jkirkcaldy

This ^ You can run a web server on a RaspberryPi with little difficulty. Even with a larger website you don't need that much power. You could buy a celeron or pentium which would save more than $10 for the 1800x. You need to put in what you want the web server to actually do, how many visitors are you expecting, are you going to need a huge SQL database? is it just for media streaming? Any advice without any of that information is useless.

Grafana and telegraf. There's a bit of a learning curve but you can monitor everything from one web page. This is my dashboard for some useful info: https://grafana.themainframe.co.uk

The problem is with things like the benchmark tests is that they do great usually because the files that they are writing and reading are all still contained on the ssd. So if you are reading a lot of files shortly after writing them you will see a huge increase in performance like you did above. But I would wager that if you were to copy a large file onto the array then copy it back again immediately, record the results, then wait until the file isn't on the cache any more and copy it off the array you will see far less impressive numbers. But if it's as much a technical exercise as it is a practical one, and you can spare the SSD then it's worth it.

No, H265 is way to CPU intensive still for my CPU. I keep most things to H264 blu-ray rips. It's always the problem when people say, what specs should I use for my plex server. There are so many variables that there isn't a one size fits all answer.

I think this is not good advice. I'm running a plex server with an Intel 3770 and that works perfectly for a Plex media server, can transcode around 5-6 streams before the CPU is the bottleneck. However In this situation, everything else I would agree with. Use the E3 quad-core for gaming and the 10 core for a media server. Also here is no reason you couldn't install some VMs on the box with the E5. Plex doesn't really need that much RAM. I have no idea about the system requirements for Blue Iris but I think you could easily allocate 48GB RAM and a few cores to the VM. The way I would set it up is: System #1 Server 2016/Hyper-V Run it as the NAS/backup server 1VM for plex/handbrake 8-10 vCPU 4GB RAM 1VM for Blue Iris 4vCPU 4-8GB RAM (depends on how many cameras) Leaves you with at least 52GB RAM for various other VM (don't forget you can over provision your CPU it's not a 1:1 allocation ratio like RAM.) System #2 As you have it. you could easily have a few VM running whilst gaming and not see much of a performance hit (depending on the game/workload.

I wouldn't bother adding an SSD. Especially as you will only really see a performance increase in the write speeds, of which, unless you are backing up loads of clients at once, the speed of a normal mechanical HDD will be fine.

Everyone always talks about transcoding 4k, That just seems so insane to me. Until Plex can transcode 4k > 4k there is no point in transcoding it. you would be better off with two separate files. And if the idea of that puts you off because it will use too much storage space, you shouldn't be looking at a 4k server, those files can reach 100gb per 2 hour film in some cases. Because as it stands, as soon as plex transcodes a 4k file (which is usually HDR) it will downscale it to 1080 and you lose the HDR. So I would look at whether your client can direct stream. If it can't it doesn't matter how powerful your system is it will look like crap. A 1080p remux will look 100 times better than any 4k transcode.

My two cents, I work in a TV production company in England so have a fair bit of experience with what you are trying to do. First of all, as it has been said, do not try and remote edit. It doesn't work. There is too much latency and compression involved to make it worth while unless you have specific infrastructure in place. (I'm talking dedicated lines from your ISP that I can guarantee you don't have now as they are thousands per month) Now onto the solution: You could have a central file server where your editors could download the footage if your upload speeds are any good. But honestly, with 600€ I think you are going to struggle to buy anything new. I would check ebay and pick up a used workstation. Have a look at HP Z820, Z620, Z420 or newer.

Tried all that. I have a feeling it's a dead psu. my next plan of action, is to plug in a normal atx psu just into the motherboard to see iif it will post, at least that way I can see where the problem lies. But if it is a power supply issue I think that will be the end of it unfortunately. The replacement psu is around £350 each so it would be 1k to replace all three and I don't think they will be willing to spend that sort of money on getting it fixed. Unless I can replace the psu with another brand as long as all three are the same model?

Sorry, I was confusing a couple of devices, In my head I was using 6TB drives - not 2TB. But in a cruel twist of fate it appears there is something very wrong with the server. It won't power on at all. I know that the server wasn't retired due to a fault, it was out of support and using ageing technology so they replaced it. I've tried pulling the PSU out, re-seating the CPU new cmos battery, pulling all the drives, raid cards, ram, nics so it is just one cpu and one stick of 2gb ram. Nothing. Just does nothing. I even tried shorting the power pins on the mobo thinking the switch was broken. So I am thinking that it's either a PSU issue or a mobo issue. Unfortunately I don't have a spare of either to test it with at the moment. For those interested this is what it looks like inside.

Yeah that’s a fair point. A single raid 6 array would leave me with around 35tb usable space right? As I essentially lose two disks to parity.

Yeah that’s why I said raw storage. If there is a raid card I will probably set up a couple of RAID 5 or 6 arrays on there. Maybe just a 5. It’s not mission critical data so if the whole array goes down it’s just a pain in the ass rather than a massive problem.

