Home Server OS for Backup & Media Streaming?

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silentbee

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I'm not sure if this is the best subforum, but I'll start here.

I want to replace my NAS with a little server. It's a little slow and it's only got two drive bays which means, now that I want to add space, I have to bin the HDDs in it and start again.

I'm looking to get a fairly inexpensive PC, throw some new HDDs in it with my old ones, set up some RAID / redundancy and use it in much the same way as I've been using my NAS...

Which is to store all my media and stream it to my DLNA blu-ray player and future DLNA hi-fi. As well as back up the two Windows laptops in the house. Potentially an Apple on in a little while.

So, I need an OS to pop onto it. It needs to be headless because I don't have a monitor and I don't want to have one lying around.

A Linux distro would be nice, but I've onlu ever used Ubuntu and I know very little about it. I'm looking into Windows Home Server and I'm very tempted by it.

Any tips??
 
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...Oh! And an internet proxy server would we pretty good. I'm not very clued up on networking, so I might have the lingo wrong, but it would be good to have a server that caches internet stuff for the latops and TVs that browse the internet. Possible? With WHS?
 
Howzit,

Check the following thread : http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/333460-HP-ProLiant-MicroServer

Hope this sheds some light :

iDOL said:
Well, I am going to be running mine headless, everytime - I start a new NAS build - the big question is always for me - what NAS OS will I be utilising.

Whilst I am waiting on the local release of "Windows Home Server" 2011 - to really complete the comparison.

I have in the meantime just started playing around - I am using 2x250gb's + 1 x80gb to test and see. (will be placing 4 x 2tb's in the chassis).

Here is a list of Diy NAS OS that I have encountered :

Free:
Freenas : http://freenas.org/ , http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/
Amahi (based on Fedora Core ) http://www.amahi.org/
NexentaStor : Community Edition - FREE version for up to 18TB of storage : http://www.nexentastor.org/
Ubuntu : http://www.ubuntu.com/
ClearOS (formerly ClarkConnect) : http://www.clearfoundation.com/
Openfiler : http://www.openfiler.com/
Opensolaris : http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/

Commercial:
Windows Home Server v1 (Includes Drive Extender)
Windows Home Server v2 "Vail" (Excludes native drive extender)
Windows Server 2008 R2
Unraid
Naslite

Please let me know about any others that you have used or read about, I would like to compile a list of them.

Also - let me know primarily what uses you have for the device :

NAS/Media Server/Home Server/XBMC Box
Click to expand...
 
I am currently using Amahi. It is very easy to set up, even for a total noob. Very powerful as well.

They do have support for DLNA, but I am not using it, so I cannot comment on it. I am using the server for streaming to my Mediaplayers, and that works great, even with 1080p content.

Instead of raid, they are using Greyhole. I am very impressed so far with Greyhole, as you do not need to have the same redundancy an all your information. Some files can be very redundant (with a copy on each physical HDD) and some like my movies can have no redundancy (only one copy). This means I do not waste space on my movies, which is no big loss if I lose them. The space I gained since moving from raid was a lot (the movie files is the biggest and takes the biggest proportion of my HDD space). And if you need more space, just add another HDD, and it will be available. No need to have identical drives at all.

Have a look, I promise you, you would be happy. If you have questions, go ahead and ask. I'll try my best.
 
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macxsanity said:
PM me i can configure a linux server for you
Click to expand...

I see from your website that you're in Jhb. Do you deliver / etc in Cape Town? Once I've sorted out which way I'm goignt to go with this, OS-wise, I'll let you know... ;)
 
Have a look at ClearOS, its simple and does most of what you want. Its linux as well.
 
Well, I've done a bit of quick poking around and I really like the look of Windows Home Server 2011. Except that it seems to format the HDDs so that they can only be read by WHS. I want to be able to pull out the drives and read them on any system, in case the WHS dies.
 
silentbee said:
Looks interesting. Are you running it headless-ly?
Click to expand...

Yes. I even did the setup headless, but needed to do a bit of reading :D

I have used linux for a few years now, but I was really impressed with Amahi. You do not need to know ANYTHING about linux. Just follow the step by step guide. You also do your basic settings on their website, after which they generate a code for your specific server. After installation, you input the code on your server, and your basic server is setup for you.
 
zamicro said:
Here is my homeserver in the "server room": Home server in Cupboard
Click to expand...

That's awesome! :)

I was really thinking about how I could get my new server to sit in a cup'd or somewhere neat, but decided it would require too much hardware hackery that would be beyond my expertise. At the moment the NAS that is to be replaced is fairly small, neat and okay-looking. It's just bigger than the 2 HDDs inside it. A server in a tower case will be uuugly!

I might look at doing something smart with the built-in cup'ds in the room it's going to live in. When we get around to doing them. Maybe create a neat niche for the tower to sit inside, with plenty of air movement around it.
 
silentbee said:
That's awesome! :)

I was really thinking about how I could get my new server to sit in a cup'd or somewhere neat, but decided it would require too much hardware hackery that would be beyond my expertise. At the moment the NAS that is to be replaced is fairly small, neat and okay-looking. It's just bigger than the 2 HDDs inside it. A server in a tower case will be uuugly!

