NAS For Delivering Footage to Editors over Internet?

[NTDaws]

Just now, ShadowWolf810 said:

Hmm ok, I'll keep looking into that FTP you suggested. Was really hoping to be able to do it all for free. 

 

On a side note, is it possible to install FreeNAS onto a VM on my current system so I could play around with it? Or will it not be able to access hard drives correctly in a VM?

It should work.

[ShadowWolf810]

3 minutes ago, Being Delirious said:

It should work.

Interesting, I might try that too. Can you think of any other ways to go about accomplishing my goal? I'm just thinking, most people are probably going to want to send their stuff via Dropbox anyways, I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just have a Dropbox pro account, use it to download everything from the clients, then upload it to a server and I could walk the editors through using one of those 3rd party programs if necessary to connect to it, then it would be wayyy less risky giving out just the public IP. Hmmm

[NTDaws]

Just now, ShadowWolf810 said:

Interesting, I might try that too. Can you think of any other ways to go about accomplishing my goal? I'm just thinking, most people are probably going to want to send their stuff via Dropbox anyways, I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just have a Dropbox pro account, use it to download everything from the clients, then upload it to a server and I could walk the editors through using one of those 3rd party programs if necessary to connect to it, then it would be wayyy less risky giving out just the public IP. Hmmm

It would work fine. Then if you wanted you could have a local file server if you wanted for you're personal files.

[ShadowWolf810]

1 minute ago, Being Delirious said:

It would work fine. Then if you wanted you could have a local file server if you wanted for you're personal files.

You mean that method I described would work fine? Using Dropbox then reuploading everything to my server? Yeah I'd definitely need to separate my personal files from it as well, even business records and whatnot really shouldn't be stored on it either

[NTDaws]

Just now, ShadowWolf810 said:

You mean that method I described would work fine? Using Dropbox then reuploading everything to my server? Yeah I'd definitely need to separate my personal files from it as well, even business records and whatnot really shouldn't be stored on it either

I was gonna say dropbox and I thought I was on another post, i am so sorry haha. But yes that method would work fine.

[ShadowWolf810]

1 minute ago, Being Delirious said:

I was gonna say dropbox and I thought I was on another post, i am so sorry haha. But yes that method would work fine.

Ohhh haha no worries, I appreciate the help. 

 

A year ago or so someone was walking me through overclocking my CPU and they sent me a file for a monitoring software off their ftp and it was filezilla, but it wasn't an ip, it was filezilla.com/adlkfaj;dsflk or something like that. Do you think there'd be a feature like the but the opposite way where you could send a link like that that gave access to upload something to the ftp?  

[NTDaws]

6 minutes ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

Ohhh haha no worries, I appreciate the help. 

 

A year ago or so someone was walking me through overclocking my CPU and they sent me a file for a monitoring software off their ftp and it was filezilla, but it wasn't an ip, it was filezilla.com/adlkfaj;dsflk or something like that. Do you think there'd be a feature like the but the opposite way where you could send a link like that that gave access to upload something to the ftp?  

Not that I can recall.

[ShadowWolf810]

2 minutes ago, Being Delirious said:

Not that I can recall.

Gotcha, ok this might be a dumb question. But say the FTP server is running on a windows machine and someone else were on a Mac. Is it going to matter how the hard drives are formatted for the transfers? I was watching some FreeNAS setup videos and they create different shares for each file format, so smb for Windows, AFP for Mac.

 

[NTDaws]

Just now, ShadowWolf810 said:

Gotcha, ok this might be a dumb question. But say the FTP server is running on a windows machine and someone else were on a Mac. Is it going to matter how the hard drives are formatted for the transfers? I was watching some FreeNAS setup videos and they create different shares for each file format, so smb for Windows, AFP for Mac.

 

Doesn't matter on FTP. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

Can you point me to a good tutorial on "setting up an FTP server" 

 

Not looking for only local sharing of files though. Needs to be over the internet. I was hoping there was some OS out there that would allow for people to just sign in through a web interface and drag and drop their files, no mapping network shares or anything like that. 

id probably use something like ownclould. It lets you much easier setup accounts, and make a nice web image.

