Wolvers' Home Server Build

wolvers · 19 Mar 2011 at 00:11

I think you are right jon, most of it is the 5% that is reversed for the superuser by default. I believe that this isn't so necessary for storage volumes so I'm going to remove the reservation to get the space back.........I hope!

From the link that you added;

So, in short, if the drive doesn't contain /var or /tmp, then there's not much point in having space reserved for root.

This doesn't account for all of the missing space so I think that the other 1% may be the journal space?

NickM · 19 Mar 2011 at 02:12

wolvers said:
Quick update, I've fitted the Fractal Designs 40mm fan and the results are very good. It runs at about 3500rpm (the original one ran at 5000rpm) and now makes the whole system virtually inaudible. Temps have gone up a degree or two but are still perfectly OK.

I didn't buy the fan controller you recommended as I was going to see what sort of noise levels it had out of the box, so my 120mm is still running at 12v.
Now I'm trying to quieten it down a bit and was looking at replacing the 120mm (and maybe the 40mm) with a Fractal Silent:
- do you think it would be worth doing for 1/both?
- how fast (RPM) will the stock 120mm @12v be running at?
- does the 40mm just unscrew easily?

edit: Thanks Jon, in the end I figured out I could use an old IDE DVD Drive + IDE to USB drive enclosure = USB DVD drive

wolvers · 19 Mar 2011 at 07:59

I don't know what the 12v speed of that 120mm fan is but if you plug it into the CPU fan header the speed will be reported in the BIOS. The 40mm fan was simple to change and the screws are just long enough for the new fan. Be careful not to put too much pressure on the heatsink, it can tilt sideways and that could damage the chip underneath.

wolvers · 19 Mar 2011 at 09:19

Nick, I forgot to ask, is Ubuntu Server any faster than Win Server?

NickM · 19 Mar 2011 at 17:51

I'm not sure. Although I got Ubuntu installed ok I had trouble connecting to my LAN/sharing my internet connection from the W7 computer, I didn't really try very hard though as I got side tracked by the slow speeds I'm getting from my network in general.
If you're getting ~50 MB/s then your setup is definitely faster than mine, I can only get 20 MB/s writing files to the server or 40 MB/s copying from it. Although I'm still trying to figure out why that is (could be a faulty drive/old motherboard/old NIC etc).

wolvers · 19 Mar 2011 at 18:16

That doesn't sound too bad though and I find that it varies a lot depending on the size of the file.

cmmc · 27 Apr 2011 at 19:34

wolvers,

Your set-up is almost the same as mine; same motherboard and memory but I'm running Ubuntu Server 10.4 LTS from a 16GB USB pen drive and only have one 2TB Samsung F4 drive connected to it. So far it's working nicely

However, I may have an answer to one of your questions although it was a while back and you may have solved it by now...

wolvers said:
3. I've noticed that the server does not shut down when I press the power button, and I would like it too do so. I'm guessing that I need to run some kind of command so that the OS knows what I want it to do when I press the power button (and reset button as well I suppose). I haven't had a chance to research this yet so if anyone has any ideas that'd be great (jon, where are you?).

I'm fairly sure that using the following two commands at the command line did the trick:

apt-get install acpid
service acpid start

It's been a while since I got it working but from memory that's all I needed - it was taken from here

I have a question for you though based on what you've said below:

wolvers said:
Quick update, I've fitted the Fractal Designs 40mm fan and the results are very good. It runs at about 3500rpm (the original one ran at 5000rpm) and now makes the whole system virtually inaudible. Temps have gone up a degree or two but are still perfectly OK.

How are you reading the temperatures? And which ones can you read?

I've not installed Webmin so let me know if that's how you're reading them.

Thanks,
cmmc

wolvers · 28 Apr 2011 at 22:19

Yeah, I'm using the system status section of Webmin to monitor temps, it will email me if they get too high. There is a package called 'lm-sensors' that is used for this that you should be able to make use of.

Thanks for the info on the 'acpid' package, I will look into that.

cmmc · 1 May 2011 at 08:40

wolvers said:
Yeah, I'm using the system status section of Webmin to monitor temps, it will email me if they get too high. There is a package called 'lm-sensors' that is used for this that you should be able to make use of.

