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What system does Linus use for his server?

I wonder what operating system does linus use for his studio server, and what protocol he uses to share disks. I know he uses ZFS filesystem and CentOS on one of his racks, but I see Windows UI on monitor (the one in server room)

Also I tried ftp to setup network disk, but there was security, permission issues and.. I just couldn't use it as "drive." I can't save or open documents right away niether saving directly. What kind of protocol can perform what i want? Smb? (I don't think it's smb though.. I saw linus directly accessing files at home with smartphone. I believe smb is for local sharing...)

Sorry if this topic is already answered.

 

Btw this is my first post at this forum. Hello!

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I don’t know if he has a dedicated video but he uses several VM. 

Unraid, freenas, and a few other Linux Distros. 

I don’t think he uses windows server. 

If he runs server, it’s likely the latest version. 

All the video editors should have Windows 8 or 10. It’s been a while since I got a good look at their taskbar. 

 

Edit: 

welcome to the forum. 

I’m not well versed in server operating systems & Linux. If you’re having trouble setting up a network, the network section should help but I think a college class would help the best but you’d have to take one for what you want to do if you aren’t good at self learning. 

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Do you have a link to when Linus browsed his files at home from his smartphone? Would be interesting to see which app he used. Could have been ownCloud. If it was just movies then chances are it was Plex.

 

I strongly recommend using SMB since it will be by far the easiest and most "seamless" way of handling network drives in Windows. It can work over the Internet, but it is EXTREMELY not recommended because it is a massive security risk. What you can do is VPN to your network and then access the SMB share through that, but it's a bit inconvenient. If you want to remotely access then it's best to use something like ownCloud, Plex, VPN+SMB, SFTP, etc.

 

Also, word of advice. Do not use Linus as a reference for how to set things up. He often does things poorly.

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The high speed nvme storage server is using Windows Storage Spaces

 

So is its near realtime backup

 

The vault is running cluster over zfs on centos

 

My server is running unraid with a couple of VMs and a plex docker container. 

 

Per the above comment I'm probably not doing it right, but it works for me

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4 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

I'm probably not doing it right, but it works for me

Isn't this what literally everyone does?

Quote me to see my reply!

SPECS:

CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X Motherboard: MSI B450-A Pro Max RAM: 32GB I forget GPU: MSI Vega 56 Storage: 256GB NVMe boot, 512GB Samsung 850 Pro, 1TB WD Blue SSD, 1TB WD Blue HDD PSU: Inwin P85 850w Case: Fractal Design Define C Cooling: Stock for CPU, be quiet! case fans, Morpheus Vega w/ be quiet! Pure Wings 2 for GPU Monitor: 3x Thinkvision P24Q on a Steelcase Eyesite triple monitor stand Mouse: Logitech MX Master 3 Keyboard: Focus FK-9000 (heavily modded) Mousepad: Aliexpress cat special Headphones:  Sennheiser HD598SE and Sony Linkbuds

 

🏳️‍🌈

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9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Do you have a link to when Linus browsed his files at home from his smartphone?

I believe it's this one: 

 (Note: it's not from linustechtip)

Btw i don't really care if it's convenient and secure enough. I often do things in 'linus-way':)

 

11 hours ago, fpo said:

I don’t know if he has a dedicated video but he uses several VM. 

 

6 hours ago, LinusTech said:

My server is running unraid with a couple of VMs and a plex docker container. 

For setting up VM, what software? I only tried installing linux directly on to disk to setup a server. Also linus said he's using 10gbit network at home. Is he using some kind of add-on card? It's really hard to find boards with 10gbit ethernet.

Btw Linus, what setup are you using at home for your server? The pc, and switches etc. Thanks!

 

(Sorry if my words sound bit weird. I'm from Korea and I'm not really used to using forums, so correct me if i'm doing st wrong..)

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Professional and potentially server grade windows have special VM software built in. 

Theres also software like VM Ware. I never got any VM software to work; however I only have the home or pre-installed versions of Windows. 

