Building a $122 DIY NAS, Local AI and Media Server - True Nas, Ollama, Jellyfin, Home Assistant

a couple of days ago I went to my friend Josh's house and noticed something peculiar as I approached the house I noticed that there was a computer tower standing outside by the trash bin when I asked my friend what was that all about he said ah it's just some 10-year-old piece of garbage it wasn't the shed for like years but here's the funny part he then said to me anyway mate I'm buying a 400 bucks NZ so I can't keep hoarding that trash so I brought the computer over with me and today we're going to transform that trash into a full-blown kast server with a Nas local AI media server and a lot more let's see if we can avoid him spending 400 bucks on a newas now I have vacuumed it a bit before bringing it over but right off the bat it doesn't really seem that bad the case was a bit battered but the board seemed perfectly fine if it will post now that's another story the first thing I knew I would have to replace was the power supply I didn't even bother testing it with the multimeter because since the board is an asped Z 77v my friend was right the computer is at least 10 years old so I got this Corsair 650 Watts on sale on Amazon for 45 bucks it's not modular and only has three SATA power connections but for what it is it's good enough the computer came with 8 gigs of RAM placs really badly I must add so I thought in increasing the size a little bit and I got an additional 16 GB for 24 bucks on Amazon I also thought I wouldn't have to change the CPU fan so all I did was reset the CPU and clean the old paste with alcohol which came right off and applied a little bit of thermal gasly paste that I had left over from a build I did last year I probably could have kept the SSD but it was only 120 GB so I got this new PNY SSD with 500 gigabytes for 33 bucks on Amazon oh and another thing that I bought extra was an HBA control for Nas and I got a secondhand one for 20 bucks on eBay they are dirt cheap secondhand and work really really well you can also try AliExpress for brand new ones but this one looks fine for me the GPU seemed fine but for an ass I don't really need uh you know a GPU and this one only has 1 Gigabyte so I rather remove it and save the additional 10 to 12 watts of power I was actually trying to sell it but I came across a guy on Facebook Market Marketplace that offered to exchange it for a 2.5 GB network card that he bought on AliExpress for 16 bucks according to him he ordered a network card and when the card arrived he realized the computer that he had was so old it didn't have a PCI Express slot we became friends the last and final piece was the HDD I got two 4 tbte seate ironwolf NAS Drives refurbished on Amazon for 150 bucks comes with a year of warranty also so it sounded like a pretty good deal to me and I'm not going to include the drives on the price count because typically nases or popular vendors for for nases and single board computers they don't really come with them and you need to purchase them separately anyway I got to say it looks pretty damn good the CPU fan is in pretty good condition the ram is not flamboyant with blinking LEDs but who cares cuz it's not like I'm going to be looking at it and there is enough room in the case for the air to circulate the next thing was to power it on and hope it wouldn't explode in my face this actually felt like when you're restringing a [Music] guitar so the CPU is nice and cool and I went to the bias and placed the CPU into energy saving mode not to mention that you will be really good on the electricity bill and the environment so the only real trash here was the PSU and I got a brand new unexpected 2.5 gig Nick that gig Nick sounds cool that I couldn't wait to try folks I can tell you that this was such a fun afternoon but the best is still to come especially if you hit that subscribe button and give us a thumbs up now comes the software part I'm going to be honest at first my plan was to install prox MOX but then I realized that the CPU was an i7 37k and that CPU supports virtualization but it doesn't support VT and therefore no support for remapping foru so PCI pass through for my 2.5 ethernet card was not possible so instead I decided to install the nas on the bare metal and use the apps that supports instead there are two nazes I actually really like true Nas scale and unraid now there are some pros and cons for each but since unraid is pay and this is a very conservative machine there's no point in adding an extra 60 bucks to the build and inst is a breeze all you got to do is go to the tras website download tras scale I I wouldn't really bother with core and then we need to use rofus to create a bootable USB stick with the tras image now very important during the prompt make sure you select DD mod or you w't boot pop the USB stick into the computer and boot from the stick the installation is simple just pressing install and following the options make sure to select the SSD drive though and not the HDD drives for the nas enter username and password and let it do its thing reboot and once it's up access it via the web browser in my case the IP is 192.168 do10 48 but yours might be something different and for sure it will be something different enter admin for user and the password that you define during the installation now that we have the computer running and it's looking pretty nicely here we need to set up our Nas our