Creating my own server + some questions.

[Rentiger]

Hi there, this is my first ever post on this forum, so if I did anything wrong, that's probably why!

 

I recently gained an interest in how LTT manages and operates their servers, and wanted to create one of my own. I have attempted to read the large post on how to create a NAS and whatnot and was able to learn about a few things, but as a beginner, all of that information was just a lot to take in. So, as a secondary source of information I have decided to create a forum post and directly ask for help. More specifically, what type of hardware I should use for an entry level NAS/Server, what software there is / what to use, and lastly how to use the server.

 

Also, I really want to know what kind of server LTT uses for their needs.

 

I am very sorry if this sounds like a lot of questions, but google has not been very resourceful for me today

 

Thanks in advance,
Rentiger

 

P.S: Responses are appreciated, as I am willing to take any help that I can get.

[Mnky313]

21 minutes ago, Rentiger said:

Hi there, this is my first ever post on this forum, so if I did anything wrong, that's probably why!

 

I recently gained an interest in how LTT manages and operates their servers, and wanted to create one of my own. I have attempted to read the large post on how to create a NAS and whatnot and was able to learn about a few things, but as a beginner, all of that information was just a lot to take in. So, as a secondary source of information I have decided to create a forum post and directly ask for help. More specifically, what type of hardware I should use for an entry level NAS/Server, what software there is / what to use, and lastly how to use the server.

 

Also, I really want to know what kind of server LTT uses for their needs.

 

I am very sorry if this sounds like a lot of questions, but google has not been very resourceful for me today

 

Thanks in advance,
Rentiger

 

P.S: Responses are appreciated, as I am willing to take any help that I can get.

If your interested in using it as just a NAS any old PC with gigabit networking and a bunch of SATA ports will work for that, You can buy older rack servers REALLY cheap if you wanted to make a game server/NAS in one box, look for dual socket Xeon X5650 Servers, you can some on eBay for <$150 including shipping (in the US at least)

[Master Disaster]

You can run a perfectly functional NAS with nothing more than a Raspberry Pi 4, a USB 3 HDD and 16GB SD Card.

[Rentiger]

Does gigabit networking mean my wifi has speeds of 1gb/s, or is it something else entirely? Also, I am having trouble finding listings for said rack server that are not above $200, which is a little over my budget as I just want a entry level NAS.

Edited July 26, 2019 by Rentiger
grammar and clarification

[Kered124]

1 hour ago, Rentiger said:

Does gigabit networking mean my wifi has speeds of 1gb/s, or is it something else entirely?

Not your wifi; but your wired connection speed. Try searching on models "Dell poweredge R710" or "Hp Proliant DL360 G7"

[Rentiger]

Thank you all so much!

[taekicks]

I've been using an old HP Proliant ML110 off of ebay for the last 3 years and it has been serving me well. My workload grew so I'm looking at replacing it, but for someone learning and it's a great box and you don't have to spend much either. For a time I would have told you to use Linux, but these days if you want to get serious about stability, a consistent OS, and easy management I highly recommend getting your feet wet with FreeBSD or get started with FreeNAS (which is FreeBSD but with a pretty web interface). I think if you want to learn a real Unix-like OS do a BSD or give Devuan Linux a try. You'll want to have your server connected to a switch, not going over wifi.

 

For my server, I spent $120 on the box got a couple NAS hard drives (don't get consumer stuff like WD Blues/blacks or Seagate Barracuda)...I also recommend taking advantage of ZFS for your filesystem for your disks and look at ZFS mirroring.

