I'm writing this as I go through and create this setup so it's going to be a dump of my train of thought as I go through it. Enjoy, or don't, up to you.
From the top
I have a few old macs laying around from the past and finally decided to do something with one of them, the machine that keeps on chugging, the iMac (mid-2007) that I got from my college's surplus sale ages ago to convert to a media server and never really got around to it. She's got a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and a whopping upgraded 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM. She ain't much, but she can still do decently enough.
What's the plan?
Honestly here at the start, the main things I need out of it are a space for data storage and transfer to other machines and devices while I'm at home and I'm also hoping I can do some media streaming from it as well.
Up to this point, I've pretty much done all of my backup and storage on my main gaming PC, so a big driver here is getting that data replicated to another device/area. I have a handful of old drives from various computers and laptops over the years and I've tossed them into this PC as extraneous storage for uncommonly accessed data, but that's not feasible forever.
For additional hardware, I'm looking at getting a dual-bay enclosure with RAID support and a couple 4TB Ironwolf drives setup in RAID 1 to give me 4TB of space with the ability to lose a drive.
To start off on the software side, I'm going to be installing Ubuntu Server LTS since this iMac isn't able to update past OSX 11.11. For basic file sharing, I already use Syncthing so I'll probably stick with that for now, it works for what I need anyway. For media, I've used Plex in the past but with their constant shenanigans I'm thinking I'll try out Jellyfin. Of course I'm going to grab Docker as well for other things I'm probably not thinking about right now.
So what now?
Well, that's all I have for today anyway. I need to order the hardware and then pull any existing media off that iMac from when I kinda not really set it up last. Next update probably in a week or so, whenever I get the drives and make some more progress.
Hey Ted,
I'm actually in a related journey. Got sick of streaming and got a set up with a seedbox, a private tracker, etc. Now trying to figure out the next step which is making the content available via Plex (or similar). So I'm curious as to what you think of Jellyfin! I personally haven't heard of it.
Hey Gabriel, long time no see.
Plex is fine, I've used it before for a bit and it sort of "just works." That said, they've been doing some fishy things on the free tier and with the Plex pass for a bit which caused me to move away from it. Jellyfin is pretty similar in my experience so far, but it does have a few more issues with content matching, particularly in older content (say mid-2000s and earlier), but if something is mis-identified it's easy enough to fix by right-clicking the content and searching for it in one of the open source databases that's hooked up. I've only tried streaming within my own network and not outside of it, but so far everything is smooth, even using this old hardware so I'm plenty happy with the setup.