true Nas so the the first thing is network configuration I have two cards and this one is my 2.5 gig which is the one that I want to use so let's configure a static IP click edit antique DHCP add aliases and some IP that you want to choose so I'm putting this one here 1 192.1681 29 with a cider of 24 enter the default gateway and in my case it's going to be 192168101 and register click confirm and test the changes then we need to open another Tab and enter the IP that we just configured log in and save now click the global settings under the network configurations again and change the domain and set the DNS server after doing that let's check if we can ping Google for example so just head over to the system shell and great it's working the next step we're going to create a pool for my two Naas drives let's click on storage create pool and let's call it bleach NZ most of my servers have anime names because I freaking love anime and yes I am 42 years old but who cares I only have two drives so mirror will have to do for now I'm not interested on any other options so we just click save go to review and create the pool confirm and this will erase everything in the drives okay everything seems to be nice and healthy with our pool created we now need to create the data sets you can think think of these as the folders or the root folders inside your pool click on manage data sets and data set let's call it bleach share just change the share type to sambba because we will want to use these shared locations over the network hit save and that's it for the data sets let's create a user so we don't have to access everything with admin so go to credentials local users add [Music] user now let's share this data set using or SMB click on shares and add share select the path to the share and enter a description then hit save the next step let's edit the file system AA list or ACL list click add item select the user you just created and in my case it's Philip and set permissions to full control this means that we can add or delete files and read of course save the AA list let's see if I can access this let's go to Windows and create a location pointing to our Nas now let's select a big file to share and look at this 280 MEC it was really good to trade that old AMD for this 16 bucks 2.5 GB C there are for sure a bunch of things that we could do here with traz like encryption compression D duplication Etc but honestly it's a Home Server so I don't really need data encrypted and I'm sure neither does my friend however there is one thing I will add and that's snapshots this is great if you accidentally delete a file and want it back head over to data protection under periodic snapshot tasks click on ADD let's select the snapshot but let's leave it for 2 weeks let's just create one snapshot manually so that you guys can see what this does go to data set and hit create snapshot select the data set in manage snapshot let's enable show Extra columns and we can see that we have a reference of 1.46 gigs now if we delete the file or the image file that I just previously copied in our share we can either roll it back in chune as or we can go to our share folder click on properties then previous versions and restart it and just like magic our file is back one of the wonders of ZFS as far as the nas goes the configuration is done done and now for the most fun part of it all the thing that is really going to bring this little old vintage box to life let's move on to the goodies if you click on apps and check available apps look at this beauty and these are only the official ones but we can extend this catalog even further and install true charts The Unofficial app catalog click on discover apps and manage cataloges and add catalog let's call it true charts copy the URL from the official true charts website and hit save this will import the catalog now look at this app's Galore if I remember I will leave the URL for True charts in the description if it's not there can someone please let me know in the comments and I'll upload it now I'm not going to go into massive detail for every app otherwise this video would be even longer than what already is but what we're going to do is the following first we're going to create an updated data set for all of our apps configuration then as children data set we create the folders for each of the apps that we are going to config and in this case is going to be Edgard home assistant ol Lama the reason why we create these extra folders or these extra data sets is so if we need to reinstall an app we don't need to set up the entire thing from scratch the first thing we're going to install is going to be adg guard because we all need ad blocking and if you don't know what ad blocking is I have some videos about that as well make sure that you set the configuration to the path we Define earlier also take note of the port we configure here because we're going to need to specify this during the adguard wizard [Music] setup you can leave everything else as default I believe and I choose a username and password then go to filters and choose the filters that you like I take pretty much all of these here uh Plus the unblock filters adguard is great and as a test we can simply go to our own local machine and change the DNS server to the server that we just configured and look at this check how amazing that works if you're happy you can add that to your VLAN dhtp server and again if you do not know what