HP ProLiant MicroServer

What are your guys cpu usage while playing an h264 file, my avg is around 10%. I cannot see what the usage if the GPU is. I'm running a GT 520.
 
naeem.ally said:
Do you really need that much of ram? I'm running xbmc-standalone in ubuntu and its only using 500MB or ram.
I currently got 3GB of ram in my server.
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I am going to use it as a file server at an office with 5 people.
 
I see crown have it for R1,309.69 Probably no stock though


2 people selling them on Bid and buy as well R1199 or R1200 (first as 2 left but can get more second has 5 left)
 
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Jeez.... Now I don't feel bad about R1100 instead of R600...
 
rorz0r said:
Jeez.... Now I don't feel bad about R1100 instead of R600...
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Yeah my 2 for a combined R2300 looks a bargain compared to R3299 each!

I see they're still on special in the UK and the £100 cash back is still on till the end of the month £194.95 so would be about R1100 with the cash back at the current Exchange rate
 
Okes carrying stock bought at the old price must be smiling ;)
 
R3299 just a slightly faster cpu? thats a ripoff! :mad:

Eks net bly ekt myne gekry toe die R1k special aan die gang was!!:whistle:

Anyways, about time I added my build here!
So far I have only set up 1 server, will set up the other one when needed. The one I have set up is currently a NAS/experiment/future download box.

I read a lot of the build some of the other guys did, Jannie with his unRaid and some people with running linus with zfs raid, others vanilla raid on linux or windows. I decided to take a slighly less-known option.

Since mine isn't a HTPC and I don't need server grade performance or the performance boost of RAID, I decided to try an alternative: Greyhole.

Currently I have Ubuntu 10.04.3 installed with Greyhole, and I believe this combo to be a nice alternative to unRAID/WHS drive extender/RAID if you don't need all their features or want something thats free.
I'll explain Greyhole in my second post, for now just know that Greyhole is a disk pooling solution, with optional data loss prevention features.

Hardware wise, my configuration is as follows:
HP Microserver (pre 2011 one)
2x 1GB ram that came with my 2 servers
2x 250gb HDD's that came with my 2 servers
1x 300gb HDD that i had lying around => its in the tape drive bay and connected to the flashed ODD port
2x 1tb WD black hdd's

Software setup:
Currently have Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS and Greyhole as stated, SAMBA (greyhole requires this), openSSH and the ubuntu built-in VNC server (for remote admin, I want it headless), PS3MediaServer.
Still to add: Couchpotato, Sickbeard & SABNZB, Transmission, Truecrypt


For some reason I could not install Ubuntu to the drive connected to the ODD port, even after the BIOS update and flash. Apart from that it seems to be running full speed.
 
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Greyhole

Well, it seems not a lot of people use Greyhole so far, but it is still young. As stated on the Greyhole website (www.greyhole.net):
Greyhole is an application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives (whatever their size, however they're connected), and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails.
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I urge you guys to go have a look what its about, but here is a messy summary trying to explain it:

Greyhole is JBOD concatenation storage pool software, which uses Samba shares. How it works is you create samba shares on one hard drive, specify them to work with Greyhole, and then tell Greyhole all the mounts you want included in the storage pool (i say mounts, since anything that can be mounted in Linux, including network drives, can be used).

Data redundancy:
For each Samba share you are using, u can specify how many copies of files within that share it should keep, for redundancy. It spreads copies on different physical disks, so if you specify 3 copies but only have 2 disks you will only have 2 copies, until you add another mount to the Greyhole storage pool.

On a technical side, Greyhole operates by copying files out of the samba folders and just leaving links behind, linking to one of the copies of the file. The actual files are copied to folders within Greyhole folders mimicking the folder structure inside the Samba shares.

What makes Greyhole interesting is that it works above file system level, not below it like RAID.
This means that if one hard drive fails, the Greyhole storage pool is not compromised. Indeed, even if Linux or Greyhole were to fail/be corrupted/disk containing them fail, all the data on the other drives can still be accessed by plugging the drives into any other pc, and the files can be accessed as on any disk.
There is even a feature in Greyhole where you can tell it that you are going to check one drive out for a short duration. You can then take that drive out of array, take files it contains to buddies (even if files are in Greyhole normally) and later just plug the drive back into storage pool and continue as if it was never gone.
Adding a drive is instant, removing a drive takes as long as copying data across to other hdd’s.

The only downside to Greyhole I have discovered this far is that if you want to use files on the pc Greyhole is running, you have to mount the Samba shares rather than work with the files on the disk directly.


I'm a complete linux noob, but I had it up and running in no time, thus far very nice :)
It has a few other features that are nice as well, but you guys can read up on that if you are interested.
 
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Damn... I was waiting until I have a *real* use for it. Now I had to quickly get one of those R1200 BoB ones.

