From the overview:

Coax turns your home media server into a linear cable channel guide. It scans your library, then automatically generates a schedule full of channels that you can flip through at your leisure.

Point the app at your Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby server and it generates a channel guide based on genres, playlists, collections, and more. It will even display over-the-air channels if you’ve configured a compatible TV tuner — with Plex DVR, for example.

It’s an excellent app and has earned its spot next to Plex in my Apple TV’s top row.

➝ Source: coaxtheapp.com

The upgraded Umbrel Home now features an Intel N150 and is available with 1TB of storage for $399, 2TB for $499, and 4TB for $699.

I’ve been very happy with my Umbrel Home — it’s my favorite piece of homelab kit. For anyone interested in building out a home server setup, this is the first machine I’d recommend looking at.

I’m not in love with the pricing for each of the storage options, though. I paid $399 for the original Umbrel Home with 2TB of storage. So you’ll be paying more for the same amount of storage.

Having the option for 4TB of storage is nice, but the pricing on that model is pretty rough. You can use external storage with the Umbrel Home, which helps, but there isn’t an easy way to expose that storage to apps you have installed — Plex for example. If the Umbrel team can get that sorted out, that would help quite a bit with the storage pricing.

As an owner of the previous Umbrel Home, this new model isn’t enough to have me interested in upgrading. The faster processor is great and the option for additional storage is nice to have, but the biggest limiting factor for me is the system’s RAM. And that hasn’t been upgraded — it’s still at 16GB.

I have twenty apps installed on my Umbrel and I’d love to install more. I have enough storage and CPU to do so, but I’m getting a bit tight on RAM. I would have loved to see 32GB of memory as an option. That would have had me thinking more seriously about making an upgrade.

➝ Source: m.youtube.com

The Umbrel Home is a tiny, $399 home server that runs UmbrelOS — a home server distribution that’s most commonly used for cryptocurrency applications, but is just as capable as a general purpose home server operating system.

The machine features an Intel N100, 16GB of memory, 2TB of storage, and gigabit ethernet. It also includes Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and three USB ports, although I haven’t been able to find any use for those with the stock operating system. At least not the current version.

The product is quite slick, especially the setup process. You connect it to your network with an Ethernet cable, plug it in to power, wait about 30 seconds, and open the dashboard in a web browser.

From there you can create your account, go through some basic setup questions, and start installing apps.

Applications and Features

UmbrelOS offers an excellent assortment of applications. From files and productivity to media and more. You can find an app for just about any use case. At the moment, I have the following installed on my Umbrel:

• Bitcoin Node — Allows you to run your own, personal Bitcoin node. This can be paired with other applications to reduce reliance on third-parties for wallet apps and other Bitcoin-related services.
• Calibre Web — An ebooks server. I’m using it to store PDF copies of product manuals for the items in my home.
• File Browser — A simple file management application.
• Jellyfin — An excellent open source media server.
• LibreTranslate — An open source alternative to Google Translate and other similar services.
• Lightning Node — Lightning is a layer 2 payment protocol that allows for more efficient Bitcoin transactions. Running your own node lets you participate in the network by routing payments and self-custody your Bitcoin on Lightning.
• Mealie — A recipe server. I don’t have too much in it now, but I plan to give my wife access when I have a chance so that we can both store and share recipes through it.
• MeTube — A web interface for downloading videos from YouTube and many other video hosting sites.
• Overseerr — A slick requests manager with Plex integration.
• qBittorrent — A BitTorrent client with support for proxies.
• Transmission — Another BitTorrent client with an interface I prefer, but without built-in support for proxies.

You can view the whole application store on the web, but Home Assistant, Nextcloud, and Plex are a few other notable entries.

Aside from the application store, Umbrel has some simple system monitoring, which you can use to keep an eye on storage, memory, and CPU usage. There are also some basic settings like the option to select a different wallpaper, enable two-factor authentication, and remote Tor access.

The Issues

Although the experience has been generally positive, I have run into a handful of snags along the way.

