Buying A Server, What To Get?

[lazyfortress]

Discord?  I'm downloading it right now.  By the way, does Netgear support wifi range extender settings on a regular router?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, lazyfortress said:

Discord?  I'm downloading it right now.  By the way, does Netgear support wifi range extender settings on a regular router?

what model of router?

[lazyfortress]

Netgear RangeMax Duo Wireless-N router WNDR3300

[lazyfortress]

What's your discord username?  Mine's lazyfortress

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, lazyfortress said:

What's your discord username?  Mine's lazyfortress

whats the number

 

[lazyfortress]

What number are you talking about?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, lazyfortress said:

What number are you talking about?

discord number.

[lazyfortress]

#6517

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, lazyfortress said:

#6517

added you not a donut here

[jackhua]

the processor is kind the slow ,,, i will really suggest you just do it the unraid , or built the new software system with Nas4free, unraid you have to pay for it ,, but the nas4free is FREE, install the nas4free on you PC, maybe just ungrade the memory to 32gb , in the nas4free you can add in OWNcloud too ,,,,,,,, its awsome

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, jackhua said:

the processor is kind the slow ,,, i will really suggest you just do it the unraid , or built the new software system with Nas4free, unraid you have to pay for it ,, but the nas4free is FREE, install the nas4free on you PC, maybe just ungrade the memory to 32gb , in the nas4free you can add in OWNcloud too ,,,,,,,, its awsome

CPU is plenty fast. Its about the same as a modern i5. 

 

For software cenetos will be fine. Unraid is just linux with a few things preinstalled, nothign sepcial. 

 

Also no use for 32gb.

[lazyfortress]

I think I figured out the problem with the wifi card.  My wifi card by tp-link has a shorter bottom part

 

[lazyfortress]

I'll be on later.  Thanks again!

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, lazyfortress said:

I think I figured out the problem with the wifi card.  My wifi card by tp-link has a shorter bottom part

 

Thats not it. Its the config on linux. And fixing that would take forever the way were doing it.

[MrKickkiller]

On 22-12-2016 at 10:45 PM, lazyfortress said:

<SNIP>

My server's doing that now^

 

First off:

127.0.0.1 is a special ip adress. Every pc around the world (that's IPV4 enabled) has this internal ip as to say: "Hey, you should link to myself!". So what you're doing there is basically asking your own server: "Hey are you there?".. Which it replies to, duh.

 

The situation i'm currently thinking of is like this

 

MODEM -- ROUTER -- SWITCH -- GAMING PC

                                                   | -- SERVER

 

The modem router and switch could be an all-in-one. Most isp's on this side of the pond do this (which I actually hate, but I digress). And -- should be a networking cable.

 

The ip adress your server should be getting if you're truly connected behind a normal consumer router (that is set up as is 99% of home connections) is like this: 192.168.y.x . Potentially the y could be a different number, but that depends on your specific setup. 99.99% of home routers have it set to either 0 or 1. The x however should be a value between 2 and 254. Why 2? Most likely your isp modem/router already has ownership of the 192.168.y.1 ip adress. And to further give you some basic ipv4 knowledge: It can't be 255 either (binary: 11111111) since that final octet is synonym for "Hey, everyone on this network should get this message".

 

And before you ask, sites like www.whatsmyipadress.com will certainly not give you the ip we are all looking for. That's your public ip. The 1 connection you have to the outside world. On the interior of your network you can have however many (max 254 per single /24 subnet (don't worry about subnets here) and you have 256 subnets in your private range) devices you want connected, but they will ALL have an ip that starts like 192.168. 

 

To further dive into networking, there's always the "Networking for Dummies" book. Don't know about its age or relevance, but i've had university classes on the matter, but our school book is, how to say this, quite the read.

 

For Dummies: https://www.pdf-archive.com/2011/02/23/networking-for-dummies/networking-for-dummies.pdf

My course book: https://github.com/mw12/Academics/blob/master/sem 3-2/Computer Networks/Computer Networking A Top Down Approach 6th Edition.pdf

(Goes really into depth on the various layers of the OSI-model. The chapter you should be looking for is anything to do with the NETWORK LAYER)

 

@Electronics Wizardy: If you ever feel like you need someone extra to help explaining/ problemsolving. Ping me  

[MrKickkiller]

5 hours ago, lazyfortress said:

I think I figured out the problem with the wifi card.  My wifi card by tp-link has a shorter bottom part

 

 

6 hours ago, lazyfortress said:

Netgear RangeMax Duo Wireless-N router WNDR3300

 

Just as a fair warning.

Wireless N has a theoretical maximum of 300 Mbit/s, while a normal network cable has a maximum of 1000Mbit/s

With overhead and wifi-strength dropoff, you'll be likely looking at a 150 Mbit/s connection speed to your server, instead of the roughly 800 Mbit/s or 100 MB/s that wired connections would offer you.

[MrKickkiller]

6 hours ago, lazyfortress said:

• Being able to connect it to the internet
• Be able to use the remote access capabilities of this server
• Be able to store files on the server remotely (from a different computer wirelessly)
• Be able to access the server from anywhere in the world

 

1. Just connecting the servers lan port to your router with a cable/ switch should set this on up directly. Unless the previous owner set a static ip outside the range of your routers directly connected subnets. (I'll look back trough your screenshots tomorrow to see if this is the case). Performing the command `ping 8.8.8.8` or even better `ping www.google.com` would let us see if the pc is actually able to connect to the internet. 8.8.8.8 is the ip of a Google's DNS server, and to test if the DNS on your machine is set up correctly, pinging www.google.com lets us see if it can go check what ip the google website is hosted at and ping that machine.

