After a painful experience of the lack of support of a Seagate Goflex Home never updated from smb1, and finding the inadequacies of a WD MyCloudUltra2, I'm ready to tackle configuring an older Dell system as the NAS for my network. What do I need to configure besides NFS and smb servers?
On 3/15/21 2:17 PM, Robert McBroom via users wrote:
After a painful experience of the lack of support of a Seagate Goflex Home never updated from smb1, and finding the inadequacies of a WD MyCloudUltra2, I'm ready to tackle configuring an older Dell system as the NAS for my network. What do I need to configure besides NFS and smb servers?
That depends on what functions you want, but that should certainly be enough to start with. If you're configuring smb, I assume you have windows clients as well.
After a painful experience of the lack of support of a Seagate Goflex Home never updated from smb1, and finding the inadequacies of a WD MyCloudUltra2, I'm ready to tackle configuring an older Dell system as the NAS for my network. What do I need to configure besides NFS and smb servers?
Basically, you should install Fedora Server Edition and include Windows Fileserver option. It includes a nice Web based admin interface for easy going. If you just want filesharing then you are done. You have just to add your users and organise where to store what files.
When you want additional capabilities, e.g. share ebooks library or local mail storage, you must install additional software depending on your wishes. The Dell / Fedora combination gives you a lot more options as any commercial NAS device I know (including hight end Synology or Qnap).
I installed TrueNAS on an old system (along with a ton of disk space), it isn't as familiar as fedora, but it seems to work very well and you get used to it after a while. Been putting all my videos on it and running a Plex server in a jail.
On 15Mar2021 17:54, Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com wrote:
I installed TrueNAS on an old system (along with a ton of disk space), it isn't as familiar as fedora, but it seems to work very well and you get used to it after a while. Been putting all my videos on it and running a Plex server in a jail.
Our home NAS is also our local Ubuntu server (pick whatever distro you like). It's got a pair (well, 2 pairs) of big drives in RAID-1 - there live our media and other large things. It shares via NFS and SMB/CIFS.
I do recommend, if you have the $s, to RAID your storage - it gets you redundancy on drive failure. While this means things stay up of you lose a single drive, more importantly it means you don't need to restore from backup after you lose a single drive; that is a huge boon.
We like RAID-1 because either drive is standalone. Any can be dropped into a cradle or other machine without the RAID for recovery. We just use the md RAID stuff, no LVM etc.
Our machine is an HP Proliant G8 - cheap, 4 3.5" SATA drive bays (not hot swap alas), a SSD up the top for /home and swap, and the OS on an SD card on the mainboard. How I wish we could still buy them.
Plex: I keep toying with plex. I find it very frustrating.
a) you need a Plex account b) it infers metadata (movie names, what have you) from filenames, which forces a particular naming scheme on you. A schema I hate. I have a whole script to make a parallel Plex link tree for that reason. c) No decent way to add (or present) better metadata. Once there were plugins but these days they seem unsupported. I've got metadata, but the best I can do is plex friendly filenames.
I'd love to hear about your setup. We still play media on our PVR, which has the server's media tree NFS mounted on it.
Cheers, Cameron Simpson cs@cskk.id.au
On 3/16/21 1:04 AM, Cameron Simpson wrote:
Plex: I keep toying with plex. I find it very frustrating.
I'd love to hear about your setup. We still play media on our PVR, which has the server's media tree NFS mounted on it.
I use Gerbera (formerly MediaTomb). It's very simple and provides a DLNA service which worked with our Blu-Ray player and now our Chromecast. I use an app on my phone called BubbleUPNP to select a video and cast it to the TV. VLC also works on the phone and desktop.
On Tue, 2021-03-16 at 19:04 +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote:
On 15Mar2021 17:54, Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com wrote:
I installed TrueNAS on an old system (along with a ton of disk space), it isn't as familiar as fedora, but it seems to work very well and you get used to it after a while. Been putting all my videos on it and running a Plex server in a jail.
Our home NAS is also our local Ubuntu server (pick whatever distro you like). It's got a pair (well, 2 pairs) of big drives in RAID-1 - there live our media and other large things. It shares via NFS and SMB/CIFS.
I do recommend, if you have the $s, to RAID your storage - it gets you redundancy on drive failure. While this means things stay up of you lose a single drive, more importantly it means you don't need to restore from backup after you lose a single drive; that is a huge boon.
+1
I had a NAS (Iomega) for many years. Over time I had to replace both Seagate hard drives with WD units and lost nothing. The NAS itself finally died a few months ago after about 10 years service, and after connecting the drives via a USB dock Fedora immediately recognised them as RAID-1.
I'm toying with the idea of replacing the MD RAID with BTRFS RAID, given that it's now supported in Fedora, but haven't decided yet.
We like RAID-1 because either drive is standalone. Any can be dropped into a cradle or other machine without the RAID for recovery. We just use the md RAID stuff, no LVM etc.
Our machine is an HP Proliant G8 - cheap, 4 3.5" SATA drive bays (not hot swap alas), a SSD up the top for /home and swap, and the OS on an SD card on the mainboard. How I wish we could still buy them.
Plex: I keep toying with plex. I find it very frustrating.
a) you need a Plex account b) it infers metadata (movie names, what have you) from filenames, which forces a particular naming scheme on you. A schema I hate. I have a whole script to make a parallel Plex link tree for that reason. c) No decent way to add (or present) better metadata. Once there were plugins but these days they seem unsupported. I've got metadata, but the best I can do is plex friendly filenames.
I use Plex and also have a script to rename media files. Trouble is that if you do that it interferes with Plex's ability to find online subtitles, so I've essentially stopped doing it. I guess I could use a parallel link tree, but I can't really be bothered.
poc
On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 19:04:06 +1100 Cameron Simpson wrote:
I'd love to hear about your setup. We still play media on our PVR, which has the server's media tree NFS mounted on it.
I've never made a plex account, it all works fine as long as you don't want to do things like play things outside the home or a few other things they insist on an account for. I mostly play things from the server on various smart TV devices with plex clients. Seems to work pretty well.
The server I'm running on my NAS doesn't get metadata from filenames, but from some random place on the internet (I think it uses thetvdb.com for TV shows). You do have to conform to the annoying naming convention, but I just caved in and got used to it.
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Cameron Simpson -
Patrick O'Callaghan -
Peter Boy -
Robert McBroom -
Samuel Sieb -
Tom Horsley