Before starting this server, my initial goal for my “Home Lab” was to create a media archive for my favorite shows, such as The IT Crowd and Community, which I could stream via Jellyfin on my Android TVs. At the time, it was running OpenMediaVault with a single Docker container for Jellyfin. I began customizing Jellyfin by editing the CSS, crafting an aesthetic inspired by early 2000s social media platforms like Facebook. This led me to explore various plugins, such as integrating my music library with Discogs and Last.fm to track my listening history on the server (you can view my listening history at Last.fm). Other plugins helped improve metadata tracking and automated the naming of my media. I found manually torrenting and organizing media to be time-consuming, which prompted me to seek out an operating system that would simplify the process of configuring the necessary applications for a more streamlined media downloading experience.
After researching my options, I decided to test unRAID due to its ease of use with Tailscale and Docker. The Docker functionality was particularly appealing, as it offered pre-configured containers, and I could manually install apps not available in the app store.
To get started, I created a bootable USB for the server. I chose not to wipe my drives initially, as I wanted to preserve the media I had already downloaded. This decision caused several issues when booting unRAID. For example, despite setting the USB as the boot priority, the system would still attempt to boot from the SSD with OPM. As a result, I had to manually enter the BIOS and boot from the USB until I was able to wipe the SSD. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as simple as pressing a format button. When creating the unRAID array, the hard drives were correctly detected as Parity, Disk 1, and Disk 2, but the cache SSD would not format or become usable. I had to install an additional app to access more features, which allowed me to manually wipe the drive and remove OPM. Once this was completed, the system was properly configured, and my unRAID server was up and running with spinning disks. This also resolved the boot issue, and the server now automatically boots from the unRAID USB.
The next challenge I faced was the appdata and system shares not being automatically configured. According to the documentation, these shares should be created automatically when unRAID is set up, but this was not the case for me. After extensive research, I was concerned that Docker would not function properly without these shares. Fortunately, simply enabling Docker resolved the issue, and the shares were automatically created.
The final step in getting my server operational was setting up SMB shares to transfer files from my family’s computers to the server. I also created a general media share for future use by various applications.
That was essentially my first day of getting the server up and running with unRAID configured.