server is a bit of a lightweight - 4-core 1st gen Ryzen with 21TB in the array.  Built from recycled and new parts, it's main purpose is to offload the Plex media server off my daily driver.  It also is a place to store backups from the daily driver, as Windows Update seems to bugger everything up ever 4-6 months.  (Thanks Micro$oft)

 

It has also been a fun project to learn some new stuff.

 

Lots of docker loaded, but no VMs yet.  May load a MacOS later this year, just to mess around with.

 

  • Plex Server (nVidia Quadro P400 for hardware transcodes) - Just family and friends.
  • Tatuilli - Because, well, Plex stats.
  • The 3 arrs - Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr.  have 2 Radarr running - HD and 4k.
  • Bazarr - Multinational household, so every movie has 2 language subtitles.
  • Handbrake - Playing around a bit with transcoding to reduce size of files.  But I'm only ~60% on the array (and a drive in cold storage) so no need to go on a diet anytime soon.
  • Nzbget/Jackett/DelugeVPN - I rarely torrent these days (I have all the ISOs I need), but the first two go through the VPN of the third
  • PhotoPrism - Gave it a copy of 15 years of family photos to chew on.  I haven't had much time to play with it since, but would love for a way to manage/organize the 10s of thousands of photos my family has accumulated.
  • Krusader/dupeGuru/Diskspeed - Utilities I fire up as needed.

I have a number of things pinned in CA.  Just need to find the time to try them out, and see if they work for me.

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  • 1 month later...

I have spent the last few days tinkering with my unraid server, and it prompted me to see how old this thing is.

 

So it turns out I bought my pair of unraid licences back in June 2010, more than eleven years ago. 

 

Since then I've updated the motherboard/cpu, case and PSU once each, and had to update the usb sticks one time as well. I've gone through a few hard drives but there are still a couple of WD Green 2TB drives that I think are from my original setup. One has over 10 years of power-on time recorded in SMART. The newest drives are 2 x 4TB Iron Wolf as parity and disk 1, along with a bunch of older 3TB and 2TB drives. 

 

Originally all I wanted was a cheapskate NAS, storing files and serving up video to a Popcorn Hour, then later to a XBMC PC. But since dockers became available.... totally different beast.

 

The last few days we've been in yet another Covid lockdown with dismal weather as well, and then I got this message that lastpass is going to be either costly or useless. So I just puzzled my way through setting up SWAG and Vaultwarden. Then I added a calibre docker (I was previously running calibre on a VM, which can now retire in favour of the docker.) Then I added LazyLibrarian, and set it up so a few family members can log in and email books directly to their own kindles instead of asking me to do it. And then a friend wanted to grab some files from me so I added Nextcloud (not that there aren't other ways to flick a file over). 

 

So here is what my tween-aged unraid server does.

 

Radarr -> Sab -> Plex for movies

Sonarr -> Sab -> Plex for tv series

NZBHydra2 (with NZBGeek, OzNZB, NZBFinder)

Plex for a few other videos like some guitar lesson vids, family home videos etc

Handbrake, set up to resize video files automatically as they are often unnecessarily large for my purposes

Calibre just to download a magazine every week and email it to my e-reader

LazyLibrarian so a couple of family members can locate and send books to their e-readers

Vaultwarden for self-hosted passwording

Pihole (one of two, the other instance is on an OrangePi for redundancy)

Nextcloud (not sure what actual use I will have for this, but whatever)

 

Also installed are diskspeed, speedtest, and a few other purely local utilities.

 

It's impressive how very easy almost all of these were to set up. There was a bit of a learning curve with reverse proxy and a bit more fiddling with LazyLibrarian than with most dockers to get the functionality I wanted (automatically converting ebook file types in particular) but mostly it is a walk in the part. So I really think that my unraid licence is one of the best investments I've ever made.

 

Now putting on SWAG was the first time I've opened up a port to the wider universe. I am a little apprehensive about it. It serves up only LazyLibrarian, Vaultwarden, and NextCloud. For security I have enabled and tested fail2ban for VW and NC (but not LL, which has inbuilt ip banning after three user/password attempts and at last check didn't log IPs for failed login attempts) and geoblocking to confine access to my own low-risk country. SWAG also runs on an odd port, rather than port 80 or 443, so it's relatively obscure. Still, I am not that well informed on security. Should I be doing more?

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  • 2 weeks later...
My server is a bit of a lightweight - 4-core 1st gen Ryzen with 21TB in the array.  Built from recycled and new parts, it's main purpose is to offload the Plex media server off my daily driver.  It also is a place to store backups from the daily driver, as Windows Update seems to bugger everything up ever 4-6 months.  (Thanks Micro$oft)
 
It has also been a fun project to learn some new stuff.
 
Lots of docker loaded, but no VMs yet.  May load a MacOS later this year, just to mess around with.
 
  • Plex Server (nVidia Quadro P400 for hardware transcodes) - Just family and friends.
  • Tatuilli - Because, well, Plex stats.
  • The 3 arrs - Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr.  have 2 Radarr running - HD and 4k.
  • Bazarr - Multinational household, so every movie has 2 language subtitles.
  • Handbrake - Playing around a bit with transcoding to reduce size of files.  But I'm only ~60% on the array (and a drive in cold storage) so no need to go on a diet anytime soon.
  • Nzbget/Jackett/DelugeVPN - I rarely torrent these days (I have all the ISOs I need), but the first two go through the VPN of the third
  • PhotoPrism - Gave it a copy of 15 years of family photos to chew on.  I haven't had much time to play with it since, but would love for a way to manage/organize the 10s of thousands of photos my family has accumulated.
  • Krusader/dupeGuru/Diskspeed - Utilities I fire up as needed.
I have a number of things pinned in CA.  Just need to find the time to try them out, and see if they work for me.

Out of curiosity, what are you using to sync your 1080 and 4k instances? I just set up syncarr, but it didn’t seem like the most widely-used solution.


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Currently my 4K movies and my HD movies aren't synced in any automated manner.  Something I will get to when I finally figure out the best strategy for my situation.

 

Basically at home it is just me and my wife.  Our son is here for a little while, while working out where he will be living post college graduation.  Any one else using the Plex is streaming via internet, and I don't like 4K transcoding.

 

The bulk of my library is HD, built up over the past 10 years.  When I started adding 4K movies, I drop them into their own 4K library (and folder).  Radarr manages HD, Radarr4K manages 4K.

 

As there are few movies I will rewatch again (and again), I typically watch them in 4K, then will replace it with a HD version, for others to potentially watch.  If it is a big hype release, I may keep both HD and 4K on the server.  Currently I do this manually, but then, I don't really consume many movies in a month.  It's manageable.

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6 hours ago, ConnerVT said:

Currently my 4K movies and my HD movies aren't synced in any automated manner.  Something I will get to when I finally figure out the best strategy for my situation.

 

Basically at home it is just me and my wife.  Our son is here for a little while, while working out where he will be living post college graduation.  Any one else using the Plex is streaming via internet, and I don't like 4K transcoding.

 

The bulk of my library is HD, built up over the past 10 years.  When I started adding 4K movies, I drop them into their own 4K library (and folder).  Radarr manages HD, Radarr4K manages 4K.

 

As there are few movies I will rewatch again (and again), I typically watch them in 4K, then will replace it with a HD version, for others to potentially watch.  If it is a big hype release, I may keep both HD and 4K on the server.  Currently I do this manually, but then, I don't really consume many movies in a month.  It's manageable.

I just setup syncarr and it takes five minutes to do. Been putting off 1080/4k radarr/sonarr containers for a while and had no idea it would be so easy.

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