Also i think LMG has several servers. I’d imagine some to have 1 os. 

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5 hours ago, Sooneung said:

 

 

For setting up VM, what software? I only tried installing linux directly on to disk to setup a server. Also linus said he's using 10gbit network at home. Is he using some kind of add-on card? It's really hard to find boards with 10gbit ethernet.

Btw Linus, what setup are you using at home for your server? The pc, and switches etc. Thanks!

 

(Sorry if my words sound bit weird. I'm from Korea and I'm not really used to using forums, so correct me if i'm doing st wrong..)

With Undraid you can setup VMs.

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9 minutes ago, RZeroX said:

With Undraid you can setup VMs.

Thanks!

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11 hours ago, VegetableStu said:

oh, with or without parity? would it reassemble itself if the storage devices are physically transferred to a new W10 machine? o_o

Assuming you move to another WS2016 box, Windows will see the pool of disks. It's one of the features of SS. It sits on the disks, not on the controller or OS.

Parity would be a nightmare on a workload like that. . Would guess mirroring simply due to uptime. Even if you have it on a realtime copy on another mass storage server, you'd have to remake the volume if it fails and transfer everything back over again which can take previous time even on 10gbE

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21 hours ago, Sooneung said:

I believe it's this one: 

Hm I see. He never showed it so it's hard to tell what he uses. Anyway, ownCloud and Plex are great solutions for remote access.

You should pretty much always use SMB for local file transfers at home though.

 

 

21 hours ago, Sooneung said:

Btw i don't really care if it's convenient and secure enough. I often do things in 'linus-way':)

That's not good. You should always do things properly, not just "it works well enough" because it can come back and bite you in the ass, hard. For example exposing SMB shares to the Internet puts you at a great risk of having your system compromised and potentially losing all your files. It's just a bad and stupid thing to do (I don't think even Linus does that).

 

21 hours ago, Sooneung said:

For setting up VM, what software? I only tried installing linux directly on to disk to setup a server.

Do you need multiple VMs? If not, then when run VMs rather than bare metal? Bare metal will perform better.

But to answer your question, he probably uses unRAID since they sponsored him before. That does not by any means mean it is the best and what you should get though.

Do not just blindly copy Linus' setup. It might be completely awful for your use case. These things are not as simple as let's say copying someone's PC part list for a gaming computer. Your use case, the purpose of getting the server, plays a very important role in determining what you should use.

 

 

Also, it is worth adding that unRAID is pretty shit.

The reason why I say unRAID is shit is because:

1) It is closed source. You may not think this matters, but you will be shooting yourself in the foot. When it comes to something as important as keeping your data safe, you want to understand the system keeping it intact, and have an easy time fixing any issue that might arise. Having to rely on Lime tech, the developers of unRAID, to fix issues is a terrible situation to be in. It is a bit less terrible if you are someone like Linus who can get in contact with their proper support, but for someone using things at home you might be royally fucked and left with a broken, undocumented issue that can not be solved.

 

2) unRAID is similar to RAID4, which is pretty much universally classified as a really shitty RAID level that should not be used. What you want is RAID 5, 6, 10 or something like ZFS.

 

3) It costs money. You might say it is worth it because it has some impressive features like the virtualization support. But the fact of the matter is that it's just KVM, a free and open source Hypervisor built into the Linux kernel. If you're buying unRAID for the virtualization then you are paying ~90 dollars for something you can get for free. Don't be a sucker and pay for free things.

 

Everything unRAID does, you can do on Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux distros, but better and for free.

The reason why unRAID is featured in Linus' videos is not because it is the best way of doing things, or even a good way of doing things. It is featured because they paid Linus to use it.

 

21 hours ago, Sooneung said:

Also linus said he's using 10gbit network at home. Is he using some kind of add-on card? It's really hard to find boards with 10gbit ethernet.

Probably. At least in 2013 when that video was posted. 10GbE has gotten a bit more common on server boards and even some high end boards these days.

