Hi folks, I'm considering setting up an offsite backup server and am seeking recommendations for a smallish form factor PC. Mainly, are there some suitable popular second hand PCs which meet the following requirements:

• fits 4x 3.5" HDD
• Smaller than a regular tower (e.g. mATX or ITX)
• Equipped with a 6th of 7th gen Intel CPU at least (for power efficiency and transcoding, in case I want it to actually to some transcoding) with video output.
• Ideally with upgradeable RAM

Do you know of something which meets those specs and is rather common on the second hand market?

Thanks!

Edit: I'm looking for a prebuilt system, such as a dell optiplex or similar.

Yesterday, there was a live scheduled by Louis Grossman, titled "Addressing futo license drama! Let's see if I get fired...". I was unable to watch it live, but now the stream seems to be gone from YouTube.

Did it air and was later removed? Or did it never happen in the first place?

Here's the link to where it was meant to happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTBYMobWQzk

Cheers

Edit: a new video was recently posted at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjy2CHP7zU

I do not know if this was the supposedly edited and reuploaded video or if this is unrelated.

Hi folks,

I seem to be having some internet connectivity issues lately and I would like to monitor my access to the internet. I have a homelab and was wondering whether someone had perhaps something like a docker container which pings a custom website every so often and plots a timescale of when the connection was successful and when it was not.

Or perhaps you have another suggestion? I know of dashboards like grafana but I don't know whether they can be configured to actually generate that data or whether they rely on a third party to feed them. Thanks!

Hi folks, I'm looking for a specific YouTube video which I watched around 5 months ago.

The gist of the video is that it was comparing the transcoding performance of an Intel iGPU when used natively, compared to when passed through to a VM. From what I recall there was a significant performance hit and it was around 50% or so (in terms of fps transcoding). I believe the test was performed on jellyfin. I don't remember whether it was using xcpng, proxmox or another OS. I don't remember which channel published this video nor when it was published, just that I watched it sometime between April and June this year.

Anyone recall or know what video I'm talking about? Possible keywords include: quicksync, passthrough, sriov, iommu, transcoding, iGPU, encoding.

Thank you in advance!

Hi y'all,

I am exploring TrueNAS and configuring some ZFS datasets. As ZFS provides with some parameters to fine-tune its setup to the type of data, I was thinking it would be good to take advantage of it. So I'm here with the simple task of choosing the appropriate "record size".

Initially I thought, well this is simple, the dataset is meant to store videos, movies, tv shows for a jellyfin docker container, so in general large files and a record size of 1M sounds like a good idea (as suggested in Jim Salter's cheatsheet).

Out of curiosity, I ran Wendell's magic command from level1 tech to get a sense for the file size distribution:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l | awk '{ n=int(log($5)/log(2)); if (n<10) { n=10; } size[n]++ } END { for (i in size) printf("%d %d\n", 2^i, size[i]) }' | sort -n | awk 'function human(x) { x[1]/=1024; if (x[1]>=1024) { x[2]++; human(x) } } { a[1]=$1; a[2]=0; human(a); printf("%3d%s: %6d\n", a[1],substr("kMGTEPYZ",a[2]+1,1),$2) }'

Turns out, that's when I discovered it was not as simple. The directory is obviously filled with videos, but also tiny small files, for subtitiles, NFOs, and small illustration images, valuable for Jellyfin's media organization.

That's where I'm at. The way I see it, there are several options:

• 1. Let's not overcomplicate it, just run with the default 64K ZFS dataset recordsize and roll with it. It won't be such a big deal.
• 2. Let's try to be clever about it, make 2 datasets, one with a recordsize of 4K for the small files and one with a recordsize of 1M for the videos, then select one as the "main" dataset and use symbolic links for each file to the other dataset such that all content is "visible" from within one file structure. I haven't dug too much in how I would automate it, but might not play nicely with the *arr suite? Perhaps overly complicated...
• 3. Make all video files MKV files, embed the subtitles, rename the videos to make NFOs as unnecessary as possible for movies and tv shows (though this will still be useful for private videos, or YT downloads etc)
• 4. Other?

So what do you think? And also, how have your personally set it up? Would love to get some feedback, especially if you are also using ZFS and have a videos library with a dedicated dataset. Thanks!

Edit: Alright, so I found the following post by Jim Salter which goes through more detail regarding record size. It clarifies my misconception about recordsize not being the same as the block size, but also it can easily be changed at any time. It's just the size of the chunks of data to be read. So I'll be sticking to 1M recordsize and leave it at that despite having multiple smaller files, because the important will be to effectively stream the larger files. Thank you all!