 

2. From my limited knowledge on how to set up a share, you basically have to set up a CIFS/ NFS/ Samba share to your network. Aka: Showing a (real/virtual) drive to the rest of the network. Normal policy is that nothing is available to the network, unless otherwise set up.

 

3. Anything connected to your home network should be able to acces the previously created share, and acces it. If login details etc are correct, you can acces this machine's storage just like it's your locally attached drive. For video footage of how dumping files on / off the machine would look, check out this Linus video (subject of the video is kinda not what we would like to happen, but it shows how network shares would be accessed):

 

 

In this case:

 * Tritium is the server machine's hostname in the network. Yours would be whatever you or the previous owner set it at.

 * client_user is the name of the share.

 

4. This is quite the tricky one. How, you ask? Well, to make sure you can say "Hey, let's connect to my server!" you would have to publicly expose your server to the internet. Something you would only want to do if you have proper firewalls and security set up. The internet is a scary and nasty place to put your machines on. If you would publicly expose that server via portforwarding on your router, I or anyone else on this forum could try and track your public ip down and scan it for any open ports. A port that would be open would lead to your server, meaning we can try and log in on it. The amount of effort it takes to write a script that basically tries every combo of password on your most likely username is nihil, nada, njet. Once we gain a login, you have no more control over what we can do with the server. A good suggestion someone said here earlier: Owncloud, basically your own private dropbox. Anything stored and transfered via Owncloud is encrypted. So your Ultra-360-Noscope-LMG-LTT-headshots and dank memes would be transmitted (and stored locally) looking like total random data. No patterns, no telling if it's an image or a video, a gif, a webpage etc.

 

If you were to ask yourself, "Wait, if it's that easy, why aren't you hacking my LTT account?":

A. (For the moment) I am not interested in it.

B. Against LTT-Forum TOS & License etc.

C. Many major companies also log your login attempts, so if i were to try 1500 times, it would probably get flagged and my public ip would get blocked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[MrKickkiller]

On 22-12-2016 at 9:47 PM, lazyfortress said:

I'm so confused.  DRAC us for remote access, right?  As if the server was right in front of you.  CentOS doesn't have a legitimate home screen?  How can I store files on it from another computer?

As Electronics_Wizardry has said, you can install a home screen onto centos, just like you would have a windows desktop or a mac-whatever. Yet noone does this on a server. It's a waste of resources even. A server is there to serve for its master (Yea, that's you!). You give it commands via the most simple, yet VERY powerfull interface of the command line. Via the command line you could list all make commands that delete / moves all files older than 24 hours and have a specific word in their name. Just with about 70 characters or so and 1 enter. Try that with a windows. (Admittedly there is a thing as Bash in Windows now (same type of shell as on your centos machine), but I call that blasphemy)

 

https://www.codecademy.com/courses/learn-the-command-line/lessons/navigation/exercises/your-first-command?action=lesson_resume

 

Being not knowledgeable about DRAC,  I've done some research on it. DRAC, sounds kinda like IPMI

It's basically a little added chip inside the case that allows you to perform VERY low level functions to the machine via a webinterface. You can turn the machine on, off, disconnect drives, get statistics etc. You can get a view of the video output. You can even type commands (because there is no home screen environment like on Windows) in the video output ot control the server. The one thing you can't do is dump files to it via the interface. DRAC, and it's web gui is like you were sitting at the machine physically, but in reality you could be on the moon (if you A. have internet and power on the moon and B. Your machine is accesible over the internet (See my later comment on why you should be carefull with this.))

[.:MARK:.]

Honestly, having servers myself and working on a bunch of others, IPMI is not very useful. I only ever use it for mounting an ISO and going through the install process of a hypervisor. After that the server is either online or rebooting (once or twice a year), and there is no need for the IPMI. I really wish that people would stop looking at it and the equivalents from other manufacturers to be an amazing feature that allows remote access, because it's a security nightmare and is nowhere near as good as OS built in remote tools like SSH or RDP.

[MrKickkiller]

6 hours ago, .:MARK:. said:

Honestly, having servers myself and working on a bunch of others, IPMI is not very useful. I only ever use it for mounting an ISO and going through the install process of a hypervisor. After that the server is either online or rebooting (once or twice a year), and there is no need for the IPMI. I really wish that people would stop looking at it and the equivalents from other manufacturers to be an amazing feature that allows remote access, because it's a security nightmare and is nowhere near as good as OS built in remote tools like SSH or RDP.

It's probably usefull if your server is halfway across the continent and it just hung. For entering commands, just use SSH.

[lazyfortress]

I'm on Christmas break currently, so I won't be able to work on my server for about 5 days.  I'm in a different state.

[GymBody]

On 18/12/2016 at 3:37 AM, MarieKirya said:

What do you plan to do with it, keep in mind that 1U is going to sound like a jet and will be horribly inefficient on your energy bill. If you're going for a NAS, there are other options.

 

I would recommend barebones Debian or CentOS. 
I would follow one of DigitalOceans wonderful tutorials on server setup. 

Then you may want to look into how to port forward and what that is.

 

can i do the same to my D-Link Sharecenter to make it accessible over the internet? I am supremely lost and know nothing about setting up a FTP server which apparently its capable of doing.

 

Basically all i want to do is make my nas accessible over the internet. Have spent many hours changing many settings( in the router and the NAS) till i have no idea whats screwed up anymore. Dont want to reset anything out of pure lazyness to redo all the stuff like SSID names..  

 

Thank you in advance for any help guys

 

Need to shoot off for now hopefully the gurus here can help me or point me in the right direction.

 

I explain my problem in this thread below in the best way a noob can.

On 18/12/2016 at 3:37 AM, MarieKirya said: