i'm building plex server/media

[plexer45]

what would be better to do? run ubuntu and do zfs or just run unraid? 

[Sauron]

for a media server it doesn't really matter, you could even get away with LVM

[10leej]

13 minutes ago, plexer45 said:

what would be better to do? run ubuntu and do zfs or just run unraid? 

It's really a question on what you want to do.

UnRaid makes doing things easy, but gives you a pretty hard limit for when you want to do things that are fairly complicated. Ubuntu gives you a lot more freedom, but I just don't like the ZFS monoculture (look I know it's been around forever and has billions invested into it, but the command synxtax is alien for my neckbearded ways and it uses dkms modules).

 

Now plex is fine and all, but what exactly are you looking to set this up for? Because if it's just a NAS, you don't actually need plex at all. Setting up a samba share, and a docker container isn't exactly hard and any reasonable modern ARM or x86 system can play local media. I myself just run a debian instance in a virtual machine that just hosts a nfs/samba share on btrfs which my htpc connects to and plays everything via kodi.

I generally prefer this to plex since I'm only serving one client, now if I was setting this up for the whole family then I'd eye an actual media server like Plex/Emby/Jellyfin

  

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

for a media server it doesn't really matter, you could even get away with LVM

LVM is not a file system and doesn't have that functionality. You mean ext4/xfs in a logical volume

[plexer45]

12 minutes ago, 10leej said:

It's really a question on what you want to do.

UnRaid makes doing things easy, but gives you a pretty hard limit for when you want to do things that are fairly complicated. Ubuntu gives you a lot more freedom, but I just don't like the ZFS monoculture (look I know it's been around forever and has billions invested into it, but the command synxtax is alien for my neckbearded ways and it uses dkms modules).

 

Now plex is fine and all, but what exactly are you looking to set this up for? Because if it's just a NAS, you don't actually need plex at all. Setting up a samba share, and a docker container isn't exactly hard and any reasonable modern ARM or x86 system can play local media. I myself just run a debian instance in a virtual machine that just hosts a nfs/samba share on btrfs which my htpc connects to and plays everything via kodi.

I generally prefer this to plex since I'm only serving one client, now if I was setting this up for the whole family then I'd eye an actual media server like Plex/Emby/Jellyfin

  

LVM is not a file system and doesn't have that functionality. You mean ext4/xfs in a logical volume

a plex server that can find content and download with backup that I can store some other data and that I can and drives easily in the future @10leej

[10leej]

13 minutes ago, plexer45 said:

a plex server that can find content and download with backup that I can store some other data and that I can and drives easily in the future @10leej

Ok so....

 

Any of the "NAS" distros will work fine, thats UnRaid, TruNAS, OpenMediaVault are fine. But that's if you specifically want a GUI which I wouldn't fault you for.

 

Bear in mind, you can't really grow a ZFS pool and there's really no GUI utilitiy for expanding a LVM system, but.... Lemme me introduce you to the btrfs commandline (obviously it can be more complicated and doesn't mount at boot, but this is just an example for examples sake)

 

(these are real working commands, you can copy paste them and they will work and do REALLY REAL DAMAGE to existing data, you've been warned)

 

Basic 4 disk raid 10 (you dont need partitions for btrfs, just let it do all the work)

mkfs.btrfs -m raid10 -d raid10 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde

lets mount it to something (you only need to mount a single disk to mount the entire array for btrfs)

mount /dev/sda /mnt

make sure it works as a filesystem

btrfs filesystem usage /mnt

you now have a file system you can read/write to. Now lets add a disk (ideally for raid 10 you add 2 disks at a time and no they don't need to be matching sizes or even the same model drive)

btrfs device add /dev/sdf /dev/sdg /mnt && btrfs balance start /mnt

and it automagically works

 

Source:

btrfs wiki

[plexer45]

6 minutes ago, 10leej said:

Ok so....

 

Any of the "NAS" distros will work fine, thats UnRaid, TruNAS, OpenMediaVault are fine. But that's if you specifically want a GUI which I wouldn't fault you for.

