Home Server Chit Chat

[Agent]

Just wondering what, if anything, people are doing with any home servers they have kicking about?
With the HP Microserver back in the region of 100 quid after cashback I’m starting to think it’s a good idea to get serious about backups and centralisation.

I’ve spent a few days reading up around FreeeNAS. I assumed it was going to be a reasonably straight forward thing, but after reading a slideshow around ZFS and how your data is basically dead and almost impossible to recover if things go wrong, I think I’ll pass. Other reasons include not being suited to being run as a VM (I was thinking of playing with ESXi) and a community that seems a bit…hostile?

I’ve also seen OpenMediaVault which seems to be fine VM'ed/ lower requirements and less scary if things generally go wrong.

Not that I’ve used it either, but I’m thinking of checking out Plex for some home entertainment goodness.

I’m not really sure what the purpose I’m aiming for yet is in all honesty. I just want to play a bit with some of the options that are out there. I definitely want some sort of centralised storage on it, probably RAID of some kind for a bit of redundancy. I’d also like to look at automating the backup of my main machines on the network – ideally including full HDD image dumps so I can restore them if needed.

So what are you lot doing with yours? Any recommendations / thoughts for me? Not a lot to go on I suppose, but that's kinda the purpose of this thread

I can get a *lot* of licences legitimately through work on the cheap (yay, education!), so if recommendations for some of the more expensive stuff comes up, that's fine

[malfunction]

I have an early HP micro server (N36L / 1.3GHz CPU) and I'm using FreeNAS, but only as a basic file server. It has 4 x 2TB HDDs configured as 2 separate 2TB ZFS mirrors and simple network shares (SMB and NFS). FreeNAS boots from an internal USB stick.

I tend to do a selective backup only - docs, code, photos and music get backed up to external storage but my films, etc aren't backed up at all (worst case I could rip / restore them from their original media, though it would be a PITA). The micro server was quite loud at stock, but I've since replaced the original PSU with a PicoPSU (and external brick). I had intended to replace the case fan too but never got around to it (you need to change the pins as the stock fan doesn't use a standard pin out).

I have a dedicated PC for HTPC duties which is both a bit quieter and smaller than the micro and uses a small SSD for the boot drive (with all media on the micro server). Personally, even with the PicoPSU, the micro server is too loud for a living room PC, mostly because of the fan noise but also the vibration from the HDDs (in my case it would be in a wooden cabinet which doesn't help).

I don't have any automated backups, I keep meaning to do something but never get around to it.

I also run another PC for various VMs - the micro server isn't fast enough and can't take enough RAM for what I need, but YMMV.

[Agent]

The N54L seems to have a bit more CPU power, so I'm not too worried about running a couple of VMs on there (although totally undecided atm). Noise I'm not too concerned about either, as it'll be at the front of the house, by the entrance with it's own place in the corner. Shouldn't cause any disruption Thankfully all the CAT5e is ran from that point, so it's quite ideal.

Probably not going to have a need to change the PSU, but I might even have a MicroPSU kicking about spare.

The most annoying thing for me is that the HP Microservers don't support S3 standby and there are no BIOS hacks to add it back. Even at a low wattage, it seems silly to have it running 24/7. I'd much rather have some sort of WOL ability when needed.

Not set on a microserver, so could go with something else. They just seem like a reasonable choice with the bays / hardware / cost.

[dave87]

When I did the maths, my N36L costs about 10p per day to run (24x7 etc). I don't think that is bad, especially if you've got it doing other things.

I'm tempted to upgrade to the N54L, but tbh I only run WHS 2011 on it, and I doubt I'd notice the difference. That being said, it would be quite nice to play with some VMs without running a Q6600 based machine for long periods of time (read £££).

[herulach]

Mine is sat with 4 2tb drives in raid 5 and ubuntu running off a 250gb in the 5.25 bay. It runs pretty standard linux file servery stuff at the moment, I did play with some vms when I started, but tbh didn't really see the point. Samba, Seafile, transmission are the basic servery stuff, and since its by the tv it also does dual duty as my htpc (with a £20 nvidia card) so XBMC takes care of DLNA streaming for me. I've got some autobackup scripts set up for data, and manually do image backups at the moment.

[peterb]

I run a standard Linux distro on a fairly low power CPU. MDADM configured as RAID 1. SAMBA, POSTFIX and APACHE to provide file, mail and web services, and SSH for remote administration. I have just added an afp server and small HFS+ partition to act as a time machine server for an OSX system on the network.

