3) Proxmox 2

Cost update:

1. Motherboard/CPU/RAM – £530
2. Noctua CPU Cooler – £85
3. Intel i350 Network card – £25
4. 3x Seagate 6TB Exos drives – £151
5. LSI 9211-8i HBA card – £32
6. HBA Cables – £22

We’re up to £845 ($1093) which is quite a lot, but I’m happy with everything I have at this point. It has plenty of CPU cores/RAM/Storage and network connections to allow me to have all sorts of fun.

Proxmox install number 2

Fresh start. I didn’t bother with Windows at this point. I’m not doing that until I’m settled with everything else and am sure I’m not going to start all over again.

I start off with Truenas. Specifically Truenas Scale – https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/

I’d seen loads of various videos over the years showing this off and it looks great. Installation was easy so we come to creating the ZFS pool and hit “Error: [EFAULT] Disk: ‘sda’ is incorrectly formatted with Data Integrity Feature (DIF)”

I naively think a quick format is going to solve this so I start one off and realise it’s going to take hours, so I cancel it, like a fucking idiot 😀

I now hit error opening device … permission denied and the drive is showing as 0TB when using lsblk.

I start panic scrolling through hundreds of posts online. Some saying a power cycle can sometimes solve the issue but a lot saying they just bought new drives. I wasn’t doing that so I carried on searching. I removed the offending drive for around an hour while I was researching.

It went back in and I was able to stat a format using:

sg_format --format --size=512 --fmtpinfo=0 /dev/sda

I didn’t time it accurately but I believe it was around 16 hours to format one drive. But it worked! The drive was available again. I’d decided at this point to not bother using Truenas to save cores and ram for other uses and just create a ZFS pool in Proxmox so I could bind mount it to any container that required it.

The ARR stack rabbit hole

Now we have storage I needed a way to share it on the network and set up Jellyfin. I found an awesome guide online here – https://blog.kye.dev/proxmox-series

The whole series was incredibly helpful to help me understand how to bind mount to containers and set up Cockpit for file managing and share set up. I ran a couple of tests from my main Windows machine and everything was visible.

I then get to the ARR stack and it’s associated apps. I followed the guide above setting up an LXC with Docker and Portainer. Both of those are new to me but incredibly interesting. Everything seemed to install ok and I managed to get Gluetun connected to my VPN (I use Express VPN) but I couldn’t get qbittorrent working at all.

I deleted the container and started again with the same result. I spent lots of time looking through the TRaSH guides – https://trash-guides.info/ but just couldn’t get it to work so gave up for a few days to play with other things. I installed Jellyfin on it’s own container and it’s great. I had to copy a few files over manually but it streamed perfectly and used the Quadro P400 for hardware transcoding with no issues.

I got bored of clicking through the SSL warnings so installed Nginx proxy manager and followed this great guide here:

Wolfgang has loads of great content. I recommend his channel along with the ones mentioned in the first post.