My Truenas Server
January 5, 2022 | TechWelcome to my new blog!
Why have I set this up?
I've been maintaining my own personal server at home for a while now and it's fun to see just how much you can squeeze out of a low powered machine. There's also definitely something satisfying about maintaining your own little piece of physical infrastructure on the internet, it's fun to tinker with.
It's running Truenas/FreeBSD and I initially set it up as a backup solution and somewhere to store and serve all of my video content. I used plex for this and it works very well indeed. It helps that I have ethernet cable running to all my TV points in the house so plex is able to serve up the video content without breaking a sweat. Sometimes an older client is unable to play the video format however and then plex has to try and transcode it on the fly - my puny microserver is nowhere near man enough to pull that off and so the video just buffers constantly in that case (main culprit seems to be an original Amazon Fire TV Box which must be lacking some modern codecs). You can remedy this by getting plex to "optimize" the culprit video for a particular use case (e,g TV or mobile) but this is an incredibly slow process and now you have duplicate copies of the video content which is annoying. Overall though, plex is awesome.
I setup a transmission instance which allows remote control from their Android app. This allows me to start torrents from my phone and then view them immediately from the plex app running on my TVs in the house. Anyone who has fiddled around with torrents on USB sticks and TVs in the past will appreciate how slick this setup is. Plex also allows me serve the content out over the internet as well so I have a handful of friends who can watch my content and I often watch directly from my phone when i'm in the gym (plex annoyingly charge a fee to unlock this "premium" feature on the Android app though).
I also went ahead and setup nginx to host my personal website.
I left it that for a while but recently I decided to see what else I could squeeze onto the server. I added an instance of https://filebrowser.org/ to allow easier file access using a browser and I must say I am very impressed with that particular project. I had an old synology diskstation prior to setting up this server and it had amazing suite of built in services and apps such a user friendly file browser which I sorely missed. This web based solution comes very close to scratching that itch even though it's not quite as slick as the native Android app that works with Synology. Incidentally I had tried setting up an instance of nextcloud before I found filebrowser.org and it was simply too bloated for my needs.
And finally I decided to setup this blog site. I did a lot of hunting around before I found Bludit being mentioned in a reddit post. It fits the bill perfectly for me. Super lightweight, themable and powered using a flatfile architecture (why complicate things?). Getting it configured was slightly painful because I have a reverse proxy setup to handle SSL temrination on all of my subdomains but it was worth the effort because it's ideal for what I need. I'm no PHP expert but I can certainly fumble my way through enough to be dangerous.
That's it for now but i'm sure i'll find some other toys to get up and running (CCTV might be my next project).
Thanks for reading.
