Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

Worth mentioning that it's a good idea to backup the FreeNAS configuration once it's setup to your liking. My pendrive failed the other week, and it was a reputable brand.

Luckily I'd backed it up to Dropbox.
 
For anyone who has or is looking to get the Gen8 Microserver, it looks like HP's custom ESXi 5.1 image includes drivers for the B120i Raid Controller. So the 2x250GB drives I setup in Raid 0 prior to installation, show up as one logical drive in ESXi :).
 
Thanks for the tips :)

Putting everything together now, gonna make a build log too :)


Got it all plugged together and working :D Just need to spend time with FreeNAS now to get everything configured properly

goals are

1) Get the box to sleep after a period of inactivity
2) Get the box to WoL
3) Configure FreeNAS to work with a Raspberry Pi running OpenElec
4) Configure FreeNAS to work with iOS and Android devices
5) Gain access over 3G/Internet
6) Configure Sickbeard
7) Configure ROM Collection Browser
8) Configure Torrents
 
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uncle_rufus said:
Funnily enough this is something I was thinking about myself... I heard about "Stablebit Drivepool" which I believe is only for WHS, but I like the idea. As far as I can understand it's like a weird type of psuedo-RAID where an application monitors your folders and just ensures that certain flagged folders or files always exist on 2 physical drives at once.
Click to expand...

It's a third-party implementation of Drive Extender, a feature the original WHS had. Drive Bender is another product that does the same thing. One of the two can be used on any version of windows, not just WHS.

Both allow you to combine hard drives into a single pool, or create multiple pools (so you could put your fastest hard drives into one pool, and your slowest into a second, backup pool, for instance.

Each pool is treated as a single drive volume, which in WHS 2011 especially is handy for getting around the 2TB volume limit. Drives in the pool do not need to be the same size, and no space is lost for mixing mismatched size drives.

You can create shares within the pool, and then set duplication on whichever shares you want: those that are duplicated will be invisibly mirrored on at least two drives. If a drive that contains duplicated files fails, you don't lose data - the files are copied to another drive, and you can put a new drive in when you want, and you suffer no downtime or degraded performance while the data is being rebalanced.

Unlike W8 Storage Spaces, this works at the file level, so you can break apart a pool without losing data. In fact you can take a drive out of the pool, and machine, put into any other machine capable of reading NTFS file systems and copy the data off it.

It's not as efficient, space wise, as RAID (or Storage Spaces in parity mode), but space is cheap these days. These two programs both provide extremely simple drive management, perfect for typical home server users.
 
I've had my server about 18 months and just found some Ram that I took out of an old computer. I seem to remember this would be suitable for the server, can someone confirm this?

Cheers :)

20130913_112832.jpg
 
anyone able to advise me how to put FreeNAS to sleep and wake it up with a WOL command?
 
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.temp said:
anyone able to advise me how to put FreeNAS to sleep and wake it up with a WOL command?
Click to expand...

Depends how exactly you mean... But based on a hunch of what you probably want:

Look at the "cron" section of the web interface (System - Cron Jobs)... this is where you can set timed jobs, so set one up and give it the command to run "shutdown -h now" (Untested so may not work). You should be able to set it to run at the same time each evening for example. If you want to shutdown at different times on different evenings just setup one cron job for each shutdown time.

For WOL you just need to download a free program or phone app for sending a magic packet, which will require the IP/hostname of your freeNAS box, and it's MAC address... You could for instance set a script to run on your main machine when you start it which will send a packet edit: Also I just remembered to get my microserver to WOL I also had to check a setting which said something about "broadcast" in the phone app I downloaded

Does that help at least get you started?
 
uncle_rufus said:
Depends how exactly you mean... But based on a hunch of what you probably want:

Look at the "cron" section of the web interface (System - Cron Jobs)... this is where you can set timed jobs, so set one up and give it the command to run "shutdown -h now" (Untested so may not work). You should be able to set it to run at the same time each evening for example. If you want to shutdown at different times on different evenings just setup one cron job for each shutdown time.

For WOL you just need to download a free program or phone app for sending a magic packet, which will require the IP/hostname of your freeNAS box, and it's MAC address... You could for instance set a script to run on your main machine when you start it which will send a packet edit: Also I just remembered to get my microserver to WOL I also had to check a setting which said something about "broadcast" in the phone app I downloaded

Does that help at least get you started?
Click to expand...


I tried to execute that command in the Shell to get it to run now but I'm greeted with

"operating system has halted
Please press any key to reboot"

on my box. I don't know if this is due to me running it from the Shell and not a Cron Job ?

I've got Wake on Lan enabled in the N54L BIOS though :/

I've got an app for my iPad called mWOL that I use to wake my PC up. Have all the information in right on that too.

