Media Server

I've got an old PC lying about not in use, it's got vista on it, an old dual core E6600 I think and 1gb RAM (did have 3gb, but 2 went elsewhere), and was thinking of turning it into a media server, instead of using my Laptop. I'm bored aswell, and was laid off recently, so this will give me something to do for a couple of hours lol!!

I'm gonna wipe everything from it, disable all services that are not needed, and have it stripped down to the bare bones.

I'm hoping it's going to be pretty straightforward, the arduous bit will be wiping all the junk from it. I'd do a fresh install of Vista, but can't find the disks, so uninstalling all of the stuff with 1gb RAM with vista may take a while!!

As I've never done this before, setup a PC solely for the intention of a Media server, is there anything I need to bear in mind? connecting to it will be my Laptop, and 2 PS3's for the time being.

Cheers for the replies.

 

How about using freeNAS if you want it purely for media serving it maybe what you want and will be pretty happy with 1Gb of ram. once you have installed it you just got to it's webpage then you can change everything there.

Have a google and a bit of a read looks pretty simple to setup.

 

freeNAS looks neat! Here's a nice intro video. (Anything but Vista!)

GK

 

Thanks. Looking at the video it looks like something that may work for me. Something to get my teeth into.

I didn't mind vista when I had it, but with only 1gb ram, it'll be painful to work with.

 

Bit of a long shot, but has anyone used freenas.

The reason I ask, is do you use the FreeNAS LiveCD, or FreeNAS Embedded?, What works best?

 

Embedded I believe would run better and you wouldn't have to listen to the cd drive spin up all the time.

If were you i would create an backup image of you vista instillation so that if it all goes wrong you can just restore the pc back to the way you had it. Burn the freenas iso to a cd and run the instillation and install software to a spare usb key. this way you can try it out without any financial loss (which has a student is my biggest concern) and time is free.

I installed it on to a virtualbox machine and it appears to be a very easy and capable bit of software. It's making me think that when I go home i might use it on my old clapped out desktop that's no longer used.

 

If being a 'media server' is the most important thing, focus on finding a software app that delivers dlna connections over the network. You'll be able to hook up a wide variety of media devices from TV sets down to PMPs that way.

A 'nas' is just one way among a billion to store and potentially serve up files.

 

I use embedded. i installed freenas on a 1gb flashdrive and set that as boot drive with the internal hard drives dedicated to storage. i can stream to my ps3 and several computers without hassle. Awesome os

 

Having a nightmare, maybe a noob issue who knows.

I've downloaded the embedded img file, and i've put it onto my sandisk cruzer 2gb card using physdiskwrite, usb stick is selected as first boot device, disk boot failure, insert system disk.

I'm at a loss, have no idea where the problem lies, how did you use the embedded file Ayle, am I doing something wrong??
If this fails, I'll have to get some blank CD's, and make a LiveCD, and install it that way.

This is frustrating me big time, I hate letting machines get the better of me!!!

Edit: Seems like there are issues putting the img file onto a USB using Vista/7, loads of people not being able to use it!

 

If you have two usb sticks you could use one a live stick using http://www.linuxliveusb.com/ to make it and then install onto the other one.

Hope you solve the problem

 

Well, I've managed to install it, was a headache but got it done, 2 USB sticks wouldn't play ball, so burnt ISO to disk.

Used FreeNAS-amd64-LiveCD-0.7.2.5543 at first, but when I installed it to the USB, and rebooted for the first time, it got halfway through loading then just shut down, re-installed, no joy, shutdown after shutdown.Pretty much thought this isn't meant to be. So went onto FreeNas site, low and behold, FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-amd64 was released today, so thought I'll give this version a go. Hey presto, worked first time.

I've had a little play with it, seems like a very capable piece of software, so, tomorrow (or later today, as it's 2.35am here in the UK), I'll be setting it all up. It's like having a new toy at Christmas, can't wait

My networking experience is very limited, pretty much zero in fact, so no doubt when I get stuck I may be asking for advice.

Glad I never stuck with Vista, and just shared from that, with 1gb RAM, it would have killed it without doing anything, where as FreeNas used next to nothing compared:

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Thanks for the input so far, much appreciated.

 

With any nas setup, you need to identify and PRACTICE your disk error recovery. This is especially important with a software-raid-only system.

Waiting until something fails and they trying to perform a recovery whilst reading from an on-line manual rarely turns out well.

FreeNas v0.8 was released yesterday morning. The last nightly build of 0.7 was ....5872.

 

As this is all fairly new to me, anywhere you can point me to for some information on this, obviously don't want a failure and I'm pretty much blind as with what to do.

 

I believe what is being suggested is that if you setup the NAS server to use some level of RAID such that if one of many HDDs fails, you can rebuild its replacement using the data on the remaining HDDs... then you should trial this recovery process now before putting the server into service, so that you know how to perform disaster recovery when disaster strikes. This presumes that you are using RAID and more than one HDD. You can simulate a HDD failure by simply replacing one with a blank drive. Recovery instructions may come with the server software or hardware that is providing the RAID... and may be as simple as stepping through the menus to perform the recovery. It is often these steps that can be troublesome on a sketchy system... so they are worth proving sooner than later if you expect you disaster recovery process to work when you really need it.