 

If you want a simple "dump file here" setup, look at SAMBA. Or do something fun like Nextcloud. Or both! I use Nextcloud for most of my files but use SAMBA for a couple things still

[Rentiger]

Is it possible to use an old laptop as a temporary NAS as I get set up? The laptop has 8gb of ram and is running an i5 that is clocked at 1.7ghz base.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

Edited July 27, 2019 by Rentiger
clarification

[Salacious B Crum]

14 hours ago, Rentiger said:

Is it possible to use an old laptop as a temporary NAS as I get set up? The laptop has 8gb of ram and is running an i5 that is clocked at 1.7ghz base.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

Yes that can be done just add an external hdd

[Rentiger]

1 hour ago, mrbilky said:

Yes that can be done just add an external hdd

I have heard that if I use an external HDD, that certain software such as FreeNAS does not work well with it. Can you please elaborate? Also, I need help deciding software as I have read everywhere that FreeNAS does not like laptops. Is it possible that I can use Windows Server in a VM instead? That would be much better for my uses.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

[dieserkai]

Depending on what your use case is: if its just a data storage which does nothing more than a bit of nfs and networking (especially now video encoding for streaming) you can just buy a cheap Pentium g4560 (or something newer), a small m-atx mainboard, a used LSI raid controller (like the lsi9261-8i, available for 30-40$ on ebay) and some  4 x 3.5" HDD enclosures (u will need 3 5.25" slots for the enclosurer) with SAS backplane and SFF-8087 connector.

 

If you need 12 or more drives you can decide if you buy a Controller with  4 internal SAS connectors, or to add a SAS Expander like the Intel RES2SV240

 

I'm currently runnng this setup with 3 SAS HDD enclousres for 12  x 8TB drives and a configured RAID 50.

The operating system (debian) runs on a small m2 sata ssd.

[Rentiger]

Just now, dieserkai said:

Depending on what your use case is: if its just a data storage which does nothing more than a bit of nfs and networking (especially now video encoding for streaming) you can just buy a cheap Pentium g4560 (or something newer), a small m-atx mainboard, a used LSI raid controller (like the lsi9261-8i, available for 30-40$ on ebay) and some  4 x 3.5" HDD enclosures (u will need 3 5.25" slots for the enclosurer) with SAS backplane and SFF-8087 connector.

 

If you need 12 or more drives you can decide if you buy a Controller with  4 internal SAS connectors, or to add a SAS Expander like the Intel RES2SV240

 

I'm currently runnng this setup with 3 SAS HDD enclousres for 12  x 8TB drives and a configured RAID 50.

The operating system (debian) runs on a small m2 sata ssd.

Is it possible for me to use a VM on my laptop as a nas? Also, are usb storage devices an option for a NAS?

 

In terms of buying used machines, I am very inexperienced as I am very bad at navigating Ebay and finding good deals, so I would prefer if I could use my laptop.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

[dieserkai]

1 minute ago, Rentiger said:

Is it possible for me to use a VM on my laptop as a nas? Also, are usb storage devices an option for a NAS?

 

In terms of buying used machines, I am very inexperienced as I am very bad at navigating Ebay and finding good deals, so I would prefer if I could use my laptop.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

why in hell should some run a vm on a laptop as a nas? You would be very limited regarding storage space. A typicall laptop comes with one, maybe two 2.5" or m2 slots. so you could only add more drives by adding usb discs. The most usb drives are slow. So you will pass through some usb drives to a vm on a laptop to make the storage available via wlan or regular ethernet. Your data access would be slow. i would never recommend that.

 

from how many device do you want to access your nas? what capacity do you need? What redundancy do you need?

 

the fact that you consider using a vm on a laptop as a nas let me suggest that you could go with any consumer "nas" drive like the WD my cloud drives. 

 

[Rentiger]

I am just trying to make a NAS as an experiment to see how it works and how to set one up. There will be no important data stored on this NAS. I have forgotten to make that clear earlier.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

[Jarsky]

On 7/27/2019 at 5:23 AM, Rentiger said:

Also, I really want to know what kind of server LTT uses for their needs.

 

Their servers are predominantely custom builds with Dual Xeon Supermicro boards. Those servers are not really entry level, they will typically cost a few thousand dollars

 

Quote

what type of hardware I should use for an entry level NAS/Server, what software there is / what to use, and lastly how to use the server.

 

It really depends on how much you want to spend, how much performance you're after, or how much flexibility you want. 

 

An entry level NAS could be as simple as an old Optiplex or something off eBay with a couple of disks attached and using Storage Spaces in Windows. 

You could step up to something like a basic i3/Ryzen 2200G system with a few disks running a NAS OS like UnRAID, Rockstor or OpenMediaVault

For high performance but the least flexibility you can go for something like FreeNAS with ZFS

 

On 7/27/2019 at 10:25 AM, Rentiger said:

Is it possible to use an old laptop as a temporary NAS as I get set up? The laptop has 8gb of ram and is running an i5 that is clocked at 1.7ghz base.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

 

Technically you can, but its not recommended or reliable since you'd have to be doing USB attached. A lot of software wont support USB attached storage for RAID either so you may be quite restricted in how you setup your storage.

 

12 hours ago, Rentiger said:

I am just trying to make a NAS as an experiment to see how it works and how to set one up. There will be no important data stored on this NAS. I have forgotten to make that clear earlier.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

 

If you just want to "test", then perhaps just make a VM on your main PC with a few 2GB virtual disks. That will allow you test out the configuration. That way you spend no $$$ learning, and you can invest it in proper hardware to make a real NAS

[Jarsky]

*duplicate post*

[soulreaper11207]

14 hours ago, Rentiger said:

I am just trying to make a NAS as an experiment to see how it works and how to set one up. There will be no important data stored on this NAS. I have forgotten to make that clear earlier.

 

Thanks,

Rentiger

Older hardware that can support Ubunut server or OMV. Have fun. I'm sure you have an old laptop laying around. Off to learning you go!

[Rentiger]

11 hours ago, Jarsky said:

 

Their servers are predominantely custom builds with Dual Xeon Supermicro boards. Those servers are not really entry level, they will typically cost a few thousand dollars

 

 

It really depends on how much you want to spend, how much performance you're after, or how much flexibility you want. 

 

An entry level NAS could be as simple as an old Optiplex or something off eBay with a couple of disks attached and using Storage Spaces in Windows. 

You could step up to something like a basic i3/Ryzen 2200G system with a few disks running a NAS OS like UnRAID, Rockstor or OpenMediaVault

For high performance but the least flexibility you can go for something like FreeNAS with ZFS

 

 

Technically you can, but its not recommended or reliable since you'd have to be doing USB attached. A lot of software wont support USB attached storage for RAID either so you may be quite restricted in how you setup your storage.

 

 

If you just want to "test", then perhaps just make a VM on your main PC with a few 2GB virtual disks. That will allow you test out the configuration. That way you spend no $$$ learning, and you can invest it in proper hardware to make a real NAS

Thank you so much! You have no idea how much you have helped me. Again, THANK YOU!

 

With much thanks,

Rentiger

 

 

[Rentiger]

12 hours ago, Jarsky said:

 

Their servers are predominantely custom builds with Dual Xeon Supermicro boards. Those servers are not really entry level, they will typically cost a few thousand dollars

 

 

It really depends on how much you want to spend, how much performance you're after, or how much flexibility you want. 

 

An entry level NAS could be as simple as an old Optiplex or something off eBay with a couple of disks attached and using Storage Spaces in Windows. 

You could step up to something like a basic i3/Ryzen 2200G system with a few disks running a NAS OS like UnRAID, Rockstor or OpenMediaVault

For high performance but the least flexibility you can go for something like FreeNAS with ZFS

 

 

Technically you can, but its not recommended or reliable since you'd have to be doing USB attached. A lot of software wont support USB attached storage for RAID either so you may be quite restricted in how you setup your storage.

 

 

If you just want to "test", then perhaps just make a VM on your main PC with a few 2GB virtual disks. That will allow you test out the configuration. That way you spend no $$$ learning, and you can invest it in proper hardware to make a real NAS

What OS would be good to set up a VM with? I have seen so many, and am not really user which ones are supported.

 

Thanks for all your help,

Rentiger

[AngryBeaver]

On 7/26/2019 at 12:52 PM, Master Disaster said:

You can run a perfectly functional NAS with nothing more than a Raspberry Pi 4, a USB 3 HDD and 16GB SD Card.

I can second this. If you are wanting to run an entry level or beginner nas this is the best approach. It is also pretty cheap. Now I generally prefer to buy actual desktop internal drives and toss them in an enclosure then connect that to the PI/router/etc. That being said you can run a decent amount of drives off of one PI.