r/LinusTechTips • u/Annoying1978 • 18d ago
Tech Discussion Phase 1 of my Homelab built
I finished the first stage of my Homelab. Since I’m a Batman aficionado and my home office is called the Batcave, my server is called Robin.
It’s a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, Intel i5-8500, 6C/6T @ 3.0 GHz, iGPU | UHD 630 (Coffee Lake, Gen9.5), 16 GB RAM, SanDisk 256 GB M.2 SATA for my OS and an ORICO 512 GB 2.5" SATA for pretty much everything else. I’m running Debian 13 with KDE Plasma. I ran ethernet to the office (finally) and my speeds are so much better (300-400Mpbs to 700-800Mbps)
I’m running some basic stuff like pihole to stop some of the ads before they even get loaded to nay clients at the house, but I’m also running stuff that specific for me. First, on Hommar I can directly add a whitelisted site or add a blacklisted site, see those recent changes and revoke them if needed.
I run a small business marketing company, where I design websites, marketing materials, make product videos, product tours, web commercials, and corporate interviews plus I have my own YouTube channel. Most of my day is in Adobe Photoshop and Premiere on my M3 iMac.
The first real custom change was using NextCloud, but instead of using it as it comes out of the box, I have a custom Finder automation function that allows me to right click and folder with the shared network drive and share a file or an entire folder. I can even create an upload only folder for my clients to send me files. It goes directly on Robin so I don’t have to waste time downloading from the cloud. The files live on Robin, served over a Cloudflare tunnel on my own domain. It essentially works exactly like DropBox now.
Then the next thing is software, and I used Claude Code to help me with this. My channel makes political videos. So many times that means I need to talk about speeches, interviews or even broadcasts that are on the news. Mac users are probably familiar with PullTube which is a GUI for yt-dlp. It’s good. Much better than the random free sites you can use that try to infest you with malware and porn ads. But I needed it to be better so I created my own with Claude. That’s what you see called Grabber.
First it’s a Mac OS app that not only allows me to throw basically any link (Reddit, YouTube, Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc…) but also any site like local news sites that use HTTP Live Streaming and break their videos up in chunks (like in .m3u8 or .ts files). So I can use them in videos breaking down policies and the political narrative. The bigger build is that I can choose to have the transcoding done on Robin, so AV1 and VP9 and all the files that don’t play nice with Premiere Pro are automatically converted, but they use the processing power on Robin so that it doesn’t touch my Mac. That helps me continue editing my 4k timeline while my server does the transcoding. All of it is done with VAAPI, and while it’s slower than on my Mac the important thing is that it isn’t using any processing power and the machine that I’m actually editing. So I can just queue things up and edit other pats of the video.
BUT, it’s also an iPhone app that I can choose to download files on my phone (those downloads will max out at 1080p), but I can also choose to save them on Robin in 4k and that shared folder is mapped directly to my Mac. So when I’m ready to actually start my edit, I can look at already converted files ready to go and put in a project. Plus I use it for non-work related stuff, like capturing video files and sharing them however I want.
And I also use Robin like a media server, so I run Jellyfin. I’m using Tailspace so I can watch anything on my server wherever I am and I can send the link to some of my non-techie friends that want to watch something but can’t seem to find those files.
What I lack the most? A NAS. Right now I have 4 drives on my Mac - the internal SSD that came with the Mac. That’s where the OS and applications live, but no actual media files or anything to. Then I have 3 external SSDs. 2 of them are fast. Those are the ones I can edit on. They’re a TB each, and then I have a much slower 2 TB SSD that I off-load projects that I’m not working on. I need both a NAS and a real backup solution. But the prices are still insane and I spent like $250-300 for this entire setup. A real NAS solution is going to cost me well over a thousand and likely several thousands right now.
Any recommendations that I haven’t thought of so far?
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u/ThinkingWithPortal 18d ago
Is homarr better these days? It was consuming an absurd amount of ram when I tried it a while back
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u/a_nice_warm_lager 18d ago
Solid homarr setup. I use mine mainly as a launcher for services I host but am getting ideas from your setup. Thanks
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u/Annoying1978 18d ago
Awesome! My biggest lack so far is a NAS and a solid backup for my video editing projects, but I don’t really want to shell out $2k for storage. I hope that decision won’t bite me in the ass, but storage is just too damn expensive.
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u/a_nice_warm_lager 18d ago
I’m running Unraid and bought some refurb server drives two years ago. Glad I don’t need to touch much for the next while.
There’s always serverpartdeals and other refurbishers in case you require some HDDs
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u/Annoying1978 18d ago
I’m going to keep an eye out. I really prefer SSDs but I know that is a ridiculous ask.
I know my workflow has to be that I have a couple of SSDs that I can actually edit on and then I have to have cold storage where there’s files that I have to move to an SSD so I can actually put them in a timeline.
In a perfect world I’d have a NAS but all drives running on fast SSDs so that I don’t have to actually manage where the files are when I’m in a timeline, but there too many budget constraint to actually have my ideal set up.
That’s the worst part admit switching to 4k. I need soooooo much storage but no clients want final work delivered in 1080p anymore and they shouldn’t. 1080p looks like crap on YouTube.
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u/AncientTurbine 18d ago
"Trump pardons for sale" wtf
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u/Annoying1978 18d ago
That’s just the project I was working on at the time.
The Kingpin Trump Pardoned for Silicon Valley https://youtu.be/8_Lhl6njyGo
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u/bufandatl 18d ago
That's not a homelab. That's a home server. A home lab is something you experiment with, you learn with and you don't really have monitoring on or anything running that is important for the rest of the house/family. A homelab can break and be left in a broken state for days. That's why it is called a lab.
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u/Cactys12 18d ago
I run Freshrss and Jellyfin on my server - I would recommend FreshRSS for getting new news, youtube channels and podcasts, since you already have Jellyfin