Doubletwist

I use proxmox mail gateway (PMG) for my homelab, configured to relay through my Gmail domain using smtp auth.

I’ve also used PMG at the enterprise level. Never had an issue with it.

It’s postfix underneath.

Y’all must be doing something wrong because HW raid has been hot garbage for at least 20years. I’ve been using software raid (mdadm, ZFS) since before 2000 and have never had a problem that could be attributed to the software raid itself, while I’ve had all kinds of horrible things go wrong with HW raid. And that holds true not just at home but professionally with enterprise level systems as a SysAdmin.

With the exception of the (now rare) bare metal windows server, or the most basic boot drive mirroring for VMware (with important datastores on NAS/SAN which are using software raid underneath, with at most some limited HW assisted accelerators) , hardly anyone has trusted hardware raid for decades.

I’m pretty sure you can make them set the modem/router to bridge mode and run your own router. If it’s cable, you can also buy your own non-router cable modem, then use whatever router you like behind it.

I’ve been using option 1 for many many years. It lets me keep control of the encryption, and it’s accessible just about anywhere.

UPSes aren’t meant to keep things running for long periods of time.

If you’re trying to keep things on for hours, you need a generator. Then the UPS just needs to keep things running until the generator comes online.

I suspect it’ll be a lot cheaper to get a small generator than it would be to buy enough UPS and batteries to run things for multiple hours.

Mostly in a state of stability at the moment.

I recently migrated off of a pair of ESXi servers, and consolidated down to just put my VMs on my TrueNAS Scale server, primarily to save power and generation so that I would only be running two servers instead of four. It’s not as fancy or flexible, but the VMs run and do what I need.

So now my lab consists of:

• 1 Dell R620 w/8x 1TB HDD in RAIDZ2 - backups (backuppc)
• 1 Dell R620 w/8x 2TB SSD in RAIDZ2 + JBOD w/16x 3TB HDD in 2xRAIDZ2 pool - NAS + VMs for Plex, k8s, ansible/terraform, etc. (TrueNAS Scale)
• Unifi UDMPro + 3APs
• Unifi 10Gb Aggregation Switch
• Unifi 24-port POE switch standard

I then have another pair of R620s, plus 2 more JBOD trays and disks as cold spares. I may run the servers some during the winter, but it’s too hot in the garage closet in the summer to run them all without additional cooling.

The problem isn’t 4k vs 1080p. I have a separate library for my 4k items which isn’t accessible remotely.

The problem is twofold:

1. My uplink speeds suck, so often a 1080p file can’t stream remotely without being transcoded down to 720p.

2. Almost everything I have is encoded to x265, and many Roku devices don’t support that, thus causing media to be transcoded even locally. (The device I use for 4k stuff does but other TVs in the house currently use devices such don’t)

Also, I’m not just running this on a raspberry pi with a single disc. I have over 1500 movies, and 200 TV series already taking up over 30 terabytes on a RAIDZ2 server. So it’s not just a simple matter of throwing an " extra fifty bucks" at it.

Frankly, with everything that’s running in my home lab, the added electricity in CPU power to transcode is barely a rounding error.

Is it possible for me to arrange things so that nothing ever needs to transcode? Sure, but it would be far more trouble and cost than it’s worth at this time.

Not everyone has the same needs or restrictions.

That’s assuming you can afford the storage to store multiple copies of your media.