Home Lab part 1

The Server

I bought an old server off eBay to tinker around with. It's a Dell PowerEdge T620 with dual Intel Xenon E5-2690v2 processors and (currently) 160GB RAM.

Why? Well, I'm an inveterate tinkerer and have always dabbled with self-hosting and linux. I'd been running my servarr* stack and a few other services on an older custom build desktop and wanted a bit more flexibility.

It came with 2 300GB HDDs that weren't really either use nor ornament, and I replaced them with a 1TB HDD (RAID0) in bay 1 and installed the latest Proxmox-VE. The chassis only had 2 drive caddies installed, so I had to wait a couple of days for another eBay delivery to get the full complement of 8 3.5" SATA caddies. I could then start to play in earnest.

Building storage

Out of the 1TB on the first disk (/dev/sda), Proxmox VE (PVE) only uses around 200GB all told and the largest logical volume (pve-data) has about 800GB. I decided to use that for at least the CT volumes and VM disks. I created a LVM-Thin volume called local-lvm, and you can see the LXCs at the time of writing here.

Servarr stack storage

Now I could begin to migrate the HDDs from the old PC to the server. I had just over (dammit!) 3TB of media on a 3TB and 2TB volume in the unRAID array so I pulled the redundant 8TB drive out and installed it in the second bay on the server (/dev/sdb).

MergerFS

I knew I wanted the media storage space to be expandable so I decided to go with MergerFS to create a unified /mnt/storage partition that I could simply add HDDs to when I wanted to increase space.

Creating the first pool disk

1. I installed mergerfs, fuse3 and tree.
2. I cleared the existing filesystem signatures:
   root@pve:# wipefs -a /dev/sdb
3. I created at GPT partition table and a single partition:
   root@pve:# parted /dev/sdb mklabel gpt
root@pve:# parted /dev/sdb mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
4. Then I formatted the partition as ext4 and labelled it disk1:
   root@pve:# mkfs.ext4 -L disk1 /dev/sdb1
5. Finally, I added the disk to the mount table:
   root@pve:# mkdir -p /mnt/disk1
# Add to fstab for automatic mounting
root@pve:# echo "LABEL=disk1 /mnt/disk1 ext4 defaults 0 2" >> /etc/fstab
# Mount it
root@pve:# mount -a

This output shows the disk after the rsync steps later, hence the 56% usage.

root@pve:# df -h /mnt/disk1
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1       7.3T  3.9T  3.1T  56% /mnt/disk1

Setting up the MergerFS pool

1. Create mergerfs pool mount point
   root@pve:# mkdir -p /mnt/storage
2. Create mergerfs systemd mount unit

root@pve:# cat > /etc/systemd/system/mnt-storage.mount << 'EOF'
[Unit]
Description=MergerFS Storage Pool
After=local-fs.target
[Mount]
What=/mnt/disk*
Where=/mnt/storage
Type=fuse.mergerfs
Options=defaults,allow_other,use_ino,cache.files=partial,dropcacheonclose=true,category.create=mfs,fsname=mergerfs
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

3. Reload systemd, enable and start
   root@pve:# systemctl daemon-reload
root@pve:# systemctl enable mnt-storage.mount
root@pve:# systemctl start mnt-storage.mount
4. Verify mergerfs is working

root@pve:# df -h /mnt/storage/
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
mergerfs        7.3T  3.9T  3.1T  56% /mnt/storage

So in the [Mount] section above, we specified we want to add any new /mnt/disk* to be added to the /mnt/storage MergerFS pool.

Create the TRaSH Guides directory structure

You can read the TRaSH Guide to see why this is a really good process when setting up the folder structure for the servarr stack.

1. Create main data structure
   root@pve:# mkdir -p /mnt/storage/data/{torrents/{movies,tv,music},usenet/{incomplete,complete/{movies,tv,music}},media/{movies,tv,music}}
root@pve:# mkdir -p /mnt/storage/data/downloads
2. Create appdata directory
   (Optional if you want to keep your Docker appdata files in /mnt/storage too)
   root@pve:# mkdir -p /mnt/storage/appdata
3. Set Permissions
   1. Set ownership (UID/GID 1000 - will be used by Docker containers)
      root@pve:~# chown -R 1000:1000 /mnt/storage
   2. Set permissions (775 for directories, 664 for files)
      root@pve:~# chmod -R a=,a+rX,u+w,g+w /mnt/storage
   3. Verify
      root@pve:~# ls -la /mnt/storage/
total 48
drwxr-xr-x 9 steve steve 4096 Oct 13 19:23 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Oct 24 10:31 ..
drwxrwxr-x 15 steve steve 4096 Oct 17 18:54 appdata
drwxrwxr-x 6 steve steve 4096 Oct 13 19:13 data

Verify structure

Add to Proxmox storage

1. Add storage pool to Proxmox for VM/LXC storage
   root@pve:~# pvesm add dir storage-pool --path /mnt/storage --content images,rootdir,vztmpl,iso

Verify

Rsync media data from old server

Here I just used rsync -avz <$source> <$dest> on the original server to copy all the media files into place. It took a while!

Summary

In this article I described the server hardware that I'd bought. I talked about installing Proxmox VE on the first hard drive, and setting up the first disk in a MergerFS storage array for my multimedia on the second. I described how I'd set up the filesystem using the optimal structure for my servarr stack.

In the next article, I'll go through the steps I used to create the Docker LXC container, install portainer and the servarr app containers.