a VLAN is check out my other VLAN videos cuz I have a couple of them already or you can just add to the general DNS settings in pfSense or any other routing software that you may use so that every Network in your home goes through this ad blocker next is home assistant home assistant is a great app that allows you to control your home apps like smart devices your boiler you know check your energy usage amongst many other features pick the right time [Music] zone and for the configuration for home assistant make sure that you point to the folder that we created you can also create separate folders or data sets for the database for now you know this is good enough then you can just click on install one really cool thing that I like to do is set up my Ard configuration in home assistant so that I have everything in just one place go to services and integration search for adguard enter the IP and the port remove the SSL tick boxes and done the next one is my favorite olama AI have your own llm or large language model just like chat GPT but in your private Network that way you can keep your own data private because the models will run locally this is why we install true charts because truez doesn't really support yet olama now check the right time zone under storage select host path and the data set that we created change the size of the quota and this is important otherwise you're going to end up with 250 gigs of space and if you have a lot of ram you can increase it or add a GPU if you have one now when you first launch the web portal and register we can see that we have no model available so we need to install a few models for this stuff to work go to the Shell of the container now that we are on bash we can run AMA commands and install the models that we want just type AMA run Lama 2 which is the model name and this will install the model it just takes a little while because the files are nearly 4 gigs but this is the way you can install any model you can enter promps directly in the Shell or you can use the web UI version for well the same purpose now remember that this computer is an oldie and it doesn't have a GPU because I traded it so it's a little bit slower but if I run the same prompt on my other llama server running on my Titan server which has you know an old GTX 2080 which is still a pretty powerful GPU the the results are well considerably better and a lot faster but you know still it's pretty cool that a 10-year-old computer is running AI finally jelly fin your own little private media server Alla Netflix but for free now I always recommend using the official tras apps for obvious reasons the folks at I ex systems not only test but stand by the applications that they recommend and allow on their platform and the documentation and the support on the forums is really good it's a really nice Community anyway click on install I'm going to leave everything as default including the configuration folders We just need to add the share uh that contains our media files so that jelly fin can scan it this is typically the place where you have all of your media you can have one data set or several the structure is entirely up to you in my case I'm using the bleach share that we created earlier if you run into this screen it's downright annoying I know but this is because we had a previous installation of gel fin so you can either use another browser clear the cookies and cash or just simply open a private window and just enter the URL and it should just work straight away just follow the instructions and on the media part of the wizard select the mount path you configured on the additional storage which again in my case was bleach share or slash bleach uh share I like en raage but I have to say true now is a soft spot for me because it's free the community is really helpful free they are also very very friendly it's free the supported great the apps are just amazing and it's free so there you have it folks a repurposed server that was pretty much on its way to the garbage dumpster and yeah it's a little bit bulky but it's an i7 3370 K CPU now it has 24 gigs of RAM 2.5 GB internet card an HBA and a brand new PSU and here's the cool part it's consuming an average of 40 WTS of energy and for a total of 120 bucks oh by the way you don't have to you know go to your friend's trash but you can find components like these on eBay garage sales Facebook Market Place you name it so before just jumping straight into like a popular vendor try looking in all of these places and trust me most of the times they are cheaper and way more powerful than a Celeron CPU for example this was a really fun afternoon but I'm afraid it concludes our video if you got this far thanks for coming along on this journey with me don't forget to give us a like And subscribe to the channel take care and I'll see you soon

Channel: Digital Mirror

Views: 89,614

Keywords: DIY NAS, TrueNAS, Ollama, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, smart home, media server, network attached storage, home automation, tech DIY, budget NAS build, open-source software, local AI, media streaming, home server setup, NAS on a budget, home networking, smart home devices, server building, home media solution, data integrity, server security, NAS configuration, media organization, smart home automation, adguard, adguard setup, truenas scale, truenas apps, old pc

Id: MLy6ECVp2Wk

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2024