The Homelab Stack History

The early days

Like most systems administrators, I was loath to throw anything away that wasn't broken. Time and time again, having that odd cable, odd peripheral or obscure tool saved me a lot of time and the companies money.

Even before I retired, I couldn't keep it all. this eventually led to major runs to the e-waste facility. It is interesting that those places tend to come and go pretty frequently. From observation, it appears that the have an imbalance between intake and disposal.

So, I confess that I am a data hoarder. I was a very early adopter of software on CDs. I actually had a subscription that brought me 10 to 20 disks/month. Many of them were not terrible useful at the time but the good ones in the bundle made up for it. I think that some of them are still in the back of a closet waiting for hardware and OS environments that only exist in the computer history museum.

At that point in time I had a large collection of ripped music CDs, that are still at the house that we left to our daughter, books, a lot of files from various jobs and a ton of email. Video file came along later. I gathered stuff, and still do, for the sake of the collecting. Now sharing with friends and family is a side benefit but at the time it required burning CDs or DVDs. Streaming was not even feasible.

Along Came High-Speed links

It was suddenly possible to have just about anything accessible with a little looking and a small investment of time. The price of disk storage was coming down; I still remember being impressed when it crossed the $.25 per megabyte threshold. Clearly the resource had to be used. What took days to download with even a 56Kb modem could be fetched in minutes.

Then Plex entered and the *arr stack to manage it

I could now watch movies on my computer. At first, all it took was to put the files in the root folder and call it good. You all know the drill. Suddenly you have hundreds and the thousands of hours of content. I spun up a NAS and ran Plex from there

The *arr collection added a means to organize the chaos. Initially, Radarr and Sonarr ran natively on a Linux system that had been a desktop at one time. Then I moved to a significant server and installed Proxmox. Then I added a large TrueNAS system that I am presently consolidating most everything on.