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So...No, this is not a post about a flying dragon-dog, it's actually another episode in the long drawn out agonizing story of my server rebuild.
When last we visited my version of the "100 Years War" (really 116 years), I had changed directions with the motherboard, and moved on to the much newer version of a Supermicro server board based on the LGA-1155. It has subsequently gotten a low powered Xeon processor, and matching 8Gb of ECC memory. All this along with the installation of 6, 2Tb drives and the PSU, you'd think that I'd have been done and moved on by now.
Then, I got hung up on this.... OK, there's been other stuff like my garage workshop, but this has been a head-scratcher for me. Oh, not of the can't figure it out variety, but of the "do I really want to do this" sort. "This" is an Icy Dock Black Vortex 4-in-3 drive cage. The concept being that you can stick one of these things in 3, 5.25" drive spaces and give yourself 4, 3.5" drive bays that are actively cooled with a 120mm fan. It's a pretty cool (no pun intended) concept, and it would give me expansion in the ridiculously large Fractal XL R2 case that has 4, 5.25" bays in it. Unfortunately, this thing requires that the drive mounting tabs that hold those 4 drives would need to be cut off or bent back out of the way. That bothered me. Don't ask me why, but permanently altering this hither-to unmolested case was not something I wanted to do. So, there it sat. The XL R2, with the Icy Dock sitting on top of it in my office for the last 2 months.
Then, I bought another case. Looks familiar doesn't it? Looks kind of like the Silverstone PS-07 that the old server was built in doesn't it? That's because it's a Silverstone CS380.
There it is for reference. The difference? Despite it's shape, it's NOT Micro-ATX. It's a full-sized ATX case, with....
8 drive-bays.....
on a "hot-sway" back-plane! And don't forget the on-board dual 120mm cooling fans for the drives. Despite the off-the-shelf ability to hold the same number of drives, this case is fully 7" shorter than the XL R2! Given where it's going to go in my office (inside a cabinet), this is a much better solution. No, the Icy Dock won't fit, but hey..... I'll find a place for it to go. Time to finish this build!
School's about to be out for summer! I'm literally sitting in my last class which is taking their final! Pretty much all the paperwork is done. I'm not moving rooms this year and neither is my wife. Plus we're not moving houses either! As far as getting projects done; last summer was a complete wasteland where all of the above happened. So yeah, I'm really beginning to contemplate what-all I plan on getting done this summer.
The number one priority is to get the "Globemaster" server off the ground. It's pretty much put together, just not "finished". Now that all the TVs have fully functioning and updated HTPCs, they're just waiting for me to get the server done to serve the media. However; it won't be the first thing to get done.
No.... this will be first. That is moving the downstairs HTPC from it's temporary home in the Silverstone SG-05 case to the Silverstone PT-13b case. It's really that small and should be sitting on my porch right about now. Some other HTPC equipment will move into that old case and it will go live with my brother/sister-in-law. I'm excited. I've been waiting some time to find this case at the $53 price I paid for it on Amazon.
This is also on the horizon. I've got an appointment on Monday to take in our dozen or so computers in to be recycled at an actual eCycler in Dallas. That's been hanging over my head for months, so it'll be great to get done.
But the BIG project will be this. Ripping our movies and the rest of the CDs into the server.
Then there's this. Yup, scanning our old photos into digital form.
If you get the impression that there's going to be a lot of digital "grunt-work", you'd be right! I'm kinda looking forward to it though.
OK, the title was a bit of a joke, although, I'm not all that certain what to call this category of all our various computers that are not routinely used by a particular person. Last time we talked about the fact that in many modern American homes, people have one, and in many case, more than one digital device that they use on a regular basis. Regardless of form, be it notebook, tablet, or phone, these are personal computers, by definition. So, then what are the other various machines that are scattered about our houses that don't belong to anyone? For us, they are generally something that's connected a large display so that they can access media content either distributed through the internet or our own network.
For our system, I'll start at the core; the server. Ours has grown from a bunch of scrounged together parts running the first version of Windows Home Server which was housed in a cheap case, to what it is now through a series of steps. The first big step was the addition of a caching RAID controller that allowed for a degree of redundancy. That was back in the mostly backing-up stage of it's existence when I was just experimenting with serving media. However, as things went along and I went from just a bunch a ripped CDs to movies, the server has taken on a greater role. In the last year, I've ripped more and more of my movies from their original optical format to something that can be accessed throughout the house as well as be easily portable. This has taken the amount of necessary space to a whole different magnitude. I just thought I had a lot of storage when I had 2, 2Tb drives in the old server. The new server will have 5! It will be built in a Fractal Designs, Define XL R2, partially because it has 8 drive spaces, but mostly because it's one of the few on the market able to take the EATX sized SuperMicro server motherboard that will run it. I haven't decided whether it will become a 24/7 server or continue as a Friday to Sunday machine as in the past, but suffice to say that it's grown beyond what it was!
