Servers
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Rebuilding My Aging Plex Server: Linux Mint 19.3 to Mint 22.3
I have been running Plex for a long time. Like a lot of things in my home lab, the Plex server has been upgraded and modified over the years, but the underlying operating system hasn’t received nearly as much attention. It has just worked. My current Plex server is a virtual machine running Linux Mint…
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Why Everything in My Home Lab Is on a UPS
Way back at the dawn of time (late 90s), I lived in a duplex for a couple years. I’d purchased a new PC and monitor and thought all was going to be good. However, the new purchase would randomly power cycle, even when working on it. OS corruption followed. Reinstalling the factory OS a couple…
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PVE Backups vs. Proxmox Backup Server: Why I Use Both
When my home servers ran ESXi, Veeam (the Community edition for the server backups) kept the critical VMs protected, and did that extremely well. It is a product I’ve used at home and the office for almost the same amount of time. When I migrated the servers completely to Proxmox, I suddenly had two different…
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Why I Buy Enterprise Drives for My Home Lab
I’ve purchased a lot of hard drives for my home lab over the years, and for quite a while now most of them have had two things in common: they’re enterprise drives, and they’re used. That combination probably sounds questionable to some people. Why put years-old drives pulled from somebody else’s server into machines holding…
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Viewing SMART data of SAS and SATA drives on my R720s from Proxmox using Smartmontools
I found a very useful trick to read SAS drive data when the disks are behind my Dell H710P RAID controller on my PowerEdge servers. Normally RAID controllers hide SMART/SCSI logs. But smartctl can tunnel through the controller. Step 1 — Install smartmontools on Proxmox. On your Proxmox host: Step 2 — List the drives…
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Why I’m Still Running Dell PowerEdge R720s in 2026
My two Dell PowerEdge R720s are old. Really old. Dell introduced the R720 generation in 2012, which makes recommending one as a server in 2026 sound a little ridiculous. Yet I have two of them running 24/7 in my home lab, and I don’t currently have any plans to replace them. It’s not because they’re…
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