OS for HTPC/Media Server

wildman_33 · 18 Feb 2017 at 16:18

I built an HTPC about 2 years ago and at the time of setting it up, I installed Windows 8.1 Pro. I set it up to share its 3TB WD Red storage drive so that I could access it from other computers at home. I upgraded to Windows 10 but soon get fed up of auto updates rebooting it in the middle of watching things and the NTFS formatted disks were getting annoying to access from my Mac.

A couple of weeks ago I moved it over to Ubuntu 16.04 and reformatted the drives to EXT4, its given me nothing but issues since and the network shares were a pain to set up. I am now considering moving over to unRaid for it's server duties and running the HTPC aspect in a VM.

My question is will my hardware be up to the task? I have the following;

Athlon 5350
1 x 8gb DDR3
120gb SSD (Boot)
3TB WD Red (Storage)
3TB Hitachi (Storage Drive Backup)
1TB Hitachi (Time Machine backup for the Mac)

My biggest concern is the hardware passthrough for the GPU seeing as it will be a HTPC, the CPU seems fairly capable for its current uses and I don't need it to do any transcoding to other devices.

Has anyone run unRaid on a similar setup? I'm looking to have something I can leave running with very little maintenance.

neodude · 20 Feb 2017 at 10:41

When you say HTPC, I'm assuming it will be used to play media as well as serve it? Why not just get a Raspberry Pi installed with Rasplex for the player and leave UnRaid as the server.

wildman_33 · 21 Feb 2017 at 08:53

That might be the way to go, it would be nice to have them both in one device to save power but I guess a raspberry pi doesn't use much anyway. I already have one of the original pi's running pihole.

Conanius · 26 Feb 2017 at 08:50

I used to use Ubuntu as my server (desktop OS) and then had several Ubuntu server (command line) VMs sat on top using KVM for virtualisation.

It takes a while to get used to, but it's fundamentally rock solid once it's up and configured.

I've just moved to using freenas and then using jails for stuff like plex. It's absolutely great, but it needs some thought when you are setting it all up.

crazypete00 · 26 Feb 2017 at 15:41

i usually stick to windows 10. pro licence is cheap enough these days and find i never really need the extra's that windows server offers.

Baboonanza · 27 Feb 2017 at 07:36

It dooesn''t seem like you need anything as complicated as that. If you installed OpenElec on it Samba shares will be setup automatically. You'll just have to add a few lines to the config file to share your HDD.

ASE001 · 27 Feb 2017 at 10:10

Have a look at NS4Free, it has a nice WebGUI and very easy to setup. It is easy to setup Samba shares, NFS and iSCSI. It also allow Samba shares to use AD authentication, although this is tricky to setup! It has a number of options for backing up your files like RSYCN. You can also install Plexmedia server, there are Youtube videos on how to do this, like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acmNuP7PwVU.

Nas4Free has a headless Virtual Box pre-installed, meaning you can run as many virtual machines as your hardware will support. i.e. VM as pfsense server, a VM as Owncloud server. If you do not fancy building your own VM, then you can download a pre-configured VM called a virtual appliance from here https://www.turnkeylinux.org/.

The Athlon 5350 should support virtualisation? 8Gbytes of RAM, you should be able to run a couple small of VM’s as well as Nas4Free i.e. pfsense and Owncloud servers.

On a machine of this specification do not try to use some of the advanced features of Nas4Free, like deduplication, it will kill your system. Deduplication needs lots of RAM (8Gbytes or more) and as many CPUs as you can give it.

If you decide to build your own VM’s based on Linux, you can use Webmin to manage them, easy to install and use. You can use it to setup Samba shares, Webserver services, keep your systems updated. Great bit of software, here’s the website http://www.webmin.com/

To keep it simple managing your Linux system, you can use your Windows remote desktop (MSRDP) client to connect. To do this install XRDP onto the Linux system, very easy to do see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFdBSyy4xcM

crazypete00 · 27 Feb 2017 at 11:22

you will beed multiple NIC cards for pfsense, well at least 2, 1 WAN, 1LAN. then its usually better to have your VMs use a seperate LAN to the pfsense.

Sp00n · 27 Feb 2017 at 13:19

Baboonanza said:
It dooesn''t seem like you need anything as complicated as that. If you installed OpenElec on it Samba shares will be setup automatically. You'll just have to add a few lines to the config file to share your HDD.

This is pretty much what I do, super easy life, can't be bothered faffing around with other stuff for home.