@Boomstomp: I am a long time Greyhole user. I am very happy with it, and it actually performs better for me than my previous software raid. The only issue is when you are using a file which has no redundancy. Then the performance is more like a single drive. Otherwise I am maxing my gigabit network out (120MB/s) with file copying.
 
zamicro said:
Damn... I was waiting until I have a *real* use for it. Now I had to quickly get one of those R1200 BoB ones.

@Boomstomp: I am a long time Greyhole user. I am very happy with it, and it actually performs better for me than my previous software raid. The only issue is when you are using a file which has no redundancy. Then the performance is more like a single drive. Otherwise I am maxing my gigabit network out (120MB/s) with file copying.
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hi zamicor, I'm glad to see there are other Greyhole users lurking around! :)

I haven't been looking at its performance, but I honestly can't see why I would ever again do software raid instead of this.
 
Sound advice

Hi guys. A little a assistance pls. So i got one of these with 2*2TBs,a POV GT520 gfx and for the OS i went with ubuntu server (1st foray into linux). Anyways, that installed well enough after some trial and error. Next step was XBMC. i followed this guide "http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=XBMCbuntu#Install_XBMC" and things went okay. Now my problem is sound over hdmi. There just isn't any.
I installed "ALSA" as per the guide but sudo alsamixer gives me "cannot open mixer: No such file or directory" and aplay -l says "aplay: device_list:223: no soundcards found..."
Did a lot of googling but still no luck, so i was wondering if anyone here, has come across and solved this problem :confused:
Thnx
 
Boomstomp said:
hi zamicor, I'm glad to see there are other Greyhole users lurking around! :)

I haven't been looking at its performance, but I honestly can't see why I would ever again do software raid instead of this.
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Interesting concept but I'm battling a bit to see a strong application unless you want very strong protection for your files. With Greyhole you can effectively have multiple copies of the same files over different drives, or more importantly, different systems.Think of it as a transparent data mirroring system (even if the author say it's not supposed to be a backup setup).

For irreplaceable stuff, like personal data or your photo collection, this makes 100% sense and you'd be willing to give up N-times the disk space for strong redundancy.

But for normal files, such as movies for example - stuff you can get back with some effort, it does not make sense to double the required disk space for redundancy. A RAID5 setup allows a small % of disk space sacrificed to give redundancy. If you have a Terabyte (or 10) of media, you'd have to double your disk space using Greyhole for the lowest level of redundancy. This is probably an overkill and still only protects you against a single disk failure. RAID5 does the same but with much less 'wasted' disk space.

I suspect the origin of Greyhole was from a requirement to concatenate disparate disks into a single pool and to grow the pool at any time with any size while providing redundancy. Normal RAID5 systems can't do this.

unRAID does seem to offer most of the features that makes Greyhole attractive (redundancy, different disk sizes, easy growing of the pool, etc.) but then adds the pros of RAID5 to that. One thing unRAID can't do is file-level redundancy, for that you'll still need a backup program.

If all your data is super critical, Greyhole makes sense.

If you have lots of data you don't want to loose but can replace with some effort, unRAID (or another RAID5-type setup) makes more sense.

If most of your data is replaceable, but some not, use a backup program for that data set.
 
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Pandaemonium said:
Hi guys. A little a assistance pls. So i got one of these with 2*2TBs,a POV GT520 gfx and for the OS i went with ubuntu server (1st foray into linux). Anyways, that installed well enough after some trial and error. Next step was XBMC. i followed this guide "http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=XBMCbuntu#Install_XBMC" and things went okay. Now my problem is sound over hdmi. There just isn't any.
I installed "ALSA" as per the guide but sudo alsamixer gives me "cannot open mixer: No such file or directory" and aplay -l says "aplay: device_list:223: no soundcards found..."
Did a lot of googling but still no luck, so i was wondering if anyone here, has come across and solved this problem :confused:
Thnx
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I don't have a solution to your problem but I got ubuntu 11.04 installed with a GT520 gfx card and I didn't have any problems with hdmi sound. I don't think I installed alsa.
 
Having read a few reviews before buying, I was under the impression these are supposed to be near-silent.

I can hear mine whining from across the room. It appears to be the PSU fan that makes a high-pitched noise.

Anyone experiencing the same issue? Does PSU have a variable speed fan? I'll check in BIOS tonight if there are settings I missed there. Got the SPCR Review reference figures of 23 dBA @ 1m which I'll compare to mine using the Android Sound Meter app.
 
Budza said:
Having read a few reviews before buying, I was under the impression these are supposed to be near-silent.

I can hear mine whining from across the room. It appears to be the PSU fan that makes a high-pitched noise.

Anyone experiencing the same issue? Does PSU have a variable speed fan? I'll check in BIOS tonight if there are settings I missed there. Got the SPCR Review reference figures of 23 dBA @ 1m which I'll compare to mine using the Android Sound Meter app.
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Are you sure it is the PSU fan and not the system extraction fan? If its NOT the PSU, you can simply replace it with a quieter fan.
 
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