I use EXT3 as a the main file system, and use DUMP to back up to an Ultrium 2 tape drive. (Not the Apple server partition as HFS+ isn't supported by DUMP. That doesn't matter to much as the OSX machine has a SAMBA client - OSX is a Unix system anyway)

At some point I will upgrade to tape to Ultrium 4, but I will need to upgrade the whole system to get sufficient throughput to the drive. At the moment, the U2 drive is in a separate machine and I back up over the LAN, but the rebuilt system will host it natively.

The basis of the system (now and future) is a mITX MOBO.

I have had tis (or similar) for about 6 years, I added the tape drive after a close shave with the RAID array, which disabled itself after a problem with a SATA connector. That was actually reassuring, once I had realised what had happened! The RAID switched itself off to mitigate against data corruption.

As part of the upgrade, I will be moving the OS to a dedicated drive, and just have data on the array.

[jimborae]

My n40l has 4x2tb drives running 2 Raid 1 arrays on a proper hardware raid card with the OS running on an old 80Gb Intel SSD, the OS is WHS 2011 and I use for backing up all the PC's in the house and media server duties for various connected devices e.g. WD TV live, PopCorn Hour and Logitech Media Server devices. Would like at some point for it also to be an iTunes media server and library but not looked into that yet. Son number one also uses it as a Minecraft server for him and his mates! Does what I need it to do and seems to do it well, best £100 I ever spent.

[jim]

I had an N36L running for a while on Openfiler, providing RAID-6 storage, alongside a WHS Atom machine, but they were very sluggish and running software became increasingly challenging.

Upgraded to a quad-core server recently, and put everything onto Server 2012, but it was a very bumpy ride. Media serving within a VM environment was a complete disaster, and never worked properly. The only solution I found was to switch to baremetal. Mind you, I can still run VMs within it if necessary, using Server 2012 as the host.

[DanceswithUnix]

My home server runs Centos as an OS. It handles all the basic networking functions that most people get their router to do for the main network like DNS and DHCP. The router runs a DMZ talking to the server, the server has two network cards so acts as secondary firewall to the main network. I run my own domain name, so the box handles email etc for that.

I use SAMBA to allow Windows PCs to write to the storage (couple of drives in RAID1) and NFS for Linux boxes.

It has a couple of VMs running on there, one has my son's Minecraft server and the other runs a security camera monitoring system (zoneminder).

[b0redom]

I’ve spent a few days reading up around FreeeNAS. I assumed it was going to be a reasonably straight forward thing, but after reading a slideshow around ZFS and how your data is basically dead and almost impossible to recover if things go wrong, I think I’ll pass. Other reasons include not being suited to being run as a VM (I was thinking of playing with ESXi) and a community that seems a bit…hostile?

Really? I've been using ZFS for years and never had a problem. I had more problems with Linux RAID (I used OpenFiler for a bit). I had what turned out to be a duff SATA cable which would sometimes fail a drive on reboot, so the drives would keep reorder themselves.

I wouldn't ever recommend running something that requires direct access to disks like that as a VM though.

[herulach]

Really? I've been using ZFS for years and never had a problem. I had more problems with Linux RAID (I used OpenFiler for a bit). I had what turned out to be a duff SATA cable which would sometimes fail a drive on reboot, so the drives would keep reorder themselves.

I wouldn't ever recommend running something that requires direct access to disks like that as a VM though.

Do you find using freenas gives you any advantages you wouldn't get from just a normal linux/debian/bsd distro with hardware raid though? I appreciate its difficult to quantify the price of easy setup, but considering that to run it effectively you need to be into 8GB+ of ram and lose the ability to do anything else with the machine I can't see how its cost effective? I could put a hardware raid card in my microserver for less than the price of more ram and it seems I'd have the same result, but with more flexibility?

[DanceswithUnix]

Really? I've been using ZFS for years and never had a problem..

Yeah I meant to pick up on that too.
As ZFS is a BSD thing I don't use it, but the ideas seem not only sound but the obvious way to go. Is it the lack of an fsck utility that causes worry?? Any FS can die horribly, the idea that the system is effectively running a continuous fsck against your files seems a good one to me.

The Linux btrfs is starting to look stable enough for me to play with, so I expect I will be moving over to that soon.

Do you find using freenas gives you any advantages you wouldn't get from just a normal linux/debian/bsd distro with hardware raid though? I appreciate its difficult to quantify the price of easy setup, but considering that to run it effectively you need to be into 8GB+ of ram and lose the ability to do anything else with the machine I can't see how its cost effective? I could put a hardware raid card in my microserver for less than the price of more ram and it seems I'd have the same result, but with more flexibility?

For a grown up NAS where the bottleneck is always going to be the spindles, the more ram the better. For home use where you don't need that level of performance, I just don't see how the 8GB is necessary.