So I pulled the lid off the server today, there are three RAID cards/HBA in there already, not sure what they are exactly. I think they are likely to be some sort of RAID cards as this was the server that they were using to edit from, so I highly doubt the disks weren't in some sort of array. There is only 1 cpu and only 6BG RAM. So Freenas is out of the question. I will boot the thing up tomorrow hopefully and see if I can pull some more detailed information about what is inside. I think it has Windows 7 loaded onto it at the moment. But I will probably leave that drive as is and just install a new fresh drive to load the os onto. This means that the company can sell the thing if they want to or even revert it back to factory settings down the line. But from some preliminary research I am thinking I'm going to install Ubuntu server (maybe a desktop environment but that's neither here nor there atm.) and set up sharing using samba. Whilst we are set up with AD, this is all managed by an external IT shop. As far as I know they aren't using groups and because we deal with freelancers, I don't think my company is about to start. (It works as is now, why fix something that isn't broken?) Because of this I don't think I can use AD to manage permissions, I don't think the company will want to pay the IT company to manage this machine, but because nothing else in the workflow is changing so if this suddenly stops working it's not the end of the world. So my thinking is I could get them to add a group policy to add the shares to mount on login/boot with an user - read only credential that I set up on the server. With another admin user being set up to add the footage to the server in the first place. The web page thing was just an idea but it is probably easier to just use the build in windows search function.

I'm going to have a little quiet time at work in a little bit and there is a project I would like to get started on. Here's what I'm trying to do. I work at a video production company. This server is not for the editors to edit from, we have a dedicated SAN on it's own network with vendor support contracts. What we do have however is the old server that the editors used to edit from. I don't know the exact specs of the machine other than it has 48TB raw storage from 24 2TB disks. (no idea if they are all working I've not had the chance to test the system yet.) Our current workflow is footage come in from location and is backed up onto two external drives and then archived onto sony ODA for long term storage. Specific footage is requested to be ingested so that gets transcoded and added to the SAN. Edit Producers then ask for the same footage to be put on a small hard drive so they can view it and make a paper edit. The bottle neck at the moment is having to put the footage onto the small drives for the EP. It can be time consuming and just inconvenient for all parties involved. So what I want to do is take the old server that is just sat there not even plugged in and use this as a nas to hold the footage for the EP. This way when the footage is backed up onto the two external drives, I can also make a copy onto this nas, then all the EP and anyone on the network would have access to the footage instantly, without the need to copy it. It's just there when they need it. So what help do I need? Well, I'm just wondering the best way to go about this. I will probably install some flavour of linux on it or maybe freenas. Should it just be fine to share it out as a networked drive, if so should I use smb or nfs? Can I set their access to read only to avoid people accidentally deleting the footage? How much bandwidth should be enough (going on an average of 10-people viewing footage all footage is 50mbps my maths says that a 1gb port should be more than capable of doing that.) And and I'm just throwing this out there, is there a webpage (internal) I could send people to, they search for the camera-roll and then it opens it up for them in windows? I should note that things like plex and emby would not work in a situation like this as the EP need access to the timecode as well as other metadata that things like plex can't handle.

So I have an R710, I'm only using 2TB drives as it's not my primary storage server. But. If you do decide to go with drives bigger than 2TB, don't use RAID 5 without first understanding the risks. Also, for Plex, you will likely have a better experience with gaming hardware than server hardware as to get a similar level of performance (for Plex) you will be looking at a lot more money. My R710 runs all my web services and VMs but my plex server runs off a i7-3770 (which will outperform the r710 with dual xeons for a plex workload. and it's also more power efficient) RAID 5 will work fine with whatever drive size you want, until a drive fails. Then the rebuild will take so long and put so much stress on the other drives that you are very likely to lose another drive during the rebuild process. If you are just going to use the server as a media server for Plex, I wouldn't bother with hardware RAID. You will quickly outgrow your storage and if you have used hardware RAID then your options are more limited than using other methods. I use FlexRAID - Transpared RAID for my plex server. It may not be the best option for you and there are other software solutions out there but a few pros and cons for T-RAID PROS: Shows as one big drive under one drive letter. Drives are all NTFS meaning you can pull a single drive from the array and ready it on any computer without extra software. You can set up multi drive parity - e.g. I can loose 2 drives before I start to lose data If a drive fails and you can't rebuild from parity - you only lose the data on that drive, all other drives aren't affected. you can mix different drive types, sizes and vendors - they are all pooled together to give you a total storage amount. You can keep adding more drives later when your array is full You can manage the array from a web browser. It only spins up the drives it needs to access CONS: Speed - you are limited to the speed of the drive that you are currently writing to (you can set up landing drive, e.g. a ssd that acts as a write cache to speed things up) UI - can be a bit clunky if you don't set up sync properly you won't have any parity. You can only add drives as big as your parity drive - If your parity drive is 1TB, you will only be able to use 1TB on your data drives. (you can swap your parity drives later to add more storage, but again it means buying a large drive with no storage gains) Can't use any block level storage on the drive, so no iSCSI.

Plex is great for streaming media but make sure you look into how to set it up to avoid problems with intermittent internet connections. Plex needs to call back to their servers for authentication so if you know you have internet connection issues then there are some settings to change but you should be aware before committing.