• I’ve run into occasional SSL errors with my Lightning Node. The fix is relatively simple, but requires using SSH or the system’s built-in command line interface.
• The Bitcoin Node has randomly dropped to zero peers and stops updating. Restarting the app hasn’t resolved the issue for me and I end up having to reboot the entire system.
• Speaking of rebooting, the first time I tried using the “Restart” option from within the web interface, the reboot never completed. I waited for several minutes and eventually used the power button to force the shutdown. Since then I’ve only used the “Shutdown” option in the web interface and then started it back up using the power button on the front. That method has been far more consistent for me.
• I’ve had instances where the Umbrel becomes randomly inaccessible from some of the computers on my network.
• There’s been a couple of times where my two-factor authentication codes didn’t work for logging in. I had to disable the feature from another system where I was already logged in. I can’t say for certain whether this was an Umbrel issue or something wrong with 1Password, though.

UmbrelOS did receive a software update while I was writing this piece, which claims to address the issue where it was inaccessible on the network. But I haven’t had enough time with it to know for sure.

Aside from those bugs, there is one glaring omission on UmbrelOS. And it feels like the kind of feature that the team should be working diligently on, if they aren’t already. UmbrelOS needs support for USB storage.

I still have plenty of storage left on my Umbrel — 2TB is a great starting point — but if you wanted to use the device for Plex, Jellyfin, or Immich, you’ll almost certainly end up wanting additional storage.

Overall

The Umbrel Home is an excellent package overall. The interface is slick and it offers a great assortment of applications on a sufficiently powerful system for a decent price. If the team is able to address the bugs and add support for USB storage devices, it feels like something I could recommend to average users.

As it is now, I think of the Umbrel Home as more of an option for tinkerers and technically savvy individuals. The type that aren’t afraid to jump into a terminal from time to time, but want something that’s a bit easier to get up and running than the alternatives. Or perhaps, this would be a good option for a more technically savvy person to setup for a family member, knowing that there could be the need for occasional support when things go wrong.

My current, primary home server has been humming along quite nicely since I upgraded to the 2018 Mac mini a few years ago. And I’m still using the OWC ThunderBay 6 that I bought in 2020 to house its storage.

The Mac mini that I ordered was just the base model with 128GB of storage. Rather than booting from the internal drive, I’ve been using an NVMe SSD that occupies the M.2 slot in the back of the ThunderBay. Up until just a few days ago, I was using a 1TB drive for this purpose. That size was chosen because it was the right price at the time and served my needs.

Since then, my needs have changed a bit, though. I started running a few virtual machines on the Mac mini, which I wanted to run on SSDs for performance reasons. But the 1TB boot drive just wasn’t going to be large enough. So I re-used a 2TB SATA SSD that I had lying around to store the virtual machines until I was ready to make an upgrade to the boot drive.

I was finally able to upgrade that drive a few days ago. I swapped the 1TB drive for a 4TB NVMe drive from Crucial.

The process was as simple as could be. I put the new drive in an external enclosure and ran SuperDuper! to clone the boot drive. Once the cloning process was complete, I moved the new drive into the back of the ThunderBay and booted from it. And that’s it. The whole thing, including copying the data, only took an hour or two.

I moved the virtual machine files to the boot drive and removed the 2TB SSD from the ThunderBay.

The ThunderBay now has a 4TB NVMe SSD that I’m booting the home server from, two 8TB Seagate hard drives that I’m using for media storage, and two 14TB Western Digital hard drives that I shucked and am using for local backups — the home server itself and every other computer in the house.

It’s about time I start thinking about upgrading those spinning disks too, though.

The two media drives are about 80% full, which is generally the threshold where I think about upgrading. I know how I am, so this whole process will likely end up taking a handful of months to complete.

My typical strategy when upgrading drives would be to buy two new drives that would be used as the new backup storage and then demote the old backup drives to media storage. This felt like the most cost effective way of increasing my available storage over time. But I don’t think I want to do that this time.

The 14TB drives that I shucked from their USB enclosure are a little loud. They’re fine for backups because I have a bit more control over when my backups take place. I have them all scheduled to run when I’m not in the office — I’m using TimeMachineEditor to accomplish this.

I sit about three feet away from the home server throughout my work day and the media drives are in nearly constant use during that time. If I used these louder 14TB drives to store our media, they’d drive me mad. I just don’t want to hear them all day long.

