Amazon hates me
Turns out the Ironwolf drives I ordered are now backordered so I abandoned that order and instead went with a could WD Red Plus drives that should be functionally equivalent. I had also planned to do a software RAID 1 so that I'll have a duplicated backup and total of ~4TB of storage, however the enclosure I bought actually has hardware RAID 1 built-in so I'm going to go with that.
So with my order showing up on my doorstep over the weekend, it was time to get started with the main setup of my homelab. I slapped the drives in the enclosure, plugged in everything and to my surprise, everything showed up immediately as a 4TB storage device using hardware RAID 1. I formatted the drive as exFAT to give me compatibility with all of the devices in my house in the event I ever need to plug this backup solution into another device and after a short wait (thanks Intel Core 2 Duo), everything was ready to go.
Gimme dem files
Now the next step is getting files from my current backup which is my gaming computer onto the homelab and to do that I'm going to use Syncthing. I've been using Syncthing for a while to sync some files across my devices for a while now and it works great. Occasionally file scanning and syncing can be slow or a bit glitchy, but overall I haven't had any major issues and always reach eventual consistency which is the goal here. I got Syncthing installed and running, ran into a permissions issue with the mounted drives that I had to resolve (mostly because I didn't know what I was doing when mounting the drives originally) and we're in business. Since my storage is mounted separately, I did need to configure Syncthing's service in systemctl to require the mounted drives before it would start so I'm hoping that will resolve that problem "forever".
Locked out
I can't remote desktop into iMac when the screen is off because my account locks. There's a couple solutions to that, I can either leave my account unlocked all the time which is fine honestly, or I can set up "allow locked remote desktop" with gnome shell extension. Installing the extension was a quick enough option and seems to work.
Home theater anybody?
Next on my list is to install Jellyfin and get that running. Installation was easy enough with the official site and after some setup steps to select my media, it looks like everything is good to go. I need to sort out some clients on my various devices but nothing too complicated there. I'll eventually go through the library and make sure things are getting identified correctly, but it looks like it does a good job by default and one movie I saw that was mis-identified was easily fixed with the interface. I could set things up to be able to play media off my local network, however I think I'm good for now with being able to access things while I'm home, maybe I'll set up Tailscale at some point.
So what's next?
Honestly, I'm not sure. I do need to do a small writeup on everything I've done so far in the event that I need to migrate this to different hardware. For now though I've got things set up the way I need them and that's good enough for me.