Homelab 2
Jun 16, 2024Hiatus
It’s been a while since my last blog entry, but I had a draft of this post kicking around from October of 2021 talking about the stuff I did with the homelab (past tense, I’ll get to that). I can’t talk about the super technical details or challenges I faced since I don’t exactly remember what happened, but I will try my best.
Great things
I had great aspirations for the homelab when I first got it running. The big goal I wanted to work towards was setting up Jellyfin (or if I got lazy, Plex) on the homelab so I could watch my collection of movies from any device within the house.
I did not get that far.
But I did manage to do some cool things with the server while it was still alive.
Samba
I created a network share using Samba that my dad and I used to host some temp files that we wanted to share with each other and other things that we wanted to have backups of. Getting Samba configured was a bit of a challenge as sometimes the file share wouldn’t read properly on Windows devices but the issues mainly stemmed from some improper config files.
Lancache
The year was 2021, and my download speed was about 40 MB on a good day. My PC only had about 1 TB of storage (only haha) so I had to offload games sometimes to make space for new ones. It’s a crime that games can be 100 GB. Regardless, there was a solution for my problem in the form of Lancache. Lancache, as it’s name suggests, is usually used for LAN parties where many participants might need to download the same game, but you don’t want 10 people trying to download the same 50 GB game. So the solution is to download the game onto a single server and serve it up locally to anyone who wants to play. I decided to use this software to cache my games locally so I wouldn’t need to re-download Grand Theft Auto 5 for the hundredth time.
The year is now 2024 and my download speed is still 40 MB on a good day.
Minecraft server w/ Ngrok
My friends and I play Minecraft every once in a while and someone always needed to host it locally or purchase some hosting plan for the duration of our gameplay. I decided that with the new homelab, I could try hosting on that. To simplify the port forwarding process I used Ngrok to open a port in a relatively safe way.
Now at this point I hadn’t considered if the hardware in the server would be able to support a Minecraft server. The RAM and CPU were old, but still fairly powerful so I assumed there would be no problems.
I logged in, there was a bit of lag but I assumed that was because my local network was not great. My friend logged in and he said it was playable at least. Finally a third friend logged in and the whole thing metaphorically caught fire and crashed.
Is it dead?
Yes. If dead means unusable then yes. I’m not sure what failed, whether it was the shoddy RAID controller that took me dozens of tries to get a single RAID 0 config to work. Or if it was the old dying RAM and CPU. Or something else entirely. But the whole system was locked in read-only mode. Numerous attempts at trying to restore the system did not work. Luckily there was nothing on that server that didn’t have a backup so I finally pulled the plug and started a fresh install on the server once again.
Epilogue
The server has been unplugged for a while, turned off while I went back to in-person university after the COVID lockdowns ended. I think I’m gonna start it back up again. I’m sure that in its sleep it has accumulated many problems once again, but soon it will be back up and running.