So I’m left thinking about upgrading all four drives in a fairly short period of time — probably over the course of a month or two.

At the moment I’m looking at 16+TB Western Digital Red drives. The company had a bit of a hit to their reputation a handful of years ago when it was discovered that they were selling drives that used shingled magnetic recording (SMR) without labeling them as such. But my understanding is that they’ve gotten better about labeling their drives and WD Red’s are quieter than Seagate Ironwolf drives.

Seagate Ironwolf drives are typically cheaper than WD Reds, though. And given the size of the drives that I’m looking to purchase, that can’t be ignored. I’ll have to do some more research to see just how much louder Ironwolf drives are and whether they would be something I could contend with. I suspect I may end up buying WD Reds that I use for media storage and then larger Ironwolf drives for backups.

I’ve been running Mac-based home servers since 2011 when I purchased my first Mac Mini for that very purpose. It started as a way to record over-the-air television with an Elgato EyeTV and to store movies, television shows, and music in iTunes that I could stream to our Apple TVs and sync to our iPhones.

I’ve since upgraded to a 2018 Mac Mini, switched to Plex for my media management, and I’m now using an HDHomeRun as my over-the-air capture device. And while I’ve added quite a few services to my home server over the years, streaming media to all of my devices is still, by far, its primary use case.

Recently, while perusing OWC’s used Macs, I started thinking about what I would recommend to a friend or family member if they wanted to get started with their own home server.

I think a lot of people would think of starting with a mini PC. They have become very popular recently and are inexpensive. But I’m not too fond of using Windows unless I absolutely have to and I don’t think managing a Linux server is user-friendly enough for most people — it’s barely user-friendly enough for me.

So the Mac Mini, in my eyes, is the way to go. Of course, you could just buy whatever base-model Mac Mini Apple has available at the moment, attach an external drive for a bunch of storage and you’ll be mostly off to the races, but I think you get a lot more for your money if you go the used route.

I would recommend a 2014 Mac Mini with 8GB of memory, 2.6GHz Core i5 processor, and a 1TB solid state drive.

At the time of writing, you can pick one up from OWC for $195.

That will get you a pretty good amount of storage to start with on a machine that can run up to macOS Monterey. That’s not the most recent version of macOS, but it’s still receiving updates from Apple and should have software support for the apps you’ll want to run for at least a handful of years.

In addition to the Mac Mini itself, if you don’t plan to connect it to a display, you’ll want to get a display emulator dongle. I use this one from CompuLab, but you could also get a Newer Technology one that’s a couple of dollars cheaper.

The last bit of hardware I’d recommend is an optical drive. This will let you rip movies and TV shows from discs to store on the server. I’m using an external Blu-ray drive from Pioneer, but it’s a bit more expensive than I think I’d spend on one today. If you wanted to rip Blu-ray Discs, you should be fine with this one from OWC. And if you are just expecting to rip DVDs, there’s literally thousands of options that are available for $20-40.

I’m not sure if there’s really any meaningful difference between any of the DVD drives available, but I’d recommend getting one from a brand you recognize. You won’t spend much more than if you bought a no-name brand, but you’ll likely end up with something that’s more reliable.

As a bit of an aside, I first started ripping Blu-ray Discs when I was still using a 2011 Mac Mini. These older Macs — including the 2014 Mac Mini that I’m recommending — are going to take a long time to rip and convert Blu-rays. That doesn’t mean I would shy anyone away from doing so, but I think it’s worth setting expectations.

With hardware alone, we’re at about $306 before tax and shipping — if you opt for the Blu-ray drive. That’s not too shabby to get you in the door. And you could certainly use this hardware as a home server for a handful of years, paired with free software options, and you’ll get by just fine.

For free software, you could use:

• Plex Media Server
• Handbrake
• MakeMKV with a free beta key
• macOS’ built-in screen sharing

Plex is perfectly serviceable for hosting your media without a Plex Pass and the pairing of Handbrake and MakeMKV will make ripping Blu-ray Discs and DVDs a breeze. And with MacOS’ built-in screen sharing features, you can run the Mac Mini without a display attached and administer it from another computer on your network.

