Blog

What's new in BanksFlix?

It has been  a long time since a post here, so I wanted to keep everyone up to date on how things have been going.

BanksFlix Cloud was offline throughout the entire summer. The server that hosts the storage for that service was producing too much heat and noise, so it had to be spun down until things cooled off here in East Texas. Now that the Fall season is FINALLY here, all servers have been placed back into the garage and BanksFlix Cloud is ONLINE again! Head on over to the Cloud page here on the website to navigate to the Cloud, or to sign up if you're wanting to use the service.

The storage pool of 30 Terabytes that hosts all BanksFlix media is 90% full. The plan is that during the winter and spring, a new server will be built with even more storage and processing power! It will be a tower server with quiet fans and good cooling efficiency, with 2 processors, a GPU dedicated for media transcoding, 50 Terabytes of storage, plenty of RAM, and solid state drives for virtual machines' operating systems to reside on. This will make sure all services are available 24/7 365, improved responsiveness in Plex, the cloud, and other hosted apps like the request websites, and provide plenty of room for future growth!! 

I look forward to what the future of BanksFlix holds as more people use the services and the media library grows. Thanks as always for using BanksFlix!

A lot of changes have happened since the last post. Here is a quick summary!

BanksFlix continues to grow with new features and content constantly being added and expanded on. If you have any suggestions or requests, feel free to contact me on the contact section of this website. Thank you for using BanksFlix!

The new server has been live for about a week now, and it has been operating smoothly. I appreciate everyone's patience as the transition happened, and I'm glad several of you reached out for help!

I am making some small changes to the website, hopefully making it easier for you to request and view content. I appreciate all of you taking time to enjoy BanksFlix.

4K content has finally made its way into the library, and it looks like the server is handling it well. Transcoding 4k down to different resolutions seems to be working fine and not being to much for the server to handle, just as I expected!


Recent changes to the server:

Check out the pictures below! So far, configuration and migration are underway. Banksflix will soon be fully virtualized on the new server. As you can see, 30TB has been reserved for media, being held by the file server. I have set up a basic Active Directory domain to manage these machines, and they're all running on VMWare ESXI 7.0 update 3. I am moving files over gradually as to not overwhelm the current Plex machine with file transfer tasks.

Upgrades are already heading this way! I found great deals on Facebook for 2 new CPUs and 128GB of RAM, doubling CPU performance and quadrupling RAM capacity, for an out of pocket cost for $135!! Here is what is left as of today:

An important thing I'd like to inform you all of is that anime and regular media will be on separate servers. I think this is for the best so that you have more control over what you see on your home page, and what your local accounts for family members and children have access to. They will each have different request websites as well, fully segmenting it into two sides of the same coin. Not to worry, on Plex all you will see is 2 extra libraries, one with Anime and one without.

I anticipate a cutover date of Friday or Saturday, November 10 and 11. It will be done during the day, since most media viewing is done in the evenings. Any streams happening I will terminate with a friendly message. I expect downtime of no less than 2-4 hours as everything is tested one last time and confirmed. I will send an email before and after this happens!

Thank you all for your investment and continued patience with this upgrade! I'm very excited to share it with you all!

Say hello to the new Server!

The guts

The drives

We did it!

Thank you all so much for your donations! We have reached the goal of $550, and now the upgrade can move forward. I am forever grateful to everyone who helped with this! And I want to reiterate, Banksflix will always and forever be free of charge, so the meaning of these voluntary donations is not lost on me. I appreciate them deeply.

With that being said, I am purchasing this server that has everything all in one package with an easy path for future upgrades. For more information on this, please view this new document I created explaining the server in full.

Again, thank you all for your support and donations and for using the Banksflix Plex server.  I'm happy this passion porject of mine can provide cost-free media to people! I will continue to post updates as I provision the server, test it, and eventually make it the production server.

Almost Halfway There!

We are almost to the $300 mark, which is where I'll hit "purchase" on the new Banksflix Server.  As we keep inching forward with this process, I'll be able to configure the device and test it before adding drives and moving the production Plex server over. You can see what the upgrade entails here. I have continued to update this document as I do more research. For example, I will be hosting the OS and VM Virtual Disks on two 2.5" SSD's, together in RAID 0, meaning even faster performance, availability, and redundancy. Again, thank you for those that have dontated, and thanks in advance to those considering!