My Synology was getting old, so I ordered its replacement: a Minisforum N5 Pro. Twelve cores, 96GB of ECC RAM, five drive bays, a GPU that can transcode more Plex streams than this family could watch if we tried. With a 20TB enterprise drive, rack cooling, and mounting hardware, the whole thing came to about $2,210 — minus the four 8TB drives I’m pulling out of the old Synology, because a man’s gotta reuse his drives. TrueNAS Scale, ZFS RAID-Z1, roughly 32TB usable.

The character’s job is the server’s job

That’s the boring part. Here’s the important part: its name is Randy.

Randy, from Trailer Park Boys. Assistant trailer park supervisor. And that’s the naming rule for every machine in this house — the character’s job on the show is the server’s job in the rack. Randy keeps the park in line, so Randy runs the house: media, storage, automations, the works. Bubbles looks after everybody in the park, so Bubbles is the machine that runs the family’s AI assistant. Barb owns the park and keeps tabs on everything, so Barb does the monitoring.

SSH into Sunnyvale

People will tell you server naming schemes are a solved problem. Greek gods, planets, nas-01. Those people have never SSH’d into a box and been greeted with:

R A N D Y — Sunnyvale Assistant Supervisor “A man’s gotta store his data” Status: DEEEECENT

Frigg off, Barb

The theming goes deeper than the login banner, because of course it does. The alert messages are mapped to Randy’s emotional register. Drive failure or degraded pool: “Frigg off, Barb!” Critical temperature: “Randy’s pants are OFF!” Storage over 90%: “A man’s gotta eat!” Everything healthy: “DEEEECENT.” I want to be clear that a drive-failure email will be a genuinely bad moment in my life, and I have arranged for that moment to also be funny.

Infrastructure you enjoy

Is any of this necessary? No. The whole business would work identically named storage-server-1. But I’m going to look at this machine’s name in a terminal every single day for the next five years, and every one of those days it can either be a serial number or it can be a little joke that still lands. Infrastructure you enjoy is infrastructure you maintain.

There’s also a Raspberry Pi in the rack named JET2HOLIDAY, after the TikTok sound. It’s the dev box. Nothing beats it.

The man arrives Friday

The 20TB drive lands Monday. Randy himself arrives Friday. The migration plan is forty pages long, the drives are labeled, and the man is ready to supervise.