My Crazy November 2021 Dive Into Home Servers
You see that title, “Virgo Monthly November 2021: Key dates you need to know.”? Kinda makes you think about horoscopes and what not, right? Well, back in November 2021, my “key dates” were all about something totally different, and honestly, way more stressful but also, eventually, super rewarding. I wasn’t tracking star alignments; I was tracking network configs, hard drive health, and CPU temperatures. My universe, that month, was a dusty old PC tower and a tangled mess of cables.
It all kicked off because my family, bless ’em, were constantly complaining about streaming services. Buffering, shows disappearing, subscriptions piling up. I looked at this old, forgotten desktop PC, a relic from like 2015, just collecting dust in the corner of my workshop. It had an old Intel i5, 8GB of RAM, and a power supply that sounded like a jet engine when it ramped up. And I thought, “Hey, I’ve got this old machine, why not put it to good use? Build a local media server. No more buffering, full control over our content.” That’s where the “practice records” really began, right around early November 2021, marking the beginning of a truly unforgettable set of “key dates.”
First order of business was gutting that old beast. I stripped out the old graphics card, unnecessary optical drives – anything that would draw power or generate heat. I kept the essentials: motherboard, CPU, RAM. Then, I dug through my spares bin and found a few old hard drives: two 2TB drives, a 1TB, and a small 120GB SSD. The SSD was definitely going to be for the operating system, keeping it snappy. My main goal for the larger drives was to create a robust, somewhat redundant storage pool for all our movies, music, and family photos. I wanted a set-it-and-forget-it kind of system, you know?
I settled on Ubuntu Server for the operating system. Seemed like a solid, well-supported choice for a headless server. I downloaded the ISO, burned it onto a USB stick, and booted up. The installation was actually the easiest part, a pleasant surprise. But then came the networking. Oh man. My home network decided to play hard to get. I wanted a static IP address for the server so I could always find it easily without it changing. I spent two solid evenings fighting with `netplan` configuration files. Every time I thought I had it right, I’d apply the changes, reboot, and nope, it would pull a random IP from the router’s DHCP pool or just lose network altogether. I remember slamming my fist on the desk more than once, muttering about YAML indentation. My notes from that period are basically a series of progressively angrier doodles mixed with different `networkd` configurations.
Once the network finally decided to behave, it was onto storage. I wanted to mirror the two 2TB drives for redundancy, in case one failed, and then combine all the drives into a single big storage space. I dove into `mdadm` for software RAID1 and `LVM` for logical volume management. This was deep water for me. Understanding which partitions to create, how to build the RAID array, then extending it with LVM, and finally getting them to mount correctly at boot with `fstab` entries – it was like learning a new language. I’d configure it, reboot, and half the drives wouldn’t be mounted, or the RAID array would show as “degraded.” I spent hours reading outdated forum posts and documentation, just trying to make sense of it all.
- Fumbled with partitioning schemes, trying GPT vs. MBR.
- Struggled with `mdadm –create`, ensuring proper drive identification.
- Fought with `pvcreate`, `vgcreate`, `lvcreate` to pool drives.
- Battled with `fstab` entries and mount options to ensure persistence.
- Spent an entire Saturday trying to get Samba shares working with correct user permissions.
With storage somewhat sorted, I moved to file sharing. I needed something simple for the family to drag and drop files. Samba was the obvious choice. But again, permissions! Getting the right users, groups, and directory permissions set up so everyone could access what they needed, but couldn’t mess with system files, was a delicate dance. I messed it up so many times, users couldn’t see anything, or they could write everywhere. The kids couldn’t drop their pictures into the shared folder, and that was a big no-no.
Finally, for the media serving itself, I installed Plex Media Server. The initial installation was surprisingly smooth, but then came the real challenge: transcoding. My old i5 CPU just wasn’t cutting it for 4K streams. Videos would buffer constantly. I tried all sorts of settings in Plex, fiddled with quality options, even explored hardware acceleration options for a bit, only to realize my ancient CPU and integrated graphics were barely supported, if at all. It was a disheartening realization after all that work.
I remember one late night, probably closer to the end of November, I was trying to expand the LVM volume and messed up a command. The entire RAID array showed a critical error, and two of my drives were suddenly “unrecognized.” My stomach dropped. I thought, “This is it. All those hours. All those files. Gone.” I felt a cold dread, thinking I had destroyed weeks of effort. I just sat there, staring at the blinking cursor, feeling completely defeated. But then, I remembered my notes. Every little thing, every command, every error message I had copied and pasted. I found a string of old `dmesg` output in my log that matched a super obscure error I’d seen on a forum years ago. Turns out, I hadn’t bricked the drives; I just corrupted the superblock during the LVM resizing. A few carefully researched `mdadm` and `fsck` commands later, and with bated breath, I watched the array rebuild. It was the longest 3 hours of my life, but it worked. Everything came back online.
That feeling of finally seeing the Plex web interface pop up, all my movies and TV shows categorized, streaming flawlessly to the living room TV, was pure gold. It wasn’t about the server itself anymore; it was about the sheer stubbornness of pushing through every single hurdle. It took me practically the entire month of November, every evening, every weekend, but I built that thing, from a pile of old parts to a functioning, reliable media hub. The kids could stream their cartoons, my wife could watch her documentaries, and I had my music collection on tap. All local, all under my control.
The biggest, absolute biggest, lesson from that whole “November 2021 home server adventure” wasn’t just how to configure Linux or RAID arrays. It was the absolute, non-negotiable necessity of keeping detailed practice records. Every command, every error message, every little configuration file tweak – I scribbled it down or copied it to a text file. Those notes, messy as they were, saved my bacon multiple times when troubleshooting. And that’s something I carry into everything I do now, documenting the messy, the broken, and the beautiful parts of any project. So yeah, Virgo Monthly November 2021 might have had its own cosmic dates, but for me, November 2021 was packed with very earthly, very technical “key dates” that taught me a whole lot about persistence and meticulous record-keeping. It was a grind, but seeing my family enjoying seamless streaming made it totally worth every single frustrating moment.
