jkirkcaldy

Sorry not sure I understand what you’re asking. Is the windows server instance you want to upgrade the virtual machine or the bare metal install. If it’s a VM I can’t see why you couldn’t upgrade like normal. But the system restarts several times during the upgrade process so either way there will be downtime. You our could always download the 180 day trials of each server OS and test the upgrade process before you do it live. The simple answer to can the VM be live throughout is no. If you need complete uninterruptible service from your VM you should consider a second server and set up replication so as soon as the VM on one machine goes down the next machine takes over.

You may be better having a server / workstation dedicated to transcoding the video files before the editors touch them which is the industry standard way of working. I know you said premiere, but in Avid (which is the industry standard for film and TV) you have to transcode all the footage before the editors can even begin working on it, by doing it this way you get much better performance during the day to day editing than any render server will give you. A proper workflow will be much more beneficial than $10000 of server hardware. I would recommend something like: - Footage comes in - Make backups -Ingest/transcode the footage on a dedicated non editing machine -Store footage on a (FAST) shared server -editors use the transcoded footage from the shared storage -when finished either do a Same as Source export - so if you transcoded your footage to DNx120 export to the same codec and same settings (should be really quick) -use your ingest machine to transcode to delivery friendly files. i.e. h.264 etc. This should work fine for you. Also don't build your own machines, there is a reason companies exist selling purely video editing servers/workstations. If you do decide to build your own storage, go for more lower capacity drives as you will benefit more from the performance that these will give you in a proper raid array. (Also use a proper RAID array, not software arrays that store a file on a single disk, they are great for file storage but not for when you have multiple editors wanting access to the same files at once.) Get yourself a couple of HPZ820/840's as these are specifically designed for editing and workstation use. You should be able to do everything above with premiere and adobe media encoder, BUT Premiere does not play well on a network, it is fine for smaller files and projects but when they start getting larger it can grind down to almost unworkable conditions. Look into avid, they do a subscription no that is similar in price to adobe, then use blackmagic fusion (free) for gfx. This will give you a much better workflow and is way more scale-able than premiere.

Veeam looks very interesting. I will have a look this evening when I finish work. I have looked at backblaze but unfortunately they don’t support server OS unless you use their bus unless plans where the price very quickly shoots up. So at $5 per month per TB it would very quickly add up. And I can’t afford to be paying $75 per month (a cost that would only get greater over time.) Perhaps the best thing to do in terms of keeping costs down is to build another server out of some spare parts I have lying around or about to free up put some hard drives in it, and take it to my parents house to backup there until I can find a new service. At least then I can backup my important files offsite. (Especially as I am offering a few friends use of my nextcloud service. Need to make sure that this data is completely safe.) I will also still look into tape archiving as you can get a lto4 drive for fairly cheap on eBay now.

Crashplan has decided that it is pulling out of home backup solutions. This really throws a spanner in my backup solution. My current solution was to backup my devices to a local drive on my server and then back the server up to crashplan central. This offered great protection for my devices and ok protection for the important files on my server. Now I'm at a loss as where to look next. I would continue on with the crashplan small business plan but they have got rid of the computer to computer backups so I'm looking for a new solution. Anyone have any advice on where to look to get unlimited cloud backup storage that will work with windows server 2016. Also if anyone has a good backup program that will work cross platform to backup my data from my devices (windows/mac/ubuntu) to my server that would be great. Currently I am playing with the server essentials backup service for my windows devices but this will only work on my home network. Crashplan was great because I could backup to my server remotely. I have about 15TB of data that needs to be backed up. (I am looking into tape archiving for some stuff but will still need a lot of this backed up to the cloud) So I guess what I want to know is: 1. PC to PC backup software that will work cross platform (preferably remotely too) 2. Cloud backup solution (unlimited storage, works on server 2016) Any help appreciated, thanks

Why do you want to move your computer out of your room? Noise? Space? Heat? Just something you want to try? The idea of thin clients is to make managing multiple computers and users across a massive network with hundreds of computers and users. I recently looked into this and it looked quite complicated, to the point where I decided that it wasn't worth it for me as I would be the only one using it. If you would be the only person using the machine you could get something very lightweight - even a rasberrypi should work, and use remote desktop to connect to your workstation. Running over ethernet you shouldn't see any / much of a performance hit. you don't want to be moving a noisy or hot pc out and connecting to it using another pc that will be either of those things. Also if you are using the processing power of your workstation in the basement then you don't need to spend your money on a pc with high performance parts. You want to keep this cost as low as possible otherwise you may as well keep the pc in your room. If you do it this way and you are running some sort of vm using unraid or something similar you can shut down your vm and turn it on using the web interface on the rasberrypi which is useful if there is a problem or you need to do restarts etc.

it should be fine. And if you can't access your nas anyway you may not have a choice. Is your nas set up with a static IP address? if so is this set on the nas or the router? i have has issues before where if the static IP was set on both my devices then it wouldn't work properly. I would restart the router and look at the DHCP table to see what IP address your nas is pulling. It may have changed for some reason or there may be a conflict somewhere. Depending on your nas can you access it through the cloud? I know Qnap systems let you access and manage their systems through the cloud.

