The "introduce yourself" thread

[Andy Horn]

Hi everyone.

Linux noob here, go easy on me!!

Andy

[fpp]

Hi Ian & the gang,

Fred here, from Paris, France.

I came upon your "How to install and configure FlexRAID on Ubuntu Server" page last February, coming from the OpenEgg forum, and bookmarked it for later.
Silly me, I only just understood today that it was but part of a whole series, chock full of great information, plus this forum :-)

I registered mostly to say THANK YOU for taking the time to write up that Howto in such a clear and detailed manner.
I'm not a Linux newbie but have never installed Ubuntu server before, I have already learned plenty and this will save me loads of time !

I have just received most of the parts for my upcoming FlexRAID box and will be starting on the assembly shortly.
The rig is composed of an Asus E350M1-M Pro microATX board (AMD Zacate 350) with a small SSD as a system disk, and three or four 2TB disk (Samsung F4) to start with.

It will be headless and hidden away like yours, mostly for secure storage and NAS, plus some apps I will migrate from my old Linux box.

Oh, and I'll probably have a couple of questions, too :-)

[Ian]

Hi Fred welcome to the forum and thanks for taking the time to sign up and post. good luck with your build.

Ian

[Shakumdown]

Hello there.

Let me first start off by saying this is a very helpful site. Found myself doing this less:

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Now on to the introduction. I have been playing around with network media players since the Roku HD1000. Have since moved to the TViX line of players which I have several ranging from HD M-5000A, HD M7000A and N1 Cafe. I have setup a variety of NAS systems, where I original began many years ago with a prebuilt NAS, the Promise ConnectStor II.
After the first power supply failure,

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I decided it was much more economical to build my own using Linux, which I have tested Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu and currently using FreeNAS 7. I am constantly looking for ways to improve upon my streaming environment and have found this site to extremely informative.
I hope to contribute to this forum as well as learn from others on this forum.

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My current streaming environment consist of the following:
A Xeon 604 socket base motherboard in a Supermicro server chasis with an Accera 1230 RAID SATA adapter.
19TB of usable storage (RAID6) using NFS to share content to media players
Most network media players are hardwired with a few connected via 5Ghz Wifi N.
I have a PS3, but perfer to use media players that can handle ISO files.

[Ian]

Hi Shakumdown and a very warm welcome to the forums

Sounds like you've got quite a beast there Like you, I've been through a few media streamers in my time, and indeed NAS devices of one sort or another. Took me a while to pluck up the courage to take the plunge and build my own. I spent an eternity going down dead-ends trying to get my server configured and working nicely. I lost count of the number of times I rebuilt my server after following a "guide" I'd found on the internet that either ended up trashing my server or simply didn't work, hence the idea of putting the site together. When I started I just knew that I couldn't be the only saddo on the planet who wanted to do the same and was sure other people were in the same boat as me.

I see you've tried a whole lot more OSs than me. What made you stick with FreeNAS? Was it the simplicity of it? How did you find this site/forum, are you thinking of starting over or merely looking for some tweaks? Jut being nosey
I was very tempted by FreeNAS after reading many success stories but plumped for Ubuntu in the end purely due to the extra flexibility that the OS has to allow me to do more than just use my server as host for my streamers. There's a few things more I'd like to do with it but for now it suits me fine. It's certainly light years ahead of anything that could be achieved with an off-the-shelf NAS, even the seriously expensive ones.

Once again, thanks for signing up and sharing details of your kit. I hope to share plenty of ideas with you!

You might find it's just me and you here sometimes but that's fine by me. As more and more people stop by seeking help this forum is slowly becoming a useful resource in itself, over and above what is on the main website.

I'm always open to ideas of how I can improve the site and indeed the forums so if you or anyone has any idea please don't be shy in coming forward.

Ian.

[n2o2diver]

Hi all,

Sean here from Dothan, AL. I am a pilot/flight instructor by trade and only have prior experience with Windows OS. I have always been the goto guy at work and amongst friends when they need to know how to do something with their computers or software. I have never done anything with any other OS, so I was a bit hesitant at first but figured what the hell its not going to cost me anything.

I had an old Dell Optiplex laying around and decided to either chuck it or do something with it. So after some research I figured I could use this thing as a server. Mind you, I had no clue how to do it. I was going to just get WHS but where would the fun be in that and haven't I given enough money to MS.