 

Bear in mind, you can't really grow a ZFS pool and there's really no GUI utilitiy for expanding a LVM system, but.... Lemme me introduce you to the btrfs commandline (obviously it can be more complicated and doesn't mount at boot, but this is just an example for examples sake)

 

(these are real working commands, you can copy paste them and they will work and do REALLY REAL DAMAGE to existing data, you've been warned)

 

Basic 4 disk raid 10 (you dont need partitions for btrfs, just let it do all the work)

mkfs.btrfs -m raid10 -d raid10 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde

lets mount it to something (you only need to mount a single disk to mount the entire array for btrfs)

mount /dev/sda /mnt

make sure it works as a filesystem

btrfs filesystem usage /mnt

you now have a file system you can read/write to. Now lets add a disk (ideally for raid 10 you add 2 disks at a time and no they don't need to be matching sizes or even the same model drive)

btrfs device add /dev/sdf /dev/sdg /mnt && btrfs balance start /mnt

and it automagically works

 

Source:

btrfs wiki

only have 2 drives rn and yes i want gui and be able to run docker @10leej

[Sauron]

37 minutes ago, 10leej said:

LVM is not a file system and doesn't have that functionality. You mean ext4/xfs in a logical volume

Well duh, that's what LVM is. I guess I could have specified I was assuming a "normal" FS underneath.

[10leej]

1 minute ago, plexer45 said:

only have 2 drives rn and yes i want gui and be able to run docker @10leej

ok so then TruNAS, openmediavault, Unraid will work fine

[plexer45]

16 minutes ago, 10leej said:

ok so then TruNAS, openmediavault, Unraid will work fine

can you add any docker to truenas @10leej

[10leej]

1 hour ago, plexer45 said:

can you add any docker to truenas @10leej

truenas core, no trunas scale yes

 

What the difference between them?

TruNAS scale is linux based, trunas core is the same old trunas except it's freebsd based

[jde3]

On 3/18/2022 at 7:04 AM, 10leej said:

It's really a question on what you want to do.

UnRaid makes doing things easy, but gives you a pretty hard limit for when you want to do things that are fairly complicated. Ubuntu gives you a lot more freedom, but I just don't like the ZFS monoculture (look I know it's been around forever and has billions invested into it, but the command synxtax is alien for my neckbearded ways and it uses dkms modules).

I'm a storage admin and I use ZFS in production.

ZFS "monoculture" if it even is so exists because it's extremely good. It is the leader because it is the best and most reliable. It does not really compete with btrfs or other home user file systems.. it competes with enterprise storage solutions like NetApp, DDN and Dell-EMC. Those are it's main competition. Not HAMMER/2 and btrfs, and bcachefs, and apfs, and Reiser5, etc.. Where as all of those have interesting ideas.. they aren't at the same level ZFS is. As we all know competition makes everything better so I wish all other filesystems good luck but ZFS is in a different class. Nothing else like that could hold a candle to NetApp but ZFS can.

..And it has one of the best CLI syntax's of anything out there.
When you do a zfs list it has options built in to only display certain columns, to remove the header or to separate it's output separated by a single tab. In effect this makes it not only pretty and convent for people using the CLI but also for scripting because the output does not have to be run through awk or grep or anything else. -- And there are many many more things like that. I use it every day and I could go on and on about it.. I dare say it might be the single best CLI ever written for a extremely complicated program.

(There is actually a story behind that at Sun where the cli was originally a hot dispute internally by very smart people and it's now a point of pride for the dev's to make it very good from memory of this old war.)

LVM is what has a absolute terrible syntax because it has to deal with partitions and volumes  and volume groups and it honestly reminds me of DOS. It's horrible to use and takes ~4 lines for things I can do in ZFS with one.
 

On 3/18/2022 at 7:36 AM, 10leej said:

Bear in mind, you can't really grow a ZFS pool

You can, but you need to plan ahead for it. Striped mirrors (like raid10) are easily expandable on ZFS. Raidz has some exceptions but can be done.

Also it's done with one line.

zpool add pool da0 && zpool online -e pool
vs.
btrfs device add /dev/sdf /dev/sdg /mnt && btrfs balance start /mnt

(it's not necessary to use mount points and device paths because zfs can figure out that information out for you.)

Personally I think HAMMER/2 is in better shape than btrfs (and it has the right license to port to Linux) but Linux can suffer from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome at times.

[jde3]

6 hours ago, plexer45 said:

what would be better to do? run ubuntu and do zfs or just run unraid? 

If all you want is storage and plex. Anything you want to use would be pretty easy to accomplish.

 

If you want to do more.. Ubuntu or TrueNAS might be a better route to take (they are free compared to unraid).. but "the best" will depend on your skill set and what you want to do. (and the things you want to do in the future you don't yet know about) Storage is hard to change once you settle on something.

btw you may want to take a look at Emby or Jellyfin as well.. they have some advantages over Plex in certain situations.