I know the power consumption of the box is low, but if I could get it to sleep when it's not needed it'd help a hell of a lot
 
.temp said:
I tried to execute that command in the Shell to get it to run now but I'm greeted with

"operating system has halted
Please press any key to reboot"

on my box. I don't know if this is due to me running it from the Shell and not a Cron Job ?

I've got Wake on Lan enabled in the N54L BIOS though :/

I've got an app for my iPad called mWOL that I use to wake my PC up. Have all the information in right on that too.

I know the power consumption of the box is low, but if I could get it to sleep when it's not needed it'd help a hell of a lot
Click to expand...

Try the halt command instead
 
i've managed to configure a cron job for auto shutdown, but if i use

shutdown -p now....it'll shut the system down, but not give me the ability to wake it without pressing the power button

shutdown -h now....this still produces the "operating system has halted. Please press any key to reboot" error

i've read about updating the N54L NIC Firmware, but doubt I'd be able to do so from inside of FreeNAS. Also read about updating the N54L BIOS to a modified one?
 
.temp said:
i've managed to configure a cron job for auto shutdown, but if i use

shutdown -p now....it'll shut the system down, but not give me the ability to wake it without pressing the power button

shutdown -h now....this still produces the "operating system has halted. Please press any key to reboot" error

i've read about updating the N54L NIC Firmware, but doubt I'd be able to do so from inside of FreeNAS. Also read about updating the N54L BIOS to a modified one?
Click to expand...

Hmm I wouldn't mess about with the NIC Firmware just yet... Did you say WOL definitely works when you shutdown the machine normally (by clicking on the shutdown button within FreeNAS)? I'll have a play about with my install later on and see if I can get timed-shutdown + WOL to work

Update: Okay so I can confirm that "shutdown -h now" does not power down the system regardless of whether you use it in a cron job or not... but for me "shutdown -p now" brings the system down and I am then able to wake it again using a magic packet... So double check your WOL settings is the best thing I can come up with :p

Also while digging around online I found that a few people have implemented a sort of conditional shutdown script to run as a cron job instead of just "shutdown -p now". In the examples I've seen you can do things like monitor a list of hosts on your network, and shutdown the server if none of them respond for a certain amount of time - so let's say all your devices go offline for 10 minutes then your NAS will shut itself down. You could then come up with a script for your other machines which will send a magic packet to the NAS on startup to wake it back up again. If I have time I might have more of a think about this :D
 
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uncle_rufus said:
Update: Okay so I can confirm that "shutdown -h now" does not power down the system regardless of whether you use it in a cron job or not... but for me "shutdown -p now" brings the system down and I am then able to wake it again using a magic packet... So double check your WOL settings is the best thing I can come up with :p

Also while digging around online I found that a few people have implemented a sort of conditional shutdown script to run as a cron job instead of just "shutdown -p now". In the examples I've seen you can do things like monitor a list of hosts on your network, and shutdown the server if none of them respond for a certain amount of time - so let's say all your devices go offline for 10 minutes then your NAS will shut itself down. You could then come up with a script for your other machines which will send a magic packet to the NAS on startup to wake it back up again. If I have time I might have more of a think about this :D
Click to expand...

Right, thanks man I'll double check EVERYTHING tonight and make sure it's all working and report back with findings. As soon as I get this working I can start looking at setting up my folders and permissions...this server stuff is fun, but it's a lot to take in. wouldn't have it any other way though :D
 
Quick question:

I have an N36L (The original model) with a : "Asus HD 6450 SILENT EDITION 1024MB GDDR3 Low Profile PCI-Express Graphics Card".

I have now bought a N54L as well (as I think this may be the last batch we see with cashback). What is the equivalent nVidia card to get? I fancied having a different card in this one and I am hoping the nVidia one might be better compatible with my TV than the ATI/AMD one. I had to mess around with Driver settings to get it to be fullscreen on a 1080P TV. Alternatively what is the current ATI/AMD one to get if I stuck with that brand?

The 6450 only cost me £30, I am not really looking to spend more than £40 maximum.

The N36L struggles with Youtube in fullscreen and higher than 480p playback. It is probably the CPU as enabling/disabling hardware acceleration in Flash makes no difference. I am planning on swapping the disks into the N54L instead and see if that helps. I am hoping the over 50% difference in CPU speed may help.


rp2000
 
rp2000 said:
Quick question:

I have an N36L (The original model) with a : "Asus HD 6450 SILENT EDITION 1024MB GDDR3 Low Profile PCI-Express Graphics Card".

I have now bought a N54L as well (as I think this may be the last batch we see with cashback). What is the equivalent nVidia card to get?
Click to expand...

What about

"Asus GeForce GT 610 SILENT Low Profile 1024MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card" http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-312-AS

Seems a bargain for £30, power rating is 29W which from what I've read should be okay, but I can't confirm that this card works (not using my N54L with a video card)
 
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