The next type of machines are actually the fastest growing category in our house, the HTPC (home theater PC). They've gone from 1, to the soon-to-be 3 in fairly short order. Granted I've had one for quite some time. It came about back in the days when there wasn't an "HTPC" term and the purpose built cases didn't exist. I had to use a Antec "desktop" case for it. But it remained at 1 for a very long time. A few years ago, I got the Ahanix D-Vine5 case you see above from my friend Pat and it has remained the home for the HTPC in my primary A/V system for quite awhile, suffering through 3 motherboard changes in that time. A couple of years ago, I picked up an Cooler Master Elite 130 Mini-ITX chassis to create a second unit when my brother sent me one of his technology cast-offs; a first-gen "Core" i3 processor on a Zotac motherboard. Later on, I picked up a low powered Gigabyte board with a Celeron CPU and it went into a much nicer Silverstone SG-08Lite case as befitting the master bedroom. It's current purpose is for us to catch up on TV show episodes that we've missed or occasionaly bouts of YouTube watching.
The third, will go into service as soon as I locate another HDMI cable so it can attach to the downstairs TV. It came to me this summer when I was visiting family in Taiwan and my brother gave me his "spare mini-server". He has a couple of interesting behaviors that has benefited me over the years. He works in technology and has the wherewithal to dabble in whatever he's interested in.... which includes low-power computing. ......And he tends to buy things in multiples whether he needs it or not! So, this last trip, he gave me an Intel Mini-ITX MB with an on-board Atom processor. Not terribly powerful, but enough to run a small HTPC. It's in an ugly plastic case, but I'll eventually find it something appropriate like the Habey cases that are clearly Apple Mini knock-offs! We have 3 stand-alone televisions, and there is a PC connected to each of them. Is that all?
No, not yet! This kind of ugly "beast" of a ThinkPad came to me recently when a friend dropped it off for me to retrieve files for him. Like many ThinkPads, it started life as his work machine, then went on to be his personal PC when his company retired it. After a long and fruitful life it's fan had given up the ghost and he bought a new computer. Like so many others, he hadn't backed up his files and needed me to get them off; after which, he left the old girl with me. Unbeknownst to the beasty, it's about to become the "garage computer"! There'll be a post on the "garage computer", so I'll leave it at that for now.
I know that this is actually under a different category and post, but let me pay a quick homage (the French say it so much nicer) to the little guy that made all this happen: Powerline Networking technology. The original owner whole built our house and spent quite a lot of money installing speakers and running wire everywhere should have done that with networking..... but didn't. So I have a 2 story house with no networking to the second floor! My options were to spend hundred (thousands!?!) for an electrician to run it, but I was able to call on this little known technology that uses the electric wiring in the house to move data as well. In the past, it had been a little glitchy, but the current version is pretty darned reliable and fast to boot! My ability to have all the various computers everywhere is very much thanks to the Trendnet 1200 AV2 kits that came in the mail a couple of weeks ago! Nothing like "wired" networking!
I've been avoiding this for a while now..... the grunt-work associated with a major change. But it had to happen sooner or later. As I've discussed before, there are a number of things about my WHS (Windows Home Server 2011) running file server that I've become unhappy with; although, much of it doesn't have anything to do with WHS itself, but rather the HighPoint Caching controller.
After a lot of hours of watching YouTube I came to the following conclusions:
- I have to decide how I want to manage my storage.
- I have to decide what operating system I want to use.
- How safe do I want to be in terms of the files residing on the file server?
- How much money do I want to put into the server in terms of drives?
- How much time do I want to allocate to learning the OS?
Don't get me wrong: I love this stuff! But I have another full-time profession, a family that expects me to spend time with them. AND I do not have an unlimited amount of cash to expend on this solution.
So, here are my options. They start with reloading Windows Home Server 2011 which has the distinct advantage that I own it and have used it for close to a year now so there's a level of familiarity. My hardware is also set up for it, with a 160Gb SSD for the OS to live on, and a Highpoint caching controller that I know works with it. The downside is that I'm not very happy with how it's working and will have to expend an unknown amount of time figuring out how to make it work better..... if that's possible. Furthermore, it's a product that's been "orphaned" by Microsoft, so this is the "end of the trail" for it.
An obvious alternative is FreeNAS. It's well-known and quite popular today. It has that always favorable attribute of being a free product. As such is supported by the "open-source" community. It and it's off-shoot, NAS4Free (more on this later), have the advantage of having a robust software RAID file system that doesn't require the use of an expensive (and often annoyingly difficult to use) hardware controller. Plus underlying technology that allows it to play nicely with various other systems ranging from Windows (CIFS), Linux (SMB) to AFP (Mac Networking). They can also handle standalone authentication or work with Active Directory, although that's not particularly relevant in my case.
And of course, you can't talk about FreeNAS without getting into NAS4Free which is ixSystems' attempt to do FreeNAS with a better web interface and plugin system. As it turns out, based on lots of research, it seems to be somewhat less "bleeding edge" than FreeNAS and thus easier for laymen like me to grasp. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of what exactly pushed me in this direction. Suffice to say that the cleaner and easier interface was a better fit for me.
....But what about the various Linux distros? Although, I'm certain that these are great for full production environments with a professional well versed in running command-line, these aren't for me. I will say that I was suitably impressed with CentOS during my time with it, but I just don't see myself investing the time necessary to become fully comfortable with it's use. Plus; I don't need a full server. I just need something to serve files, so really a "roll-your-own" NAS with greater flexibility.
What got done today? I loaded the OTP (Old ThinkPad) mobile file server up with NAS4Free 32-bit v. 9.3.0.2.1190 with it. Got it up and running. Copied a ripped movie file to it and played it back off. It's a good start! So stay tuned as this project proceeds and I decide whether this is in fact the server OS for me.