I have a spare PC and a few old drives sat around. Perhaps I should try booting up FreeNAS in 2GB to see how it does

[malfunction]

Do you find using freenas gives you any advantages you wouldn't get from just a normal linux/debian/bsd distro with hardware raid though? I appreciate its difficult to quantify the price of easy setup, but considering that to run it effectively you need to be into 8GB+ of ram and lose the ability to do anything else with the machine I can't see how its cost effective? I could put a hardware raid card in my microserver for less than the price of more ram and it seems I'd have the same result, but with more flexibility?

I know you were asking b0redom, but I chose freenas specifically because it was pretty much a NAS only solution; I like to tinker with things too much so rather than it being a case of "sorry, you can't watch a film / listen to music right now because I'm changing the fan / heatsink / blah blah in the server" I chose something that I wouldn't really want to tinker with too much; so low end pre-built hardware with a fairly closed solution seemed like a better idea than trying to 'roll my own' multi-purpose server. I'd have bought an actual NAS device if they were better value - the micro server was much better value than an equivalent 4-bay NAS at the time (and still is with the current offer).

For a grown up NAS where the bottleneck is always going to be the spindles, the more ram the better. For home use where you don't need that level of performance, I just don't see how the 8GB is necessary.

I have a spare PC and a few old drives sat around. Perhaps I should try booting up FreeNAS in 2GB to see how it does

As far as 8GB goes - again it's timing. At the time 8GB was dirt cheap (less than half the current price) - selling the included RAM and HDD paid for the 8GB upgrade if memory serves. I haven't kept fully up to date with each release of freenas but the recommendation when I set it up was to use UFS rather than ZFS - to only use ZFS if you have 1GB of RAM per 1TB of HDD space.

[peterb]

I had what turned out to be a duff SATA cable which would sometimes fail a drive on reboot, so the drives would keep reorder themselves.

Glad it isn't just me! I've had a few odd problems over the years that have turned out to be a duff SATA cable (or the connector)

In the case of the RAID system, the RAID deactivated itself, which was a tad worrying until I realised what it was. I then mounted a disk on another system and re-activated it, then just let the array rebuild itself.

[virtuo]

I have 2 N54Ls, one running nicely with Ubuntu 13 as an XBMC HTPC, (also used for emulators, which run fine up to at least PS1 level). As mentioned above stuck a very cheap low profile Nvidia card in there for smoother accelerated playback and 5.1 sound output over HDMI.

The other one I intend to use as a NAS box (donating its 2GB RAM to the HTPC and sticking 16GB in there for ZFS), I'm planning on putting 4 (or 5) 4tb drives in to it and running FreeNAS off a USB stick.

I was thinking of running some sort of software raid solution, but this would mean losing half of the capacity to redundancy. For a bunch of mkvs and some music, I don't think I'd worry too much if I lost some of them. So what I might try and do is use 3x4 tb drives for media and then load in 2 smaller 1tb drives in RAID for backups and storage. I believe freeNAS can handle that kind of setup. I've heard unRAID is good as well, but not free.



On the N54L as a HTPC, it's a bit big for my liking (but fits in TV unit ) and the only noise as mentioned is the fan. It's only noticeable if there's no sound playing , but I think I'll look at replacing it at some point, anyone know what I should be looking for for this?

The bright HP LED on the front is annoying (I thought I saw an option to disable it in the BIOS, but can't find it now) but easily fixed with some black insulation tape.

[Agent]

Really? I've been using ZFS for years and never had a problem. I had more problems with Linux RAID (I used OpenFiler for a bit). I had what turned out to be a duff SATA cable which would sometimes fail a drive on reboot, so the drives would keep reorder themselves.

I wouldn't ever recommend running something that requires direct access to disks like that as a VM though.

It's only from what I've been reading on their own forum. There is a pretty good slideshow which is well worth a read about it: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...9.2.0.pptx.zip It's quite technical and I had to google a few terms as ZFS is new to me, but I understand most of it.

It seems that ZFS is a pretty awesome filesystem that's quite resilient, but if anything goes wrong with the zpool, you're basically knackered in a lot of situations. The reasons they say you really should use ECC RAM and the likes seem fairly solid, but it seems much more suited to commercial applications where alternative backups should also be present.

Failure of a VDev in a zpool will cause the zpool to fail. This means all data in the zpool is lost. There is no chance of recovering data from the remaining Vdevs and there are no recovery tools for ZFS.

Even recovering data from a NTFS RAID array isn't particularly difficult these days, so I find that a little bit daunting.

Maybe it's not an issue in the real world? I only have people on their forums loosing their data to go off, which is somewhat one sided but with other filesystems being available....I'm just not sold on it.

I think for development purposes only I might put FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault on a VM and have a play anyway.