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4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Hm I see. He never showed it so it's hard to tell what he uses. Anyway, ownCloud and Plex are great solutions for remote access.

You should pretty much always use SMB for local file transfers at home though.

 

 

That's not good. You should always do things properly, not just "it works well enough" because it can come back and bite you in the ass, hard. For example exposing SMB shares to the Internet puts you at a great risk of having your system compromised and potentially losing all your files. It's just a bad and stupid thing to do (I don't think even Linus does that).

 

Do you need multiple VMs? If not, then when run VMs rather than bare metal? Bare metal will perform better.

But to answer your question, he probably uses unRAID since they sponsored him before. That does not by any means mean it is the best and what you should get though.

Do not just blindly copy Linus' setup. It might be completely awful for your use case. These things are not as simple as let's say copying someone's PC part list for a gaming computer. Your use case, the purpose of getting the server, plays a very important role in determining what you should use.

 

 

Also, it is worth adding that unRAID is pretty shit.

The reason why I say unRAID is shit is because:

1) It is closed source. You may not think this matters, but you will be shooting yourself in the foot. When it comes to something as important as keeping your data safe, you want to understand the system keeping it intact, and have an easy time fixing any issue that might arise. Having to rely on Lime tech, the developers of unRAID, to fix issues is a terrible situation to be in. It is a bit less terrible if you are someone like Linus who can get in contact with their proper support, but for someone using things at home you might be royally fucked and left with a broken, undocumented issue that can not be solved.

 

2) unRAID is similar to RAID4, which is pretty much universally classified as a really shitty RAID level that should not be used. What you want is RAID 5, 6, 10 or something like ZFS.

 

3) It costs money. You might say it is worth it because it has some impressive features like the virtualization support. But the fact of the matter is that it's just KVM, a free and open source Hypervisor built into the Linux kernel. If you're buying unRAID for the virtualization then you are paying ~90 dollars for something you can get for free. Don't be a sucker and pay for free things.

 

Everything unRAID does, you can do on Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux distros, but better and for free.

The reason why unRAID is featured in Linus' videos is not because it is the best way of doing things, or even a good way of doing things. It is featured because they paid Linus to use it.

 

Probably. At least in 2013 when that video was posted. 10GbE has gotten a bit more common on server boards and even some high end boards these days.

I actually have windows server 2016 license (got one from dreamspark.), and I'm planning to build server with i5 (or i3) which's not servergrade. (Xeon just costs too much. I believe xeon 3? 5? - no idea one xeon's naming Performs about the same as i5). I don't want to run two machines for just home server but I want to have Linux(Ubuntu - the one I'm familiar with) server with Windows Server to maximize compatibilities with windows machines at home.

And no, I DO NOT plan to open smb out into wild. It's meant for local server. What I meant is that since I'm not really good at serverside thing, I won't be able to secure all the connection. Although I will try to, by following online tutorials, I'm going to setup the most basic security settings. Besides, I won't be opening my personal pictures, documents etc to public. This is where virtualization comes in. I won't seperate server - one for out in the public, and one for local network.

Also I have a question. Is gbe enough for 2018? I researched a bit online but those 10gbe switches and all that gears costs.. alot. I mean for student with part-time job, it's not an easy choice to make. I download movies and share projects, musics on network, and they are quite big. (Animes with 1080p bd grade video is big.) Would gbe be enough in 2018?

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On 6/25/2018 at 5:01 AM, Sooneung said:

Also I have a question. Is gbe enough for 2018? I researched a bit online but those 10gbe switches and all that gears costs.. alot. I mean for student with part-time job, it's not an easy choice to make. I download movies and share projects, musics on network, and they are quite big. (Animes with 1080p bd grade video is big.) Would gbe be enough in 2018?

As you say you are storing large video files I will assume that you are using large HDDs with a top transfer rate of ~180MB/s.

If you are only using mirroring RAID then you will only be slightly limited by the transfer rate of GB ethernet at ~110MB/s, this will not even be an issue when creating system images over a network.