If you wanted to take the software setup to the next level, I would recommend purchasing a lifetime Plex Pass — $120 — which will give you the ability to download media to the Plex mobile app, give you access to Plexamp, and a whole host of other features.

In addition, I’d recommend purchasing Screens 5 — $80 for a one-time purchase. This will make management of the server significantly easier. You can install Screens Connect on the server and Screens 5 on your Mac, iPhone, and/or iPad to connect and control the machine locally on your home network or remotely anywhere you have access to the web.

And lastly, I would suggest purchasing a MakeMKV license — $65. You can get by with the beta key referenced above, but it expires and sometimes it expires before a new beta key is available. To support the developer’s work and ensure you can always rip when you want to, I’d recommend just buying a license.

With these extra software purchases, we’re looking at around $571 total. That may seem like a lot. But this is a system that you’ll be able to run on your network and use for the next five years, easy. Serving up media that you likely already own — everyone has a box of CDs and DVDs somewhere in their house.

And perhaps, if you really want to commit, you can cancel a streaming service or two and redirect those funds toward physical media. You’d be surprised at how cheap DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, and CDs can be acquired for these days. And after enough time of purchasing media, you’ll find that your own media library has more good content than any of the streaming services offer.

Rick Findlay, writing for Reclaim the Net:

Umbrel, the company that develops umbrelOS, has announced a new home server, Umbrel Home, to provide users with more privacy and control over their data.

The $699 home server uses umbrelOS, which comes with self-hosted apps in the Umbrel App Store like Home Assistant, Plex, Bitcoin/Lightning node, and Nextcloud, which acts like a personal cloud solution for documents, photos, videos and more.

I like that they’re selling hardware, but I think the price is a bit too high. Especially considering how inexpensive mini PCs are these days. You can find many from Beelink, MinisForum, and others that would be perfect little home servers for half the price of this offering from Umbrel.

I have Umbrel running on a 2012 Mac Mini that I picked up from OWC paired with a 2TB SSD. That cost me around $300 total for a pretty capable little machine that looks at home next to the other Minis that I’m running as home servers.

Having operating system upgrades right within the Umbrel dashboard would be nice. With my setup — Umbrel running on Ubuntu — I have to SSH or VNC in to the machine for those. But my Mini is more than capable of handling everything I want to run on Umbrel and I’m happy to save $400 in exchange for a smidge of convenience.

➝ Source: reclaimthenet.org

I’ve touched on this a number of times over the past few years — my current home server is due for an upgrade. The 2011 Mac Mini has served me well, storing our Time Machine backups, our Plex library, our local photo library, and performing various random Mac-specific tasks for the past decade. But it’s stuck on High Sierra and is quite a bit slower than any modern Mac.

I thought about upgrading when the 2018 Mac Mini was released, but the funds never quite lined up and at the point when they did, the Mini had been available for long enough that I didn’t want to order one shortly before a new model was released. Then the M1 Mac Mini came around and I had a bit of a dilemma — should I jump into the Apple Silicon world head first? Should I wait until the second iteration? It was a tough call, really.

Eventually I made a decision and not necessarily what you would expect. I recently ordered a base model 2018 Mac Mini. Yes, it’s older and slower than the M1, but there’s good reason to stick with the previous model for my next upgrade.

1. It’s less costly than the M1 Mac Mini. The model I ordered cost just $499, brand new. The M1 starts at $699. But even if I ordered a refurbished one, we’re talking in the $600 range.
2. It has more ports. I don’t expect to plug too much into the Mini at a time, but I do want to move everything to USB-C and Thunderbolt. The M1 Mini only comes with two Thunderbolt ports compared to the 2018 model’s four.
3. It has upgradeable memory. With the M1 Mini, I need to order one with the amount of memory I need now and what I’ll need in a handful of years when I’m still using it. And that’s capped at 16GB. With the 2018 model, I can order the base configuration with 8GB to start and then upgrade to 16GB, 32GB, or even 64GB down the line when my needs change.
4. It’s based on Intel, making it more versatile. Sure, there’s been some advancements in getting Linux running on M1 Macs. It will probably be working fully at some point in the future. And Microsoft may, at some point, let you purchase a license for a version of Windows that runs on ARM. But there’s no guarantee. And even though I don’t have any plans to run Windows or Linux on this machine, I’m going to own it for a decade or more — I’d rather leave my options open.
5. It’s space gray. This is an incredibly minor point, but there is something sort-of cool about owning the only Mac Mini released that wasn’t silver.

