Nginx serves as a convenient reverse proxy to add SSL support to all backend web-serving containers and to add authentication for every service. I run Plex, OwnCloud, Nginx and a number of supporting applications, nearly all containerized. Batch operations are infrequent and can happen in the background. The bottleneck to the NAS is more than acceptable since generally, a user will only need one file to be accessed and the difference waiting 5ms or 70ms for a single file to start streaming is imperceptible to the end-user. Also, since I’m using DDR4 and M.2, the system’s bottleneck will probably always be CPU, as access times for application-related storage and RAM should be very low. Also, the system being quad-core HT means it should have enough processing power to run all VMs, Docker containers, and burst transcode 4 streams with a little bit of overhead. The system stores no media files, only application configurations, ISOs for VMs, Docker volumes etc, and once fully spun up I’m at 25% RAM used and 33% storage used, which should allow me room to grow and an adequate amount of storage for logs. I also used an off-the-shelf 32GB USB flash drive for unRAID’s OS (which is overkill, since it should really never use more than 1GB). I went with a Skull Canyon NUC with 32GB of DDR4 RAM and 2 1TB M.2 SSDs. The system must have enough storage to accommodate running the VMs and Docker containers (but it does not need to store all of my files, since I already have a NAS).The system must have about enough memory for at least two medium-sized VMs, and 10 Docker containers.The system must be capable of transcoding 4 streams at once.Again, all things equal, I want the lowest footprint possible.All things equal, I want the lowest power consumption possible.My system build is pretty simple, with some basic goals and ideas: The network is pretty unexceptional from there, although I do connect to my VPN via OPNSense and route traffic to it, so any host on the main fabric can natively reach VPN resources How did I build my system? Since my old server had two ethernet ports and was still more than capable, I converted it into running OPNSense, an open-source fork of PFSense, a network and security appliance. Part of the perks of upgrading to unRAID on a new server (as opposed to running a physical server with all of the applications I needed installed in an ad-hoc manner) is that the previous server was freed up to do other things. With unRAID, we can deliver all of these capabilities, at the same time, and on the same system.” What that means is unRAID is a platform from which you can store and serve files, and run applications to manage and stream those files for you (such as Plex or Kodi) using Docker or a fully virtualized machine with whatever specific applications you want installed. Traditional approaches to personal computing technology place limits on your hardware’s capabilities, forcing you to choose between a desktop, media player, or a server. What is unRAID?įor the uninitiated, unRAID is “a scalable, consumer-oriented, server operating system. I recently started using unRAID for my server at home, and I figured I’d do a rough write-up of how I configured mine and some design decisions I made along the way. Note: This post was originally posted on my personal blog.

Unraid vpn monitor