Thanks for the info on the 'acpid' package, I will look into that.

Hmmm, I already have lm-sensors installed and despite following the set-up instructions that it gives, it fails to read the temperatures of the CPU's cores but does give me two other readings, temp2 and temp3 whatever they are, 64 and 27 degrees C. I also get a fan speed for fan1 of 3770 RPM - I assume if I connect another fan to the other fan header I'll get a valid value for fan2.

What temperatures does Webmin show you, does it tell what they are temperatures of? Also, what sort of figures are the temperatures?

wolvers · 3 May 2011 at 10:30

Maybe there's another package then that it's using, I'll have a look later for you.

I installed the acpid package and the power button shut down worked straight away, thanks for that.

arnoldma · 8 Jun 2011 at 16:51

Mike306 said:
This thread has been a great read. Thanks goes to wolvers69.

I've been looking at a NAS for some time now. I have looked at Synology & Qnap which seem rather pricey but have good performance & reviews, also looked at Netgear as they were offering a free HDD but seen mixed reviews on these.

Now I'm tempted to build my own.

Ditto, great read, well done wolvers! the only thing that puts me off from building my own is setting up the software side of things, which server OS/GUI, speed optimisation, compatibility, etc... the actual building part is fine, as i've always build my own PCs. Did you use a guide to set-up yours?

Thanks mate!

wolvers · 8 Jun 2011 at 21:41

I followed this one here;

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-howto/30573-build-your-own-atom-based-nas-part-2

It's slightly out of date now but it's only a slight variation in the way the options look in webmin that has changed so still OK to follow.

For everything else I needed to know/learn I went to the Ubuntu forum. For anything you can't find there just ask, they're very knowledgeable and always happy to help. Of course there's lots of people like that in the Linux section here too.

Magic_x_uk · 21 Jun 2011 at 10:34

Can I just ask, if building your own NAS ( I am looking in to it, compared to off the shelf ones)

you could use any size case if it is going in a room you dont use couldnt you? so you can always keep adding drives if needs be.

NickM · 21 Jun 2011 at 16:55

Magic_x_uk said:
Can I just ask, if building your own NAS ( I am looking in to it, compared to off the shelf ones)

you could use any size case if it is going in a room you dont use couldnt you? so you can always keep adding drives if needs be.

Sure, you could just use any old/spare computer you have kicking around. There was a thread in GH where someone made a NAS/server from a full sized Fractal XL!

slylittlefox · 21 Jun 2011 at 19:26

Great thread

I'm looking at doing something similar, but using it as my HTPC (with an appropriate mini-itx Atom board with HDMI out). How much did the system cost you all in?

wolvers · 26 Jun 2011 at 17:37

slylittlefox said:
Great thread

I'm looking at doing something similar, but using it as my HTPC (with an appropriate mini-itx Atom board with HDMI out). How much did the system cost you all in?

Thanks.

From the OP (I think I've listed the cost of each component at the time I bought them);

wolvers said:
So the total cost of the build is £225 (without HDDs), a big saving on the off the shelf units. This is helped by the OS being free

wolvers · 19 Jul 2011 at 12:50

Bit of an update. I've added DLNA media streaming capabilities to the server by installing the miniDNLA package and configuring it to stream my music, photos and videos. The simplest guide I found for this is here;

http://anotherdev.wordpress.com/201...e-to-mediatomb-for-samsung-dlna-tvs-minidlna/

There is also a Webmin module for miniDLNA but it didn't make the correct changes to config file so I had to do it manually. Everything is working great and I can stream my whole media library to whatever device I like, in this case it's my Eee Pad tablet.

The only downside is that it streams everything as is, so if the remote client isn't capable then it won't play. This means that my full HD rips won't play properly on the Eee Pad so my next mission is to find a solution that will encode the videos on the fly............

wolvers · 31 Jan 2012 at 21:00

A quick update on this.

The 3.5TB of storage space is now full so I've decided to swap out the two 1.5TB drives for another pair of Seagate Green 2TB drives. I'm going to run all 4 in RAID5 so that I get 6TB of total space and retain some redundancy.

It's going to take some time to migrate all that data!