There are downsides, of course. Buying an older model might put a shorter lifespan on its usage, especially with the transition to Apple Silicon. And it is slower than the M1. But I think the positives far outweigh the negatives, at least for my usage.

Speaking of usage, I’m pretty excited to get it all setup. It’ll be quite the process, though. I’m not going to be using Migration Assistant to move everything over, I’m going to do it manually. The current Mini’s macOS install is several years old at this point and I think it’s time for a fresh break and a clean install.

That means manually configuring my Time Machine shares and getting a new backup from all my machines, transitioning my Backblaze license, moving Plex’s database files, setting up VNC for remote access, and more. I’m also going to be booting from an external drive so I have a bit more breathing room — I’ll have to enable external booting and installing a fresh copy of macOS on the external drive.

There’s quite a bit to do, but it’ll be a lot of fun. This is exactly the sort of stuff that I enjoy most about computing. And there’s likely to be plenty of opportunities to write about what I learn and discover along the way.

We all know backups are important, but they’re not as flashy and interesting as the next Apple Silicon Macs or nifty new piece of software. So they don’t really get discussed as often as they should. But in honor of World Backup Day, which I didn’t know existed and just happened to conveniently take place while I was already working on this piece, I thought I’d share my current backup strategy.

Macs

We have three Macs currently in use in our house — my work MacBook Pro, my wife’s MacBook Air, and our Mac Mini home server. The Mac Mini has an OWC ThunderBay 6 connected with a handful of drives inside — an SSD boot drive, a couple of 4TB drives for storing media, and a couple of 8TB drives for storing backups.

The Mac Mini shares the backup drives over the network as Time Machine destinations. And every Mac in the house backs up over Time Machine to these drives. So all of our local backups and media are stored in a single box — the ThunderBay.

We use TimeMachineEditor to have a bit more control over when our Time Machine backups take place. I have the Mac Mini setup to backup in the middle of the night and the MacBook Pro setup to backup at lunch time on weekdays.

The Mac Mini and my MacBook Pro are also setup with Backblaze to continuously backup all relevant data to the cloud. We will likely setup Backblaze on my wife’s MacBook Air too, but she only recently started using it again and we just finished the initial Time Machine backup.

iOS Devices

I pay for a 2TB iCloud storage plan that is shared with my wife. Our iPhones and iPads all backup to iCloud nightly. We store all of our documents on the service too.

We don’t use iCloud Photo Library, though. Instead, we use Google Photos — the primary reason being their excellent Partner Sharing feature. The feature automatically shares each photo and video to each other’s library. This means we don’t have to worry about who took a given picture or where the full version is stored — we both have access to all of the.

And seriously, Apple, get that feature figured out so I don’t have to maintain an additional service.

But Google Photos doesn’t give us the option to store local copies on the Mac, so a few times each year we manually backup photos from our iPhones and iPads to the Mac Mini server using the Photos app.

So every single photo we take and video we record is stored in six locations — the original device, Google Photos, the iCloud device backup, the Mac Mini’s media drive, backup drive, and Backblaze. It might seem like overkill, but our family photo library is almost certainly the most important data that we have and I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Overall

The pillars of my backup strategy are Time Machine, Backblaze, iCloud, and Google Photos. As I mentioned above, it would be nice if Apple finally introduced a solution for family photo libraries. Then we could eliminate Google Photos from our setup and we’d no longer need to manually backup photos to the Mac Mini, since the Photos app offers the option to store full size local copies of everything in your iCloud Photo Library.

But in terms of locally stored backups, I’m pretty happy with the setup. Since everything is stored inside the OWC ThunderBay 6, if there was ever an emergency, I could grab my iPhone and the ThunderBay. Those two items contain all of the important data in my life.