I have an old Antec 1200 beast of a tower with a bunch of hard drives in it right now and it's running Windows 10 with Plex and the Arr suite of stuff and it's been great. Use it to watch stuff with Kodi, game with Steam, and friends/family can still stream.
However, we turn off the main PC, game on it, watch stuff on it and it can cause plex users to stutter or buffer if we're using it while they're streaming from it sometimes...just not stable.
Also, it's on my internal network which I don't like so I'm working out solutions here.
I'm getting into learning Linux/Docker and Home Assistant and I have a Linux machine set up now that I'm loving playing with.
However this Linux machine, while it's got decent hardware, is tiny form factor with an m.2 SSD and I can't install an internal HD on it much less use the three 3TB drives I have going now or the new 18TB drive in my stocking.
I realize I have quite the patchwork equipment set up but I'm trying to conceptualize the best way to get this going.
In an ideal world, I would run everything off this Linux machine I think. Just because I can keep it on, not even bother with a monitor since I can do things SSH, even plug it in on the rack downstairs if need be. Then use my windows PC to just stream from that server and game with, etc.
That doesn't seem entirely practical however as things like my Unifi Controller are on the Windows PC and if I put it on a different vlan it just won't work. So I'm thinking I will likely need to just run Docker on the Windows PC as well to handle a few secure things for the internal vlan like Unifi.
I'd like to still run Plex and all the Arr stuff off the linux box, but how do I run those services on one machine while using the hard drives in another? Especially with one being windows and one being linux?
Is there maybe a Docker container I can get going on the windows PC where I can specify the windows volume on one side and linux volume on the other, and then point a container from the linux PC to the container on the docker PC perhaps and make just one little explicit firewall rule for that hole to be open?
Anyone have better ideas or easier ideas? Should I just buy an enclosure and plug the new HD into the linux box? Would love a NAS just can't afford right now.
Any brainstorming you can do or thoughts on how you would handle it would be much appreciated. Doubly so if I don't have to wipe or rename every file and folder on my Windows hard drives to let Linux read/write to them :P
So if the only thing you're looking to do is this one thing, you can definitely get just a smart plug and use any number of little things to automate a routine for it.
That said, if you're a nerd and you like the idea of automations like this, you probably won't stop at just one or two and you might as well do what I just did last week and start with the "gold standard" which is Home Assistant.
It's self hosted, free, has tons of documentation and info online, lots of people who wanna help, and works with a whole lot of stuff to keep you from being locked into an ecosystem.
That said, if you happen to be an Apple user they also have a very solid setup that's more straightforward with their HomeKit.
Home Assistant can run as it's own OS on something like a Raspberry Pi, or if you have a spare PC you can toss Linux on there and run it from a Docker container in about five minutes.
At that point you would just need to find a wi-fi plug or grab a zigbee controller to plug into that PC and one of those plugs and automation to do what you want would take about five minutes.
Just getting started in all this stuff myself so I'm not an expert and others here will know a lot more specifics, but that said I'm loving Home Assistant so far and it's cost nothing but time at this point to get some cool automations going.