I might look at doing something smart with the built-in cup'ds in the room it's going to live in. When we get around to doing them. Maybe create a neat niche for the tower to sit inside, with plenty of air movement around it.
Click to expand...

I have added a cupboard temperature sensor to my server, and via the server I am controlling the extractor fan in the ceiling. Currently it is set to switch on when the temp reach 29 degrees and will switch off when the temp drop below 25 degrees.

Here is the times that the extractor fan worked in the past 3 days :D
May 15 16:50:01 hda root: Mains Fan Control: - Fan on : 29.06 greater than Upper limit (29)
May 15 17:05:01 hda root: Mains Fan Control: - Fan off : 24.93 less than Lower limit (25)
May 17 14:55:01 hda root: Mains Fan Control: - Fan on : 29.06 greater than Upper limit (29)
May 17 15:15:01 hda root: Mains Fan Control: - Fan off : 24.93 less than Lower limit (25)

Granted, it will be different come summer time, but for now it is working nicely for me.
 
Home server

Hi All
I have:
Headless P4, 3GHz, 2GB Ram
ClearOS 5.2 in Gateway mode... very happy with this
Minidlna as my streaming software, if you have some strange files the transcoding patch can be installed, tested and it works well
Have 8 drives, fitted 2x icy-doc MB455SPF-B, only 2 drives run all the time, rest go to sleep when not in use for more than 10min.

My CPU load with streaming FULL-HD 1080p is never more than 8% and go to 25% if there is transcoding - (DVD quality only)

I have shared drives, for all users on my home network, and a backup that run @ 03:00 in the morning

Z69
 
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I'm using Windows Home Server 2011 to backup 5 PC's and serve up media to all of them. Works excellently. Also, Microsoft has dropped the price of that OS. I think it's quite worth while now.
 
Yeah, I went with WHS2011 in the end. Works well. The menu almost always crashes my Blu-Ray player after watching a video and returning to it. It's annoying. Backups, etc work very well. Wakes up my notebooks and puts them back to sleep :)
 
vinodh & silentbee: you guys mentioned features from the last version of WHS but with DE (Drive Extender, the magic make-more-space) function missing, what's the procedure for adding capacity ..and can it be added without having to to wipe/restore the files it's holding?
 
@bdt: I've never actually had to add drives to my Home Server yet. That's mainly because I delete TV series when i'm done watching them. However, I quickly read through a Windows Home Server 2011 book that I have and found this:

Who Needs Drive Extender? Implementing Spanning, Mirroring, and RAID
People loved Drive Extender because of its seamlessness and set-it-and-forget-it nature. It
was and remains the easiest drive maintenance tool that Microsoft (or, really, anyone) has
ever built. Its loss is a blow, to be sure, but as I said earlier in this chapter it’s not a catastrophic
one. There are plenty of good reasons to use Windows Home Server 2011, and
there are plenty of tools that you can wield to implement most of what Drive Extender
could do. The next few sections show you how to use those tools.
Creating a Storage Pool Using a Spanned Volume
One of the best features of Drive Extender (indeed, one of the best features in all of
Windows Home Server version 1) was the dynamic storage pool. If you installed a new
hard drive on the server, you could then add that drive to the existing drives and instantly
get a larger storage pool for client backups and shared folder data.
Alas, Drive Extender now resides in the trash bin of technology history, so you have to
deal with fixed disk sizes in Windows Home Server 2011. This can be a particular problem
with client backups because they tend to take up a lot of disk space, and if the server drive
that stores the backups gets full, subsequent backups will fail.
That is, to say the least, not good, so you’re forced to look for other solutions.
Fortunately, one such solution sits right under your nose as a feature of Windows Server
2008 R2: a spanned drive. This is a kind of virtual drive—or volume, as Windows Server
calls it—that combines two or more physical hard drives into a single storage area with
two main characteristics:
. The new volume is dynamic because if you install more drives on the server, you can
add those drives to the volume to instantly increase the storage area without losing
any existing data.
. The new volume is spanned because data is seamlessly stored on all the physical hard
drives without your having to worry about where the data is stored. If one of the
hard drives fills up, Windows Server automatically writes new data to one of the
other drives in the volume.
In other words, a dynamic, spanned volume is a reasonable facsimile of the storage pool
feature of Drive Extender. Is there a downside to using spanned volumes? Yes, unfortunately,
there are two:
. If one of the hard drives dies, you lose all the data stored in the spanned volume,
even data that resides on the remaining functional drives.
. If the total size of the spanned volume exceeds 2TB, you won’t be able to back up
the volume using the Server Backup feature of Windows Home Server 2011 (because
Server Backup has a 2TB maximum for any volume).
108 CHAPTER 5 Setting Up and Using Home Server Storage
FIGURE 5.8 Your first task is to convert to dynamic disks those drives you want to include in
the spanned volume.
In other words, if you go this route, I strongly recommend that you come up with some
other way to back up the spanned volume to prevent data loss (for example, by installing
a third-party backup program on the server).

They also mention RAID 5 and a whole bunch of other trickery. If you need more info, i'll mail you the book.
 
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