This website is freaking fantastic! I first started off with Ubuntu Server 11.10 but ran into some problems trying it on my own. Then I found this site and it was written for the older 10.04 so I quickly ripped a new CD with 10.04 and went at it. I followed the step by step instructions and a few hours later (I'm slow) I had a working Ubuntu Server up and running remotely from my Windows machine. I am amazed I was able to do it. The only problems I had was getting the VNC to run at start up, but writing the script and setting it up as a cron job in Webmin worked. So it is up and running but that is it so far. I need to get some hard drives in it still. I wanted to make sure I could get it to work before spending any money on it.

The Box as is has a P4 1.7 with 512Mb Ram 20G HD and a CD rom. It has five empty PCI slots so I think I can get some SATA controllers in PCI and stick a few new SATA drives in it. Still not sure how I do that but I'm learnin!

Thanks for all the good info on here!
Sean

[Andy Horn]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

One thing I have learned by installing PCI SATA cards is that they are not bootable for some reason, I have an old PCI IDE that is bootable-strange .

The PCI SATA/IDE card I have in my server has RAID, but I am not a fan of raid.

You will probably need another stick of 512MB RAM at some point in the future if you are intending to stream from your server, mine uses 350-400MB of RAM on a single stream.

Andy

[n2o2diver]

Thanks for the info Andy.

I did order and newer IDE primary boot drive 320gb and another 512mb of RAM. I will use the other two 2TB SATA drives just for storage so I don't think it will matter that I can not boot off of them. I also came across a spare SATA DVD ROM that I can put in once I get the PCI SATA Cards. Not sure that I will need the DVD capability but what the heck.

Ouch my head hurts. I have been reading from the Ubuntu websites downloadable server users guide. This is like trying to read the US Tax code, written for lawyers by lawyers so the average joe has no f'in clue. I'm reading this thing written by some software engineering genius for other software engineering genius and my pea size brain is smoking. I'm looking around for a button to translate it into english. I mean really! Every dang acronym is defined by another acronym. Takes me a half of an hour to look them all up, just so I can read one paragraph. I don't think I can learn on my own this way, way to slow and frustrating.
WHS for $50 might not be so bad. Of course I'd have to fork out the dough for a 64 bit system.

Without this websites guide I don't think I would ever have gotten it installed, never mind running.

Well at least I'm learning something, albeit slowly.

[Andy Horn]

Hey Sean.

All the tips and advice are in the guide Ian has made available on the main web site, without the guide and help from Ian I would probably have a Win based server.

I would ignore the user guide you have downloaded as I guess it will more aimed at running an enterprise server rather than a home media server.

Having a DVD drive will do no harm at all and you can rip DVD's directly to your server (OGMRip from synaptics seem good).

Life without wall's ha, bring on the Penguins they don't need walls or Windows or even GATES

If you need any help there is usually someone around to help, especially Ian.

Good luck.

Andy

[Kryspy]

Used this site to setup my Mythbuntu server a few months ago so I figured now is a good time to introduce myself. I used to use Windows Home Server and only dabbled with LINUX. Over time I found Linux to be much more satisfying and comfortable than Windows.


Case: Antec Three Hundred
Motherboard: ASUS M4A785-M
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 245 Processor, 2 cores 2.9 Ghz
Memory: Kingston 4GB
Hard Drives:
(1) Western Digital Green WDC WD5000AADS-0 OS (500 GB) for OS and Data partitions for downloads and Torrents.
(2) Western Digital Green WDC WD10EARS-00Y (1 TB) Music, Pictures, Movies, Music Videos, User Folders
(3) Western Digital Green WDC WD10EADS-00M (1 TB) backup of WDC WD10EARS-00Y using rsync.
(4) Western Digital Green WDC WD15EARS-00S (1.5 TB) TV Series and Recorded OTA TV.

I use Mythbuntu 11.10 as my OS. My server also contains a Hauppauge 2250 and 1250 ATSC tuners for a total of 3 tuner sources. For IP music I use Subsonic. Torrents are handled by Transmission.

My house frontends are 2* PS3 fed by PS3 Mediaserver on the server for viewing OTA recordings, downloaded movies, music videos and tv series, Netflix, listening to music, viewing photos and VUDU movie service.


Kryspy