Well, it finally happened. I’ve been talking about it for a while now, but I finally upgraded my storage host (Hemlock) to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS from CentOS 7. CentOS 7 is deprecated, and after seeing the licensing change and absorption into the RedHat Borg, I decided to abandoned the RedHat fork entirely and move to Ubuntu. I’ve been using Ubuntu (and Debian, really) since around 2000, and have been dailing driving Ubuntu since about 2004. All of the VMs driving the services I run use Ubuntu (headless) and I’m certainly comfortable in that environment. I haven’t yet tried out a rolling release Linux distribution, but I think that I’m going to be trying it out on my personal laptop at some point this year. So far, the host mgiration went successfully and all of the services are back up and running. I’ve also installed Minio, and I’ll be slowly transitioning the storage related services over to Virtual Host storage rather than the current NFS solution.

I also just received my Turing Pi RK1 32GB compute modules, which I’m hoping to eventually have run all of the services that don’t rely on GPU transcoding directly. There’s also rumors of Plex supporting RockChip GPUs (these RK1s use the Mali G610 GPU) at some point in the future, and JellyFin already does, so I may take a more serious look at JellyFin as my video streaming solution - so watch out for invites to the service as I make it available. One downside is that I’ll have to manage user accounts, but since I make regular offsite backups now, restoring those accounts (especially via containers) shouldn’t be an issue. The eventual goal would be to eliminate (almost) all services being run on the storage host (Hemlock) and move those to the Turing Pi and NUCs where I need baremetal for database and other purposes.

If you’re wondering where the name Hemlock came from, it was my Dad’s handle back in the BBS times all the way up to the internet. We had started building the storage host out when he passed away, so I felt it was appropriate to name the host after his persona. It’s been a rock solid machine and I forsee it keeping the Hemlock monicker even when I do some physical hardware upgrades on it, which will be happening eventually.

To give you an idea of what Hemlock is:

  • Skylake E5
  • 64GB ECC RAM
  • Nvidia P400 GPU for transcoding / ML purposes
  • LSI 9211-8i RAID card in IT mode
  • 8 * 3TB WD Red CMR disks in a RAID 6 MDADM array
  • 8 * 4TB WD Red CMR disks in a RAID 6 MDADM array
  • A few SSDs attached to the motherboard to provide some ephemeral storage
  • 4 1GbE NICs, wanting to upgrade to a 10GbE connection (necessitates 10GbE switch too…)