If, however, you are just playing around with freeNAS and one HDD, then you have no RAID and no ability to rebuild a failed drive from remaining good drives. So, forget about it.

GK

 

At the moment I am using 2 disks separate from each other, one 250gb, one 500gb. I don't have any RAID setups in place.

Also, as I have 2 different size disks, would the larger disk loose 250gb if I was to setup RAID in some form or another?

I'm guessing this isn't they best way to go, as I would have to manually backup each disk in case of any failures?

Sorry for sounding like a complete noob, new to this and trying to learn as I go!!!

 

Identical HDDs are probably required or recommended for RAID. Software RAID may decrease server performanance and may not be worth it... would have to try it. Perhaps freeNAS can automatically mirror a 250GB data partition on the 500GB to the 250GB to provide your backup. Or, you could use a backup program to backup HDD1 to HDD2. The frequency of backup required depends on how often the data changes. Relatively static media libraries can be backed up incrementally as you add to them. Live databases are more demanding. I would first explore what backup/data protection facilities freeNAS offers.

GK

 

No what is being 'suggested' is that the OP learn a lot more about whatever nas distro they decide to use INCLUDING how to recover from disk failures.

 

The OP is a novice playing around with freeNAS on a spare PC to learn more. If it crashes, no big deal. He'll have a backup somewhere just like anyone else would. This is not a big iron IT project!

GK

 

Cheers for the replies. At the moment, I'm basically experimenting with FreeNas, I haven't got any backups setup with the server as yet, but all of the data that is being stored on there is backed up elsewhere. So not to much of a problem if things go wrong, and I will look at the options available in the future.

After installing the latest version FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-amd64, I found out that it didn't support UPnP as yet, so I've reverted back to FreeNAS-amd64-LiveCD-0.7.2.5872, no real biggie, as I didn't have much setup.

After getting used to the slightly different interface, I've got my setup going. I'm using the disks independently with no RAID setup's in place as I'm just experimenting, but when I've got some more experience and cash, I'm going to buy some new drives (maybe looking at 2 to 4 TB's in a RAID array of some sort) and have a more permanent setup, I also need a new motherboard, as the one I have only has a Realtek RTL8201CL 10/100 LAN Controller which is bottle-necking when transferring files, it's running at around 90mbps, which is near enough to the max speed, so would like one with gigabyte LAN capabilities, but that's going to have to wait.

I've managed to get CIFS/SMB shares up and running, FTP, and I've got UPnP and FUPPES up and running, this was the service I wanted most as I needed the streaming to PS3's, after setting it up first time, it all worked well, and everything streams to the PS3 very well, this was the service i thought would cause me massive issues but in fact was the easiest.

The only thing I've got issues with is the permissions, I kept switching between anonymous and local user logins when using ftp, and cifs, causing me massive headaches when it came to editing the files, i.e. delete etc, but I'm slowly getting my head round it and it is all part of the learning process, and things seem to be falling into place.

I am very impressed freenas, and what it offers, and definitely learnt a lot over the past few days. Backup procedures next i think to be learnt and see what options I have.

 

pull the cable out of the back of a drive (shutdown/power off first) and then see how your nas behaves/recovers.

Now replace that faked 'dead' drive with another and practice your recovery.

Also, consider how you would recover your data from backups if for some reason the entire nas failed to an unrecoverable state.

 

I have a spare drive i could do that with.

If I put the new drive in and it doesn't recover, will I be able to put the original drive back in, and it works fine?

 

I have no way of knowing.

But if you're going to put your faith and data on this machine, you should probably find out how to manage recoveries before you commit too deeply to the thing.

Better to learn your recovery techniques and procedures now, when the machine is empty than in 6 months when you've got your whole life on the machine and a drive craps out.

 

There's only one way to find out then!!!

I'll give it a try, but I'm not hopeful of any backup at all as the disk are running independently from each other. But it will be interesting to see how FreeNAS behaves, whether or not you can take 1 disk out and the server will still keep running.

Thanks for the reply.

 

I've done as suggested, and was nicely surprised with the results.

I removed one of the drives and replaced it with a "new" drive. FreeNAS itself, booted as normal, and it all worked fine.

As the disks are working independently from each other, the files obviously are not there. The second disk within the setup works fine, still able to view all of the files, no problems. I was expecting FreeNAS itself to behave erratically but all worked fine. The thing that was odd though, was it saw the new disk, but the size of the disk was was the same faked dead drive, original was 250gb, new disk was 160gb. I have then put the original disk back, all works fine as if nothing happened.

So, if I was to keep the setup like this, I would have to backup the disks elsewhere to recover the data. This is something I need to investigate, and will give whatever I find on offer a whirl.

 

by pulling and replacing a drive, I meant pulling and replacing a drive that is part of raid 1 or a raid 5 set.

Force the array/nas into a recovery state.

Pulling a drive that has nothing on it or is not a part of a raid set isn't much of a test.

 

No RAID = no RAID recovery problem.

GK

 

Thought that was to easy lol!!! Still, was interesting to see how FreeNAS reacted and was reassuring to know it still worked.

I'll take a look at setting up a RAID set at some point, I have 3 disks of varying size, so I could try both 1 and 5. I'll post the results once I've figured it out.