Servers Ahoy

So, I have obtained two raspberry pi’s. I am not experienced in servers, at all. I want an immich instance, and something to handle my media. I’ve really gotten into buying second hand physical media, ripping it and storing it and playing it digitally. Immich by the way is a really neat tool for managing images, and I have 30k+. Mostly pictures of dogs. Don’t judge me.

I use Fedora 44 as my desktop environment, and I love it. So why not use a Fedora server on one of the pi’s? I can make it headless, and because I’m used to fedora, that will remove any friction I have of swapping OS’s. Hey, be nice, I’m still a baby when it comes to Linux. I used it a lot in university but that was a long time ago.

For the media handling I’m going basic, and just picking Kodi/LibreELEC to start with. I’ve never messed around with raspberry pi’s before and these seem popular. Usually for a reason.

I’ve ordered a wireless keyboard/touchpad thingy to be able to control the Kodi/LibreELEC Pi from the TV, and as our NAS has pretty much died I’m harvesting the hard drives and just connecting them via a dock. Not perfect but we haven’t got the time to set up a new NAS right now.

Oh yeah, the NAS. So I inherited an old computer from a friend, and we decided to run TrueNAS on it. Which worked great! For two weeks, until it refused to mount the storage drive. Then we just didn’t have time to deal with it so it gathered dust for a month or so, then it refused to boot after a power outage. So it gathered more dust. So I was the other day and started figuring out why it wouldn’t boot - one of the RAM slots is borked. Okay, fine, three sticks of RAM is ok. The RAM is fine, but if theres RAM in the slot - it refuses to boot.

So I pulled out the hard drive into a caddy, and it is detected just fine by my computer - nothing wrong with the hard drive. So, my conclusion? With the broken RAM slot and being unable to mount the HDD? Motherboard is nerfed. We don’t have the resources to replace it, so I’m harvesting the HDD’s for my Pi project.

Wish me luck, I’ll keep you posted.