I wouldn't use your desktop and leave it on 24/7. The Pros for this system: -You only have to worry about one system -only one computer powered on vs 3 -Powerful CPU for plex transcoding. Cons: -this system will consume a lot of power being left on 24/7 because it is powering the CPU and GPU -your website/plex/server is offline if you have to restart your computer (you often need to restart a gaming pc for installs/crashes/diagnostics) -I'm not sure how well certain CPU intensive games will handle sharing CPU resources with a VM or two. I would perhaps build out low powered server from used parts on ebay. you don't mention anything about what your requirements are for plex so I'm going to assume maybe 1-2 transcodes simultaneously, nor do you mention what you use for a webserver? I built my first plex server for £250 without drives. It was a Pentium CPU with no GPU. If you pay for a plex-pass you can download and install the hardware transcoding preview that uses the built in gpu on the CPU to transcode meaning you can get more power from a less powerful chip. Getting an R710 is a good shout as you can do everything you need on one box that you can leave running 24/7 with a separate vm for webhosting on linux and plex on whatever you are comfortable with. You should check out Nextcloud for file storage, lets you host your own cloud storage with desktop clients and mobile apps like dropbox or google drive etc. but is quite advanced to setup.

Crashplan lets you use their normal "desktop" application on server OS. I currently back up my windows server 2012r2 to crashplan's cloud service. About 60ish USD for a year of unlimited storage. And bonus you can also backup to local drives as well as local computers for free using the same software.

Do you need to share the avid projects between the two or more editors at once? Do you need bin locking etc? Also what's your budget? Storage requirements etc? How are you connecting to the qnaps? Is everything coming out of the nas from a single cable or does each workstation have a dedicated connection. Gigabit lan may be fine now but if you start adding more systems you will run out of bandwidth so will need 10gb ethernet (either now or a free pcie slot to add later) to a switch where everything else will be connected via normal 1gb ethernet. Also how big are your projects? Premiere for example is happy for small projects to be on a network but when you start getting into feature length or high res footage then you need very fast storage. (There's a reason Linus built a nvme ssd raid server to edit from.) The way backup works is slightly different to a normal server and may be similar to something you do now, but we backup all our footage onto two external drives - graids or similar as well as Sony ODA archive drives - so the server isn't backed up itself. Which is common practice in editing work flows. My advice would be to get something with many drives in a fast and redundant array and you should have more than enough bandwidth without having to deal with two separate servers. (A server /nas for longterm backups is going to fill up very fast.) The backups should be separated from the server. There is too much that can go wrong with automated backups to leave it to an app.

The 125MBs is internal transfer speeds from your computer to the nas. (Theoretical speed if both ends are wired via ethernet and the drives on either side can read/write at a sustained speed of 125MBs or greater.) It doesn't matter what your Internet speed is. Even installing games onto a nas you won't be able to play them over the Internet or wifi. You will need to be plugged in via ethernet either 1gb or higher. I think you can in theory play games from a nas. Although it may be worth looking to iSCSI if this is something you want more stability. This in laymen terms let's you mount a network drive like it is a plugged into your computer directly. It's a bit more complicated than that but for simplicity sake I won't go into it any deeper. You will have to read up on setting up an iSCSI drive though as it's quite a bit more complicated than a normal shared folder on a nas. To be honest, although not quite as interesting or fun to do, you may be better off getting normal usb3 drives for your games and using the nas for file storage.