 

Also unless you have very fast internet, this server will be very slow. 

 

Most nas os's have good support owncloud, or you can put it on a linux distro or windows. For your use id probably just use freenas.

[Eniqmatic]

Why not use a VPN? I haven't read the full thread apart from the beginning but the suggestion of FTP is a bad idea due to the security of FTP. Setting up a VPN or as suggested above, Owncloud/Nextcloud is also a good idea.

[Pixel5]

as this has not been mentioned enough here, how fast is the fastes connection you can get?

 

if you got below 100mbit/s upload you can kind of forget all of this as everything will be too slow to work with.

[ShadowWolf810]

20 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

id probably use something like ownclould. It lets you much easier setup accounts, and make a nice web image.

 

Also unless you have very fast internet, this server will be very slow. 

 

Most nas os's have good support owncloud, or you can put it on a linux distro or windows. For your use id probably just use freenas.

So owncloud is like a plugin for a NAS OS like FreeNAS? Can you describe that a little more, and also what you mean by "a nice web image." Is that like a customizable interface for people to sign up or up/download things through? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

So owncloud is like a plugin for a NAS OS like FreeNAS? Can you describe that a little more, and also what you mean by "a nice web image." Is that like a customizable interface for people to sign up or up/download things through? 

its a google drive like interface for it. Its a plugin for many nas os's or will just run on windows or linux. 

[ShadowWolf810]

17 hours ago, Eniqmatic said:

Why not use a VPN? I haven't read the full thread apart from the beginning but the suggestion of FTP is a bad idea due to the security of FTP. Setting up a VPN or as suggested above, Owncloud/Nextcloud is also a good idea.

So my only knowledge about VPNs is that if you use one all your traffic goes to a VPN company and then is encrypted before it goes out to whatever website you were requesting, that's my understanding of it. How would hosting your own work. I'm guessing that's something this server could do? Or is that a router thing? And how would you go about connecting to it? I do like the added security but in my experience VPNs do slow everything down quite a bit which might not be ideal, and if it would be complicated to connect to it'd be hard to have clients use it. 

 

I could get around that with the suggested method above of downloading every clients footage through Dropbox, and then I could upload it myself to the server, and the editors could pull from the server, then upload a final product to it, and I'd have to upload it to Dropbox to send off. Which just sounds like a pain, it would be amazing if I could make a temporary account and password for the client, give editors permissions to see client folders, send a nice link to the client and have them upload their footage. Process needs to be extremely simple because a lot of people aren't that tech savvy. 

 

I'll definitely look into Owncloud like you guys suggested, but you think that'll solve all these issues? 

[ShadowWolf810]

9 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

as this has not been mentioned enough here, how fast is the fastes connection you can get?

 

if you got below 100mbit/s upload you can kind of forget all of this as everything will be too slow to work with.

Well this server isn't something I'm hoping for the editors to actually edit off of remotely, that would be great but I think the hardware and expense of something like that is a bit out of the budget for now. 

 

You think as only a delivery system it still wouldn't be viable? Currently my house has about 10-12 Mbit/s upload. And I anticipate with the work we'd be starting off with the raw footage will be in the 20-50 GB area per project, if that. So it'd be slow to download everything but not unbearably slow I don't think. But I'm also looking into the option of getting business grade internet at my house, because I don't want to run into monthly data cap problems because I can definitely see with 10 editors working on multiple projects a month going through more than 1 TB of downloads  

[ShadowWolf810]

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

its a google drive like interface for it. Its a plugin for many nas os's or will just run on windows or linux. 

Interesting so it allows you to share folders, or give people access, and admins to see everything and manage permissions etc... How is that different from using say FreeNAS's own interface, from the few videos I've watched it seems like it basically does all of those things

[Electronics Wizardy]

34 minutes ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

Interesting so it allows you to share folders, or give people access, and admins to see everything and manage permissions etc... How is that different from using say FreeNAS's own interface, from the few videos I've watched it seems like it basically does all of those things

Well it's made for wan not lan. Freenas has no easy way to manage wan shares and is made for to lan shares. 

