Windows XBMC N00b NAS Build

(2012-04-26 01:42)Bstrdsmkr Wrote:  One quick note, avoid those power-line ethernet adapters like the plague. You'll do good to get a 30mb throughput, and most area's power grid doesn't filter them out. I can see two neighbor's powerline networks from work. I would easily use wireless before powerline (in fact I do).

sabnzbd, couchpotato and sickbeard -- These are download programs, similar to rtorrent, but for newsgroups. Couchpotato keeps and a list of movies you want to see and downloads them from newsgroups automatically when they're available. sickbeard is the same thing, but for TV shows.

My advice is choose your flavor of linux and build a full linux server. flexRAID will do a good job of handling the NAS, and you'll have the option of all the other services, like rtorrent, couchpotato, sickbeard, orb, and etc. You'll probably find yourself moving services off your Windows boxes and onto your linux box (I did =) )

+1 all your words!

That was super helpful. I'm really stoked to realise that there's .torrent wish list applications!!!

I think that I might simply install a variant of Mint on my headless server and run that for a while and deal with my new Xbox problem (post #2) as it comes.

(2012-04-24 04:15)tonka28 Wrote:  25th April 2012 - To make things even more complicated, my lovely lady wife has just brought home an Xbox 4GB. Meaning that I can't be running XBMC on every device. Of course, being a freakishly good gamer that she is, she wants the Xbox in the theatre room (130" screen). Adding to the confusion, I don't know if I can set an Xbox a static IP, not to mention that it'll only run Windows Media Centre, greatly reducing my ability to watch .mkv, .dvi etc. files. Any hints?

You're in luck. Xbox will play media from SMB shares, as long as it can play the file format
You CAN set a static ip on the xbox
You can also setup a cron job to transcode your non-xbox compatible media periodically too if you're so inclined

(2012-04-26 02:35)Bstrdsmkr Wrote:  ... as long as it can play the file format ...
... You CAN set a static ip on the xbox ...

- Is there any list on the interwebs that I can see that shows the file types Xbox will play?

- What is this dark magic you speak of? Do you know of a 'How-To:' guide?

jackh & NeS_BCN - I've got an old machine that I was going to turn into the NAS; however it's an old M/B and it's IDE not S-ATA; all my drives (2x640GB) are S-ATA. So I'm thinking about building a new machine to dedicate the NAS to. My initial config is;

• Intel Celeron G530 2.40GHz
• 4GB DDR3
• 3x640GB 7200RPM HDD
• 24x DVD+-RW
• Intel H61M M/B
• Gigabit LAN
• 500W PSU
• Standard (non-flashy) Micro-Form Factor Case
  

After jackh's suggestion - I'll be running Linux Mint 12 with LXDE as a headless machine with SSH enabled. Then I'll be putting Couchpotato, SickBeard and kTorrent in place to handle my new content and the weekly/fortnightly clean up and file of new media.

Most of the guides are for the older dashboard, like this one: http://portforward.com/networking/staticip-xbox360.htm
The process is pretty much the same, just have to find the System and Networking tabs

Pretty sure this should be up to date: http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-360/s...vds-movies

With flexRAID you can add whatever drives you want to the array and swap new drives in or add more without losing data. It's pretty nice

Thanks for that info mate - I've googled the static IP for the Xbox and will attempt after the working day is done.

The list of files that can be played is pretty up to date - it just seems that after my NAS is up - I'll just have to set some queues to convert all my media to the appropriate formats (yay -.-).

Please, someone in direct terms, explain to me the advantage of setting up raid. I know 'round about what it is, but I'm at a loss as to figure out why I would do it.

Regarding hardware, I'd recommend going for higher capacity drives and making sure the motherboard has many SATA ports (5 or more is nice). To make things easier to manage, I'd also recommend you install the system on an (old) spare drive (could be even IDE or USB), so that the data partitions will be separate from the system partition. This makes future system updates or total reinstallations much less painful. 20GB should be ok, but you can easily fit a lean system in 8GB, provided you are careful.

Regarding software, there's not much to add to what has been said. If you will be using torrent, I'd say couchpotato is great for movies and ktorrent can be very smart with tv-shows once you master the art of RSS.

