Unraid Community Rockstars: spxlabs

One of, if not the main reasons why the Unraid community is so great is due to our many Community Rockstars who go above and beyond to help others out. 🤘

In this blog series, we want to spotlight key community members to get to know them a little better and recognize them for all that they've done for the Unraid community over the years.

This blog features Stefano Partida of spxlabs. Stefano is an outstanding Unraid community member and content creator who has created countless blogs and videos on his website, youtube channel, and as a guest blogger here!

Where do you live? What do you do for a living?

About 3 years ago I moved to Huntsville, Alabama. AKA Rocket City. It was a bit of a reluctant move from Orlando, Florida because Orlando has an incredibly diverse community with AMAZING food from all over the world. However, the cost of living, distance from family, and a new member in the family caused us to begin looking for jobs in areas that were closer to home and had a lower cost of living. Well, that was accurate pre-2020 anyway.

To make my living, by day I am a Red Hat System Administrator and by most nights, I create homelab-related content for my fellow homelabbers, whether that be in video or written format. It took me a few years to finally become a System Administrator because one of my biggest setbacks was lack of experience. However, thanks to my homelab and by extension Unraid, I was able to prove to interviewers that I had the drive to not only learn new things and try new things but also was willing to document the work I was doing. Apparently, other administrators really like a person who can write up a guide on how things work and are also more than willing to do it.

How did you discover Unraid originally?

I don't quite remember exactly how but I do remember being extremely annoyed with Windows because it would often reboot seemingly randomly and was becoming cumbersome with all the services I wanted to host at home at the time. I remember thinking "there has got to be an easier Linux solution out there" and searching and searching the web until I finally found a post (possibly on Reddit) about Unraid. I remember giving it a go and after about 2 or 3 hours I was so happy with how easy setting things up was that I immediately bought my first license. Also, I was so sick of RAIDs because adding storage to an existing array may as well have been a death sentence due to my lack of skills. I did know that I would eventually need more storage after all.

What is your most liked feature of Unraid?

I'm a simple man and I like simple things, so without a doubt, it's the ease with which to expand an existing storage array.

What do you like most about being a part of this community?

Hands down the community itself. Years ago getting help from the Linux community would have been an absolutely frustrating and defeating task because of how cruel and unforgiving some people could be. I was new to Linux and simply did not have the proper knowledge because it was not taught at school. Before I jumped into the Unraid pool I spent some time reading posts on the forums and was absolutely thrilled with how kind and patient people were answering the onslaught of endless questions. Of course nowadays, I really really appreciate the effort of all the container creators like ich777 and the linuxserver.io team (there are more sorry for not name-dropping) and folks like Ed aka Spaceinvader One and Ibracorp. Obviously, there are many contributors out there that are unsung heroes, trust me, I may not know you off the top of my head but you best believe with 1000% certainty that I have definitely been thankful for you, yes you!

What feature would you most like to see added to Unraid?

I'm really not sure. It would be cool to see Unraid become more Enterprise Grade and have all sorts of things other people are asking for but.... I don't need any of that stuff. Unraid currently meets all my wants and desires.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with the community?

Thank you all for creating content, asking questions, and most importantly enabling me to experiment with containers, VMs, and other software within a linux environment. I thoroughly believe the only reason I have my day job is because of the constant experimentation I have done. All based on the ideas, questions, and other content from the Unraid forums, my go-to place for exposure to new stuff.

Do you have a donation link you’d like to share?

I suppose I do yes: https://www.paypal.me/spxlabs

All donations will 100% without a doubt be spent on my homelab, which 90% of the time yields some homelab-related content for, hopefully, your viewing pleasure.*

*User satisfaction not guaranteed, some funds may also be used for frivolous expenditures like gaming hardware. While uncommon, other side effects from donations may include, donations to other content creators, a yearly subscription to Discord, monetary contributions to other open source projects, and while incredibly rare death. Please speak with a financial advisor before contributing as these side effects may occur.