My thoughts for someone who works in the TV industry in the UK. You need to decide which part of video/photography is more important to you as each camera has it's pros and cons for both. My general rule of thumb at the moment is that Sony are doing more, and more interesting things with video than Cannon these days. Cannon used to be the go to camera for indie filmmakers but that is less the case now. If video is more important and 4K is a must then go with either the Sony A7Sii (or panansonic GH5) these cameras a great performers when it comes to video and you just can't beat the low light performance of the A7Sii. BUT for photography the sony will perform worse than the cannons or even the A7R. It has a much smaller pixel count - which is the reason it is so good in low light as each pixel has more surface area on the sensor to capture light. But it means your photographs are going to be much less detailed. And I think the A7R only shoots 1080p video. With the a7Sii you can also attach an external video recorder to get higher bitrate 4K recordings which would be better for editing and grading etc. On the other side Cannon takes fantastic photos and has a great colour science. And nearly all of it's features these days are geared towards photographs rather than video. Especially for it's higher end DSLRs as they don't want to compete with themselves. For example the C100 cinema camera is cheaper than the 5DmkIV so if they were to give the 5D 4K and other video features they would sell less of the C100s. Even when they do add 4K to their DSLRs like the 1D they do it in a way that may not be what you want. The 1D has a full frame sensor but when you shoot in 4k it shoots in cropped mode meaning you aren't using the entire sensor and you get the "zoomed in" effect with all your lenses. Speaking of which, lenses are less of an issue today than they were previously as you can get some pretty great adaptors and can pretty much put any lens on any camera these days. But this is where you need to think seriously about the camera system you want to buy as if you buy good lenses then they will outlast any camera you decide to buy. You don't want to buy a shed load of sony lenses to decide that you want to shoot on cannon next. My recommendation is that if you are going to be spending a lot of money on a lens go with a canon L lens as they are more versatile and have way more adaptors to connect them to other camera systems. They are also compatible with most entry level as well as some higher end cinematography cameras from the C100 all the way up to REDs In the end it really depends on your use case and which side of the photo/video you are going to need more. As with most things one camera is not the better than the other at all things. You need to think long and hard about what your needs are, and also what your budget is. Hope that helps a little.

I ended up breaking things so completely I gave up and did another fresh install. I took out all my drives and erased them on a windows machine initialised them and put them back in the server. Did a fresh install, set up the LAMP stack manually, installed my webmin, then my website and then nextcloud and it all seems to be working as expected. Pages loading within milliseconds rather than minutes. So there must have been something weird going on with my drives, maybe the reminants of a previous OS or something it didn't like. But all is well again and it is now all *touch wood* working perfectly.

You could look into the Nvidia Shield for game streaming, it runs android TV so has all your htpc apps like plex, netflix etc and the gamestream works pretty well, even lets you stream in 4k, even if your computer monitor isn't 4k. It also comes with a remote and a controller now too. And you can use the newer Xbox one controllers if you prefer. But I would think you would need a dedicated gigabit LAN port for each of the VMs of sharing a 10GB Ethernet into a 10GB switch using 1GbE to the rest of the clients. The limitation here is that you will have to use nvidia GPUs on all your VMs otherwise it won't work. But I would echo others concerns about the maturity of threadripper at the moment. I don't think it will have as many problems as Ryzen did at launch but I would maybe wait until the chips start hitting general consumers and people start testing it. I assume that there will be a lot of testing and benchmarking coming with virtualisation in these processors in the coming weeks and months. But it certainly is a great time to be a PC enthusiast at the moment with genuine competition in the market again.

So I've been playing with this all day and I have made some progress. I downloaded and enabled google pagespeed which helped quite a bit and I have also enabled the second ethernet adaptor and bonded them together in a round robin config. This has made things speed up considerably. I uninstalled apache and re-installed, and did the same for webmin. Webmin now behaves normally. and loads in a reasonable amount of time (a couple of seconds rather than tens of minutes) Web page is still a little slower than I think it should be. But I also have nextcloud installed and this is working normally so there is something weird with the web page portion of my setup that is throwing a spanner in the works. I'm going to keep digging and if anyone has any ideas/suggestions I'm always receptive. Thanks

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Internet is back up now so I have done the php test page. It gives me a huge list of all the settings for PHP Apache etc, tbh I don't really know what I am looking for so if someone is happy to have a look and see if they can spot anything I would be very greatful

This is the second complete fresh install I have done. I even swapped the boot drive thinking it may have been a poor performing drive but I can't see how this would be the drives fault. Just a fyi on the VM it was 2 virtual cores of an i7 3770 running in hyperV 4GB RAM - virtual disk was on a mechanical drive also. whilst the dedicated machine is not the most powerful in the world, considering that this used to be my plex server from a while back and could transcode a couple of 1080p streams at once it should be able to handle a simple web page. specifically a modified version of this site: https://startbootstrap.com/template-overviews/agency/ It looks like the internet is out at my home at the moment but as soon as it's back up I will create the test php page and report back.

