Keepalived

I run multiple pinholes using keepalived. Then I only use one DNS in my DHCP server. Second pihole will seemlessly take over if the first one goes down whilst using the original DNS address.

Work quite well. I had to learn the hard way that only using a single pihole was just asking for my partner to be mad when it didn’t work / when I was doing server maintenance. Now I have multiple and they can all seemlessly take over if any my server nodes are down

How is your Plex install so big? My library is like 6x larger and my Plex install lives in a 24GB VM

I am sure I am in the minority, but avoid AAC multi channel encodes as much as possible. It really makes no sense for anyone. Most home theater equipment does not support it. AC3 or eAC3 are supported by nearly every device natively. AAC does not work over SPDIF or HDMI ARC without reencoding. All that for a slightly lower bitrate? No thanks. Plus most are likely encoded from a AC3 or eAC3 so they will sound worse than the native version.

AAC is such a stupid codec to use for anything other than 2.0 channel.

5.1 / 7.1 AAC doesn’t work over ARC. Over eARC it need to be decoded to LPCM and then sent out. It doesn’t work with SPDIF.

Both eARC and SPDIF will most likely get downmixed to 2ch.

448 or 640kbps AC3 is perfectly fine and has great compatibility, SPDIF, ARC, eARC. Pretty much all blurays and DVDs will also have a AC3 track.