Posted 11 hours ago

Mini PC projects and questions T8 Pro+

Hi all, I got the Mini PC FIREBAT T8 Pro Plus. I have some ideas on what id like to do with it but I was wondering if anyone else has one and what they've done with it?

I got mine to replace my Raspberry Pi which is running Docker and a few images... But I think times have changed and I'm probably a bit behind now. I've been reading up on Proxmox and other things that I think I understand but not entirely. I also don't know what the capabilities are of this machine.

I think I'd like to somehow move my torrent (all legal) archives over somehow and my audiobook/ebook collection. I currently run AudiobookShelf on docker and a qtorrent. A few other things too.

If anyone has any nice videos on YouTube for helping with these things id be very interested.

I'm also thinking about getting a Synology nas system but I'm not sure where to start on that and prices seem all over the place. I think I'll also need some upgrades Network switches as I notice these are slowing everything down.

Would love to see what others have done or plan on doing.
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  1. aLV426's avatar
    It sounds more like you are wanting solutions for problems you haven't encountered yet. Rather than try and extract value from your purchase (by running as much as you can). Why not sit down and write out what you want to achieve. It's a PC and would be capable of doing almost everything (within the contextof IT of course!).
    I made the mistake of consolidating everything to one device and suffered mulitiple simultaneous hard drive failures. Rather than rebuild it I switched oer to laptops and I have a dedicated laptop for each app. Yes overkill, but even after losing 2 laptops my network continues to function without interruption!
    For retro gaming have you tried Batocera?
    Walgeon's avatar
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    I think if I were to do that if be better with multiple raspberry pis which I did kinda do before. I just found for encoding they were really bad.

    I do have a few old laptops which I have thought about using... But this n100 just seems like a cool project and uses little power for what it does. That's also a goal of mine, low power consumption. I might buy another n100 or two. But for now I really want to see what these can do first as maybe something else is better.
  2. dcx_badass's avatar
    I have a different NUC but run Pihole, Wireguard and an FTP Server for my doorbell recordings.
    Walgeon's avatar
    Author
    It's running nicely? Did you have any issues?
  3. t3r4's avatar
    In my opinion no point in running Proxmox unless you need to achieve something specific that actually needs VMs. There's a learning curve, overhead and it adds complexity you have to unravel.

    Docker achieves most things in its own right anyway with less overhead and configuration.

    I use an HP Elitedesk box to run the media stuff, but also to use as a NAS mainly for photo backups etc. I use an OpenMediaVault+CasaOS combo, but to be honest if I redid it I might ditch CasaOS as whilst it's pretty it has too many quirks so I've had to build a lot of containers/stacks myself anyway (eg I couldn't run containers through a VPN using it, I had to build my own stack). Openmediavault is excellent mind for file storage purposes imo. A key part is understanding what you want out the system and what is and isn't worth consolidating. I nearly tried to go with bare Debian instead but I'm quite glad I didn't.

    I'm not running things like Home Assistant (live with people so don't want to manage that), PiHole (not really needed as my devices do it) or CCTV at this point. If I had services like that, I'd be more inclined to split those off to other devices.

    Hardware Haven and Wolfgang are both good YouTube channels imo (edited)
  4. ElliottC's avatar
    Rather than use of separate NAS, multiple drives on a Windows machine can be pooled together. I use external USB drives which are switched off when not in use, but when required, a relay switch (controllable via API call or however you desire) will switch the drives on (including internal drives that support hot swap). Storage Pooling them allows for a logical representation of the physical drives in the storage pool.

    Contrary to other peoples' use cases, I really do make use of one single machine to serve multiple applications (of course, with scheduled image backups of the system), in particular:

    - NextPVR TV server
    - Filezilla FTP server
    - WEBDAV Server
    - HMailServer
    - Windows SMB Server
    - Netcam Studio NPVR
    - SeaFile self hosted cloud storage server
    - SoftEther VPN Server
    - Postgres Server
    - Technitium DNS Server
    - Jellyfin Media Server

    The latter (Jellyfin) makes claims to audio book support, although I have not used this particular feature. (edited)
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