I have a website that was being hosted on an ubuntu VM but due to collecting random bits of hardware over the past few months I have a system that I can use as a dedicated webserver. It is a fairly low powered system but should handle it fine. Specs are: CPU: Pentium (can't remember which one exactly, runs at 3.2GHz) 8GB RAM DDR3 Bootdrive is 160GB mechanical hard disk I installed ubuntu server, installed apache, php and mysql went through the configs and made them match the settings the VM was using and changed the port forwarding to the new server. But it loads so painfully slow that it is unusable. A page will take nearly 5 minutes to load if it loads at all. I also installed webmin but that takes so long to load 10-15 minutes if at all that it is pointless. I have no idea why it is taking so long to load sites. I have run top and the cpu is sitting at 99% idle and memory has 7.5gb free any help would be greatly appreciated

I would probably stay away from the Z800/Z820, they are great machines that I use daily when working with Avid for video editing etc but for using as a server I think they are going to be very power hungry and I think there are a few limitations in terms of how many drives you can put in them. Not sure what your requirements are in terms of the size of the computer but these computers are pretty huge. In terms of actual performance, I have a home server that I put together using my old gaming hardware, a i7-3770 32GB RAM no gpu etc and it runs plex, and two linux vm's constantly with another linux vm I use to play with and a win7 vm for windows testing. I also host a website, game server and run crashplan for the backups and it runs it all great. For plex this will easily play 4 hd streams I think the most I have had is 4 transcoded streams and one direct play with my family accessing it and there were no issues. And the Passmark score is total so with two xeons you should be laughing, especially for 4 streams. Just make sure that whatever you chose you make sure you get enough RAM, I don't bother with ECC as my workflow doesn't really require it but I think the Z800 series can be a little fussy when it comes to hardware.

This was the issue, Went into the apache2.conf file and changed the servername from my external IP to 0.0.0.0 - restarted apache and it looks like this has solved it. Thanks, most of my googling wanted me to change settings in the router etc.

server is ubuntu 16.04 I can access everything in the lan if I use the local ip address 192.168.1.x everything is on the same subnet I have no VLANS or anything separating the network either.

I have a server on my network that does multiple things, amongst one is hosting a few pages for a website, designed for managing the server remotely and for friends and family to access plex/test to see if it is down etc. I also host a nextcloud server as well. Now I can access all of the pages of the site remotely or if I am connected to a VPN, but I can't connect to it if I am on the same LAN as the server. I suspect it is a setting in the router (Asus DSL-N16) but I am not sure what setting I should be looking for. I have looked around for loopback settings or something that may be similar but I'm either blind or more likely it has another name and I am missing it. more info on the home network: DHCP is handled by windows server 2012r2 DNS goes through windows server 2012r2 router is basically acting as a PPPoE client/modem until I get paid and can buy a long enough cable to build a pfsense router in my rack upstairs. Any Ideas?

ah, maybe try usb 3 if it was in a usb2 port or visa-versa. Also check what the usb settings are in your bios?

I had this exact problem with a corsair K70 keyboard, and the way I fixed it was I now only plug one of the two cables into a usb3 port rather than both cables into usb2. That seems to fix the issue for me.

My server usage is almost identical to this so this is what I'm using. CPU: i7 3770 MOBO: Gigabyte z77-udh5 RAM: 32GB (can't remember what ram) PSU: some random 850w (needs replacing with something more efficient/reliable) Case: Logic Case SC-4316 (4u rackmount) OS HDD: Crucial 250gb ssd Storage HDD: random assortment of drives that I am slowly replacing with more nas specific drives. around 35TB total raw storage. OS: Windows Server 2012r2 RAID: FlexRaid Transparent raid. I use plex for my media server, this does all of what your requirements are for serving your media and transcoding it on the fly for different devices with different codec support. OS is windows so if the game runs on windows - it will probably work on this too - you could always use a hyper-v VM or some other vm to host it on another os if needs be. not too sure what the policy on the forum is about talking about torrenting and piracy probably not a good idea, but there are a couple of automated systems that you can implement with remote access to add and search whilst away from your server. DM me for more info. I use filebot to run a script on my downloads folder to check for new files and rename and move into the correct folders for plex as plex is pretty strict about the file structure and file naming if you want it to work properly. Cloud storage - I use nextcloud running in a linux vm using a shared folder on the server for it's storage. This basically works like dropbox or other cloud providers, i.e. multiple users, desktop and mobile clients, file sharing etc etc. All accessible outside of the house but for it to work properly you are going to want a web domain and a ssl certificate. VPN, i actually don't bother with a vpn, I did but tbh the internet at my home isn't good enough to bother. And the whole reason I use a vpn is to stop my isp logging all of my web traffic so it would kind of defeat the purpose. But it's fairly easy to get set up. I use crashplan to backup my computers to the server and then I backup the server (minus plex media which is about 15TB now) to crashplan's servers, probably about 1TB of important documents and the computer backups. Os drive is backed up to an internal drive to protect against a drive failure, that's about it. I also just set up a second linux vm using ubuntu server to cache all my steam downloads as well as the games my flatmates download too (we play a lot of similar games so makes sense to do this.) so the game/update downloads to the server and the client at the same time then the next time it needs to be downloaded it comes from my server rather than over the net. The whole thing runs at about 160w average, but it's never idle really. it's always doing something.