The Windows tower kept dying, so I put the homelab on a Pi

The 90-day view on my homelab status page is mostly a record of a ten year old Windows tower losing power. Homelab and Media sit at 91 percent because of that machine. The last few weeks were the worst of something that had already been going on for months.

The three green rows showed up this weekend, after I moved the box.

The boot lottery

The tower ran Jellyfin for a private library, and keeping it available had become a second job. I would start the machine and stand there while it died on the way up, came back, died again, and eventually stayed on long enough that I could walk away. Then I started the services by hand, because they did not come with the boot. A few hours or a few days later the power would drop and I would be back in the same doorway.

I never landed on heat versus the power supply. I opened the case enough times that the question stopped being interesting. The hardware was old. Another afternoon of guesswork was not going to make it a machine I could leave alone.

What finally got me moving was the network. Everything else in the house was fine, but the tower had started lying. I would get alerts that the server was down while I was sitting there watching it. A few IPTV channels had also started to stutter just enough that I would give up. I stopped blaming the house.

Unplug, plug in, start over

I had a Raspberry Pi 4 in a drawer. The library was already on one of the USB disks, so the files were easy. I unplugged the disk from the tower and plugged it into the Pi. Mounting it was a small pain the first time, and then it was just there on boot. The other disk is for Forge.

The actual fight was the Jellyfin data. Moving that from Windows to Linux was the worst part of the weekend. I threw it all out, because I am the only user. The metadata built itself again when I added the libraries. I made a new account and wrote down what was in Next Up and Continue Watching, and that was the whole bill.

The Pi finishes booting and the services are already running. I did not realize how much of the old machine I had been operating by hand until I stopped doing it. Those IPTV channels that were not worth watching are steady, and they load faster than they did on the tower.

The tower is unplugged. Two days of green does not fix a 90-day average, and I do not need it to.

Playback was why I moved, and it was not the end of the weekend. Once the box stayed up I finally did the access and hardening work I would not waste on a machine that might be dark in an hour. That is next week’s post.