I’ve been running a pair of cyberpower systems for over a decade. I had to replace the battery in each of them once, but they’ve been working great.

I assume newer ones use some sort of Li-Ion battery tech, but mine are just plain old Lead Acid.

Whoa, really??? I guess I just assumed nothing changed in the last 5 years. I need to look into that.

Not the only use cases, but you’d need a different service if you need/want wildcard certs, certs that are manually installed and managed, or certs with a longer expiration.

I use portainer, but I don’t think I ever gave them my information. How would they even have my email?

How do you set this up to forward properly? Do you use different domains for different services? like plex.example.com?

I currently have nginx set up to forward based on port, which is fine for me, but it could be a little better.

That would be a great platform to start with.

Price in a backup solution too, you don’t want to have all your movies disappear because of one hard drive crash, or an accidental reformat gone wrong.

RAID is not a backup.

Feels like some of that stuff, like the SSD’s are a bit overkill for a media server. Most of them still use spinning disks to maximize size vs. cost.

Additionally, the CPU/GPU needs of a media server are pretty minor, unless you need to transcode on the fly, and even then, single streams aren’t very intensive either.

So unless you’re capping the outgoing bandwidth to multiple external sources, you’re most likely just streaming the video source as-is to the destination, which just needs a stable network stream. If you don’t need to transcode at all, you don’t really even need a GPU on the hardware.

Just keeping lunch warm.

Nah, a cable modem costs anywhere from $60-$300 depending on if you want one with a built in router/wifi. That’s a pretty good return on investment. Mine has been running just fine for over a decade, and I’ve replaced the wifi router behind it 3 times to get improvements in WiFI speed that I wouldn’t have gotten from my ISP. $11/mo would have cost me an extra $1,300+ of fees by now.

I have mediacom, and they’re pretty good about support in my area, even if they are pretty shitty about other things. They can and do send signals to be able to manage a self-owned cable modem, and they’ll send a tech to your house and diagnose issues, even if you roll your own network.

The US has some decent laws around protecting you from getting shafted by ISPs for this specific situation.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/router-and-modem-rental-fees-still-a-major-annoyance-despite-new-us-law/

Very interesting, I like the screenshots! Will definitely check this out.

This is a good list, but I didn’t see you mention SSL certificates. If you’ve gone through all your steps, you should be able to use LetsEncrypt to get free, automatically managed SSL certs for your environment.

https://letsencrypt.org/

Solid writeup. Good looking setup. I like how you have a great reason for every decision you made.

Crazy overkill for almost everyone, but you’re living in the future!