[ShadowWolf810]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Well it's made for wan not lan. Freenas has no easy way to manage wan shares and is made for to lan shares. 

Ohh ok interesting. So would you still recommend running FreeNAS as the operating system then, or would it be easier to run Windows and NextCloud as an application? My understanding is that FreeNAS is zfs based, and my knowledge of all the new RAID configs with that are extremely limited. 

 

Also would you recommend buying a used server? Someone suggested a Dell Poweredge 2950. You might remember from other posts I've made that I've got an old AMD 8350 processor, mobo and ram laying around so with a power supply and case I could put my drives in something like that. What do you think? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

Ohh ok interesting. So would you still recommend running FreeNAS as the operating system then, or would it be easier to run Windows and NextCloud as an application? My understanding is that FreeNAS is zfs based, and my knowledge of all the new RAID configs with that are extremely limited. 

 

Also would you recommend buying a used server? Someone suggested a Dell Poweredge 2950. You might remember from other posts I've made that I've got an old AMD 8350 processor, mobo and ram laying around so with a power supply and case I could put my drives in something like that. What do you think? 

Stay away from a 2950. They  like power and will want over 30 a month in power to run and are very loud. If you want a used server I'd get a Dell c2100. 

 

Since you have a old system I'd just get it running and install open media vault or freenas. 

[ShadowWolf810]

7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Stay away from a 2950. They  like power and will want over 30 a month in power to run and are very loud. If you want a used server I'd get a Dell c2100. 

 

Since you have a old system I'd just get it running and install open media vault or freenas. 

Hmm ok cool, I looked the c2100 up and its a bit out of the budget for right now. So say down the road this whole company thing does get big enough to warrant getting a proper server, would I run into issues transferring the raid to it? Or would I need to just buy enough drives to where I could copy the existing data to the server, then erase the drives from my old system and add those in as well. 

 

I've also heard FreeNAS doesn't like hardware RAID controllers because it can't access the S.M.A.R.T data properly? 

 

One other thing too, I was looking into FreeNAS yesterday and theres FreeNAS 9, and then FreeNAS Corral, which looks completely different and the FreeNAS Youtube channel was uploading tutorials and stuff for it literally hours before I looked it up so would you recommend staying with 9 for now?

[Electronics Wizardy]

24 minutes ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

Hmm ok cool, I looked the c2100 up and its a bit out of the budget for right now. So say down the road this whole company thing does get big enough to warrant getting a proper server, would I run into issues transferring the raid to it? Or would I need to just buy enough drives to where I could copy the existing data to the server, then erase the drives from my old system and add those in as well. 

 

I've also heard FreeNAS doesn't like hardware RAID controllers because it can't access the S.M.A.R.T data properly? 

 

One other thing too, I was looking into FreeNAS yesterday and theres FreeNAS 9, and then FreeNAS Corral, which looks completely different and the FreeNAS Youtube channel was uploading tutorials and stuff for it literally hours before I looked it up so would you recommend staying with 9 for now?

Upgrading to a real server can be done with moving drives. But you should have a backup of the server. 

 

I'd probably go coral. 9 won't be updated much in the future. 

[ShadowWolf810]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Upgrading to a real server can be done with moving drives. But you should have a backup of the server. 

 

I'd probably go coral. 9 won't be updated much in the future. 

Ok, this is my first foray into anything past RAID 0 so not sure how it all works. 

 

My only worry is just that there aren't as many tutorial videos out there but new updates are probably more important

[ShadowWolf810]

@Electronics Wizardy So I still have to buy a domain to use NextCloud over WAN? It doesn't generate a link that you can send out to people? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

39 minutes ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

@Electronics Wizardy So I still have to buy a domain to use NextCloud over WAN? It doesn't generate a link that you can send out to people? 

I'd buy a domain so you don't have to give them a ip. If you have a dynamic ip you can also have it automatically change the ip when your dynamic ip.