A server for media & work

Azza

Azza

Azza

Caporegime
Joined
6 Dec 2005
Posts
37,862
Location
Birmingham
So I'm thinking about setting up a server of multiple uses and it's either a NAS (Synology) or DIY'ing it with a N54L or something.

Now I need something to store all my media on (1080p mkvs, photos, music), run the usual sab, couch & sickbeard, be able to store work documents and essentially work from the server while the documents are backed up to OneDrive and Dropbox. And photos to Box would be nice as well.

At the moment I have a few TB of media that's all on my PC and it's becoming a bit of a pain waiting for stuff to copy to USB so it can be played on the TV. So PMS and a Roku 3 seem like the ideal solution to this.

I'm sure most of this could be done (apart from maybe working from within the server) with a NAS but if I wanted to go down the N54L what OS('s) or combination of software would be the best way to go about it?


Thanks.
 
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My N54L runs Ubuntu server and has 6TB of storage for my documents, music, photos and videos. It runs TVHeadend for playing and recording live TV. MiniDLNA for streaming to my Bluray player, PCs and raspberry Pi. SABNZBDPlus, Sickbeard and Couchpotato for downloads. It also hosts my website and my own mail server.

If you're not familiar with Linux, building this sort of thing is a great way to learn and there are plenty of guides out there. If you don't want to go to all the trouble of learning Linux then try Xpenology, FreeNAS or Open Media Vault. Or you could stick with Windows.
 
I'd recommend an N54L running Ubuntu Server/Debian/CentOS as well

It would be a great way to learn as little linux as mentioned and it gives you the flexibility of selecting exactly the right packages, file systems etc for your needs.

I haven't used Xpenology but if you want simple then it looks like the best option as it gives all the features and ease of use of a Synology unit without the price tag.
 
Been playing with Xpenology in a virtual box and it seems to do pretty much everything that I would want it to. Needs to be quite user friendly and easy to access as my girlfriend would be using it for her work mostly, so needs to look nice. :)


Would a N54L be able to handle 1080p MKVs to 3 x Roku 3's of which 2 are remote and 1 local at the same time?

edit ----->

Just remembered why I stopped using PMS on my PC (just reinstalled it) I get a shocking memory leak when manually updating my libaries to the point where windows asks to close programs.
 
I'm not a N54L owner (very nearly became one this week) but I'd suggest the N54L isn't capable enough to handle 3 x 1080p streams, even with PLEX using direct play. The general consensus suggest that the N54L can handle a 1080p stream using direct play but isn't powerful enough for 1080p transcoding. Although there's plenty of owners who can give their experience.

There's quite a good thread on the PLEX forums discussing the N54L: https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/to...l-server-capable-of-720p-transcoding-via-pms/

My own experience with PLEX Media Server has been using my very cheap AMD A4 5300 APU which is a low power CPU I originally bought for a XBMC HTPC (although a little bit more powerful than Turion II based on it's benchmarks) and it can't handle more than one 1080p stream transcoding.

The N54L is a bargain so you could always take a punt or set expectations appropriately but my suggestion is you need to look at something with more CPU power than either the N54L or most NAS units (there are some with i3's but are very expensive).
 
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Buffalo2102 said:
My N54L runs Ubuntu server and has 6TB of storage for my documents, music, photos and videos. It runs TVHeadend for playing and recording live TV. MiniDLNA for streaming to my Bluray player, PCs and raspberry Pi. SABNZBDPlus, Sickbeard and Couchpotato for downloads. It also hosts my website and my own mail server.

If you're not familiar with Linux, building this sort of thing is a great way to learn and there are plenty of guides out there. If you don't want to go to all the trouble of learning Linux then try Xpenology, FreeNAS or Open Media Vault. Or you could stick with Windows.
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Sounds like a good setup there! What are you using to host your mail server been looking at giving that a try myself as never done anything like that before.
 
liamcrane said:
Sounds like a good setup there! What are you using to host your mail server been looking at giving that a try myself as never done anything like that before.
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I'm another that host my own Web, email cloud storage . For the sake of simplicity you cannot beat virtualmin, it's a single shell script to install which installs and configures the lot. Only thing you really "need" to do is install Fail2Ban and configure it through the Web UI as it is a great security tool, as it bans ip addresses in iptables after failed login attempts as quite a few people seem to be trying to brute force the mail server to send spam

Mine runs on a small OVH VPS (2GB ram, 2 votes, 25gb raid10 disk) which costs me 4 quid a month.

I also have it setup to rsync crucial data from my home server every 24 hours,
 
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liamcrane said:
Sounds like a good setup there! What are you using to host your mail server been looking at giving that a try myself as never done anything like that before.
Click to expand...

I started with Postfix and Courier but it was a pain to setup and maintain so I added Squirrelmail which gives you a nice webmail interface.

As Frozennova says, it's important to consider security. Make sure that you "harden" your server - plenty of guides out there for that also.
 
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