so this is basically a page to help me remember and track my experience in setting up a new /homelab type server. i started with NO server knowledge and many years (20+ now) using the linux desktop. this started long ago with a pentium 486 and ubuntu. progression was to mac for work friendliness and then back to linux fulltime after privacy concerns etc. so now i type this on my lemur pro 13″ laptop running garuda-linux, and this blog is published/hosted on my dell r730xd. i’ll include as many details of my build as possible and will start at the very beginning along with providing any hindsight. maybe it will help others maybe it will just be a way for me to rebuild if something breaks.
…it all began with a synology nas:
i got tired of netflix, amazon and other streaming services. i wanted what i purchased to be mine, not stuck in the ether. so i adapted a synology nas i had to be my first streaming device as many do. i had never heard of usenet, never used docker, and the *arrs were not in my vocabulary. i had as many do, mp3 and flac files accumulated over the years, photos i needed to consolidate that i had been copying over as laptops and computers and phones died. so i began my journey. figured out how to get container manager running (docker in synolanguage) hacked the synobox a little and was able to get a jellyfin service running and get my synobox the ability to talk to the outside world. i began to run out of storage and setup the jellyfin instance to be available on the www . connection was working, but the video sucked, jittery AF playback, entirely unusable.
…what? my synobox has no ability to transcode?
and so i went down the rabbit hole…