Regarding RAID: it's a way to organize several drives into one single array, with varying degrees of performance improvements and redundancy (depends on the RAID level). My experience is that it is very robust but not without risks. I was using mdadm in linux with a RAID5 array, it survived beautifully several hard resets and system reinstalls. But it has several problems associated with it: All drives must be the same size (or the smallest one), if one drive fails your data will survive, but if another one fails (before a replacement is set in place) then you lose everything. Also, RAIDs have a tendency to rebuild from time to time, and with today's drive capacity it's easy to reach the error rate in SATA specifications (one error every ~12TB).

This is why there's a number of alternatives (Unraid seems to be quite popular in this forum), each has their pros and cons and it's worth researching a bit before taking the plunge. I personally chose Greyhole after several years with RAID5. Basically it's a program you can install in any linux, it will take whatever drives you specify (storage pool with mixed capacities, filesystems, etc) and make one or several shares you can use from your server AND network. You can specify redundancy per share (from one to maximum), meaning the number of copies for each file in case one drive dies. Drives can be added, removed and even re-added as necessary.
Best of all: it's open source and free!

(2012-04-26 05:02)tonka28 Wrote:  jackh & NeS_BCN - I've got an old machine that I was going to turn into the NAS...

After jackh's suggestion - I'll be running Linux Mint 12 with LXDE as a headless machine with SSH enabled

Thanks! What an honor!

Now, seriously, for home server purposes the G530 will do just fine, almost an overkill. In fact I built my HTPC with that very processor based on one of eskro's suggested builds, and was running my Asterisk VM on this box for a while at the same time that I'd watch movies on XBMC. No problems at all!!
HOWEVER, wanna know how I chose the E6550 as my new server processor? Answer: buying used. Yes, I went online looking for old computers (I'm sure there's a Kijiji or Craigslist for your city) and started looking for a bargain with a CPU capable of virtualization. $120 later (yes, $120 !) I had a "new" machine. Reformatted, installed Mint 12 LXDE, added my old 1TB media drive, added apps and service, a little fine tuning, done.

IMPORTANT: I also agree with having separate system and media hard drives. In case of something blowing up (G'd forbid) just take the good drive out and rebuild the rest.
For VNC: disable the "remote desktop" feature that comes included with Mint. Just install x11vnc and use that. Waaaaaaaaay better and faster.
For sharing folders: if you are connecting from another linux machine, use NFS: performance/speed will go up to the roof. Then for everything that does not support NFS, fallback to Samba, will work fine but transfer speeds will never be great.

About powerline ethernet: I've got no experience so I can't tell. Others seem to not have had a good one. In any case, I find it expensive for the limited benefit provided. But it depends on each case what the best (or least worst) option you can use...

Last word: calling my home server a "server" is just a functional name. It's still a basic workstation OS, but hey, it's Linux...

NeS_BCN, I'm telling you mate, still trying to find that reputation + button!

jackh; thanks for your info mate. I'm pretty happy with the hardware I've jotted down and the M/B can support 4x S-ATA drives, so I'm pretty happy with 8TB off the bat! I'm pretty keen on running the CF to PCI card idea with a 16GB card for the OS. Thoughts?

(2012-04-26 15:54)jackh Wrote:  For sharing folders: if you are connecting from another linux machine, use NFS: performance/speed will go up to the roof.

Tell me mate; when you say this - keeping in mind that the end of the line for my home media network is going to be an Apple TV 2, jailbroken running XBMC - is there a way I can share files with XBMC through NFS?

I'm going to have a big crack at it on the weekend - load Mint (Lisa) on my existing machine (old hardware) to test on the network and share through my Xbox as I haven't yet gotten an Apple TV.

I'll post my findings (and probably another amazing diagram/map ) after the drop.

If you already have the pci to cf card *and* the cf card *and* the system allows to boot from it, I'd say it's fine. Otherwise you can't go wrong with a usb pendrive, they are really cheap nowadays.

If you decide to use ethernet cables, cat 5e is good and cat 6 is better. MOAR CATS LOL!