If you are using striping then you may be noticeably limited by your connection however you will need at many more potentially expensive disks as well as networking equipment.

 

Lastly I would like to point out that RAID will not protect you from all threats and give you the reliability you may desire - it will not protect against accidental deletion or ransomware and a separate potentially offline backup disk may be appropriate.

On 6/25/2018 at 5:01 AM, Sooneung said:

And no, I DO NOT plan to open smb out into wild. It's meant for local server. What I meant is that since I'm not really good at serverside thing, I won't be able to secure all the connection. Although I will try to, by following online tutorials, I'm going to setup the most basic security settings. Besides, I won't be opening my personal pictures, documents etc to public. This is where virtualization comes in. I won't seperate server - one for out in the public, and one for local network.

Setting up access rights for each share may be a possible solution. Samba allows you to limit the access of a certain share to certain users so that only users you trust can access the photos while everyone could access a read only music share.

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On 6/23/2018 at 2:55 PM, LinusTech said:

The high speed nvme storage server is using Windows Storage Spaces

 

So is its near realtime backup

 

The vault is running cluster over zfs on centos

 

My server is running unraid with a couple of VMs and a plex docker container. 

 

Per the above comment I'm probably not doing it right, but it works for me

You just jogged my memory on why people pinged me in IRC about one of your videos where you used ZFS a couple years ago. You should have used a server and a JBOD instead of 2 servers glued by using gluster to concatenate the storage. It would have been cheaper upfront, lowered your electric bill and reduced the number of layers where things could go wrong.

 

JBODs can be pricey, but with the exception of super dense configurations (e.g. 90 drives per 4U), they should be cheaper than full servers by virtue of them literally having less hardware. In theory, a JBOD should always cost less than a full server because you can make one out of just about any server by replacing the motherboard, RAM and CPU with a $50 part from supermicro:

 

https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-cse-ptjbod-cb1-jbod-power-board-diy-jbod-chassis-made-easy/

 

As long as you have enough external SAS ports (which you can increase using SAS switches), you could in principle add storage as you needed it without having to buy a full server every time by merely adding a JBOD.

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On 6/25/2018 at 12:01 AM, Sooneung said:

I actually have windows server 2016 license (got one from dreamspark.), and I'm planning to build server with i5 (or i3) which's not servergrade. (Xeon just costs too much. I believe xeon 3? 5? - no idea one xeon's naming Performs about the same as i5). I don't want to run two machines for just home server but I want to have Linux(Ubuntu - the one I'm familiar with) server with Windows Server to maximize compatibilities with windows machines at home.

And no, I DO NOT plan to open smb out into wild. It's meant for local server. What I meant is that since I'm not really good at serverside thing, I won't be able to secure all the connection. Although I will try to, by following online tutorials, I'm going to setup the most basic security settings. Besides, I won't be opening my personal pictures, documents etc to public. This is where virtualization comes in. I won't seperate server - one for out in the public, and one for local network.

Also I have a question. Is gbe enough for 2018? I researched a bit online but those 10gbe switches and all that gears costs.. alot. I mean for student with part-time job, it's not an easy choice to make. I download movies and share projects, musics on network, and they are quite big. (Animes with 1080p bd grade video is big.) Would gbe be enough in 2018?

Used Xeons off eBay are cheap. You can even get some fairly beefy storage servers off eBay for less than the cost of new components. For example:

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/4U-24-Bay-Storage-Server-2x-Xeon-E5645-Hex-Core-SAS2-6Gb-s-HW-RAID-0-1-2PS/153070306421?hash=item23a3b38475:g:xuYAAOSw1cNaAKd2

 

The only problem with that one is the noise from the fans on the server chassis and PSU.

 

For your usage, I doubt that you need more than 1GbE.

 

It is a less popular choice among Windows users, but using Windows does not mean that you need to use SMB. You could use a NFS server on a non-Windows server with a NFS client on Windows.

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