It's About Time!

It has been about a year since my last blog post.  I have been super busy with all sorts of various things.  One thing that has occupied my interest has been homelabbing.  For those who don't know, a homelab is basically a home server (in any form factor) that you can tinker with for fun.  But homelabs are actually pretty useful.  

My first server was a humble raspberry pi (obtained before shortage and scalpage).  It ran Pi Hole and that was pretty much it.  I wanted to do just a little more than the raspberry pi could handle, and I came across an old Intel NUC.  While not the most powerful computer, it served as a really nice balance between power and efficiency.  I installed CentOS 7 on it and ran a few minor things such as Docker, Pi Hole, Jellyfin and Octoprint (yes I got into 3D printing).

After a while, the 500GB HDD in that machine was just starting to look sad, and I really wanted to start a NAS for my whole family to use, so I ordered 2 used 4 TB hard drives.  They worked great (although having nearly 40,000 power on hours) so I installed one in my NUC and the other in my computer.  I am treating the two like a really jank mirrored backup.  With the new hard drive, I swapped over to TrueNas Scale which seems to be a lot more stable and perfect for what I wanted.  Now we can watch up to 4TB of movies and shows that are stored locally (I don't pirate but use a software called PlayOn which is essentially a DVR for streaming services).

I've already ordered more hard drives, I can only accept my fate of having terabytes of storage over time...