I got it all working now. I pulled all cards out of the server and flashed the card with the LSI it mode firmware in the one slot I knew it worked in. After I checked it was working and drivers were being passed through correctly I added the expander and plugged all my drives in. It took a bit of work getting them to all show up at once, and everytime i booted the server I would have to pull the drives and put them back in one by one - turns out this was a driver issue and switching to the correct driver solved this. I then plugged my 10GBe card in and that showed up too. so once I confirmed the the H200, 10GBe and SAS expander cards were working correctly I plugged in the 1GB nic and the TV tuner car and everything works. No idea why it didn't work before but everything is working as expected now. I will eventually swap out this server with some actual server grade hardware, I'm thinking a Supermicro CSE-846 with a couple of Octa-core xeons for an plex server that may actually handle transcoding 4k. I will probably change my disk setup at this point too and go for a real hardware RAID setup but until I can find a spare 2k lying around to buy the server and standardise my disks, this will have to do.

Yeah it's a pain. I'd be tempted to just use my R710 for everything but Plex actually performs much better on the i7 compared to the dual xeons. Maybe I'll flash it tonight and then pull everything out, and put it all back in one by one and see where it breaks. Or if it works at all.

So a while ago I asked on this forum what the best way of getting more sas/sata ports for my server and the advice given was buy a Dell PERC H200 or a LSI 9211-8i but as far as I can tell they are basically the same thing. So I have done exactly that. I also bought an IBM SAS expander card to give me the 16 ports that I need for my server. So I need to flash the H200 to IT mode and will be following this tutorial. But last night I thought I would plug everything in, that way I could at least see if my server picked it up and it was seeing all the drives and this is where I start to bang my head against the wall. So I am using a Z77-UDH5 motherboard with an i7 3770 (it's my old gaming rig.) And there are already some cards plugged in. The layout of the motherboard is: PCIe x1 - gigabit nic PCIe x16(8) - 10GBe SFP+ PCIe x1 - Hauppage tuner card PCIe x1 - SATAx4 PCIe x16(4) - Startech sas PCI - empty PCIe x16 (4) - Gigabit nic So my plan was to run it in this config: PCIe x1 - gigabit nic PCIe x16(8) - 10GBe SFP+ PCIe x1 - Hauppage tuner card PCIe x1 - empty PCIe x16(4) - H200 PCI - empty PCIe x16 (4) - SAS Expander However, the problem I am having is that my H200 or my 10GBe isn't recognised by my system unless it is in the top 16x slot. I can lose the two gigabit nics and even the tuner card if needs be. My motherboard says that when the last 16x slot is occupied the 2nd slot becomes a x4. Maybe this is causing the issue with it not being recognised by the PC? which would be annoying as I'm pretty sure the SAS expander only needs the PCIe for power. If push comes to shove I could maybe lose the 10GBe but I don't want to. Also I can't get my drives to show up when connected to the SAS expander. Maybe this is a compatibility issue? I read that a sas expander should just work with any HBA but that doesn't seem to be the case here? Do you think I will just have better luck once my card has been flashed to IT mode? It is an IBM 46M0997 SAS expander card.

Could you not look into a seedbox and host the file on there for people to download as a torrent? Or a lot of seedboxes come with some sort of ftp server build in so people could download it from the ftp? a lot of seedboxes have "unlimited" bandwidth and a high speed connection to the internet, and come with around 500GB to start with. they are around the £10 per month price range depending on what offers you can find.

duplicati, install the software on the clients and set-up an ftp for them to backup to. they can encrypt their backups and control everything themselves. can do the whole disk or just specific files. I use it to back up all my workstations and laptops to my server in my home.

So after changing the MTU settings it worked well one way, so I logged into the shared drive using a different user and bam it started working properly. I can now transfer at about 400-500 mb/s which is about right considering disk speeds etc. I could set up a ram disk and see if it's hitting the full 1gb/s speeds but considering I am maxing out my disk speeds anyway I don't see the point. I can also now mount my iSCSI disks again where as I couldn't before. I still can't browse the computers in LANShark but everything else seems to be working fine so I'm hesitant to changes anything and break it again.

I'm not sure how it works with Emby, but a plex pass is well worth the money. Get a lifetime pass any it's a one off price, then you don't have to pay for the apps or anything and then you get access to features like syncing to clients for offline viewing. Very useful for times where you won't have access to the internet like on a plane or a train where signal may drop etc. Not sure about free apps though

It's DNS, it's always DNS. ^ This would be the easiest way of accessing it from your computer but it means you won't be able to access it from any other device unless you change the hosts file for them as well. The best solution would be to et up a DNS server on your lan, have all your devices point to this which will resolve your website to an internal ip address and forwad everything else to an external DNS provider.

So I changed the MTU settings to 9014 from 9000 and that seemed to work one way for a little. They should definitely be on the same subnet but I downloaded Lanshark to test the p2p connection and I can't browse through the files on there at all. Here are my settings: NAS Build: R710: Like I said, I have no issues connecting to either server from other computers on the network. Makes me think that there may be an issue with the switch not letting the 2 10GB ports speak to each other properly. But I could (and probably are) be wrong.