upgrading the media server

[cimorene]

As indicated in my last post, I upgraded basically the whole inside of my PC: new motherboard and processor, new memory, and an SSD. So last night I turned to waxjism and said,

"Hey, you wanna upgrade the hardware in the media server and try to install one of those headless media server OSes on it together? It'll be fun! It'll be like a date!"

(It's her summer vacation right now.)

Our "media server" is actually just a spare PC built out of the still-working hand-me-down components of our PCs and it has always run a regular Ubuntu-based Linux. There's a keyboard, a monitor, and a mouse attached to the box, although we leave them off 90% of the time and use it over the LAN. I knew about headless OSes for servers of course, but I didn't really realize there were free Linux-based distros designed specifically for the sort of cobbled-together media server we've got, but to be controlled with a web interface so we could actually put this tired old monitor into storage.

I found out about the existence of these distros a couple of weeks ago by accident - I can't remember how. Memorably, the computer-building nerds refer to these as NASes, which stands for Network Attached Storage, and I can't get over that because... Nas already means something and he's one of the 10 greatest hip hop artists of all time, according to most listicle-making judges?

But anyway, we plugged all our media hdds and the old old old old power source into the motherboard just retired from my former PC and set about installing one of these distros. And we immediately ran into complications.



screengrab from my tumblr text post and Wax's reblog showing the tag journeys

• FreeNAS has a minimum requirement of 8gb of memory, which is ludicrous for our purposes. Our server has been using 4 for years and it's fine. Also so have our own PCs until the last couple of months. Also it's based on FreeBSD, not Linux, which is a minor negative in that we're familiar with Linux.



• OpenFiler is designed to be installed from an optical disk only and our attempts to burn the .iso to a usb kept failing. Eventually we found an explainer about the fix for this, but by this point we had other concerns.



• OpenMediaVault wanted to take up an entire hard disk for its exclusive use. Not a partition of a disk, but a whole physical disk. We always use partitions, so both the media hdds are already partitioned and both of them contain data that we don't have backups of elsewhere at the moment. Now, I had an unused spare physical drive in my box, and we have a box of old ones in the library, but Wax had already screwed the cover back on the case at that point.



• Nas4free really, really wants you to run it off of a dedicated USB stick or similar, not a hdd. Really. Really. But if you keep googling you'll learn that if you MUST, you can put it on a hdd, but then it will take the entire disk as well.



• We decided to just go ahead and try to add another hdd and use it, since we have plenty of them. I started to reformat the one in my box since it was already attached, which I've definitely done in the past, but unlike in the past Ubuntu-based system I was using when I've done it, after I cracked the case and removed the drive, I wasn't able to repair the install by booting into emergency mode and modifying fstab and grub. That's what I've done multiple times in the past, but Ubuntu 18.04 wouldn't offer me an emergency or recovery mode, and unlike past live oses I've used to access my disks, the 18.04 liveos wouldn't access my drives so I couldn't use it to modify fstab or grub. I just reinstalled using the same /home partition, which did preserve most of my settings, but I still had some tweaking and reinstalling to do to fix it.



• But we couldn't plug the hdd into the media server because there were no more sata power cables on the ancient power source. The two hdds had used them all up.



• No problem! We'll use one of the old hdds that have IDE plugs, right? Nope, because the newer motherboard we were using didn't have a single IDE port.



• So then we decided to run Nas4free, since it wanted to run off a USB stick anyway. We have USB sticks to spare, right? No. It's built to RUN on USB, but it's not built to be INSTALLED from USB. Its install .iso is again exclusively for optical drives. And we couldn't plug the optical drive into the media server's motherboard because it was an ide.

So eventually, after breaking my install, opening browsers for issues related to the project on both our desktops and Raja the chromebook as well as my phone, booting up the old laptop just to check the USBs were in fact bootable, opening the media server's box twice and mine once, and watching two cats jump down from a shelf and land on Raja's keyboard, we gave up...

... after midnight, though, which made that a very long date. We succeeded in none of our aims, though we learned a fair amount about the confusing world of free NAS distros. We did have fun at the beginning, so it wasn't a failure, per se.

And today we walked to Jimm's PC Store and got a new basic model power source, and Wax insisted on getting a 60-gig SSD as well simply because she wanted to play with one. With these mods in place, we installed openmediavault successfully and got through the stages of setup with no wrinkles so far. Operation over the network is working okay too, and after a few missteps I got the Samba shares working and we're currently moving files around in preparation for some reformatting and creating persistent drive labels with a new bootable stick of gparted.

Comments

[msilverstar]

You two are so adventurous! I can't even install npm correctly.

[cimorene]

I don't think that's something that we have done. I tried googling it but the top results didn't quite make clear what it was?

However, remember, all this experimentation was on our spare third pc. We don't need it for day-to-day tasks. And we have already pre-partitioned all our data away, so our experimental installs never put it at risk of damage, either. Even when installing a new OS in one of our own boxes, the worst that could happen is that we have to use one of the .isos we have around for an os that we already know works to make a clean and working install, which can be accomplished in an hour or so. We have backups of all the personal settings in our own installs as well, so that doesn't take long to fix either.

[msilverstar]

npm is a package manager, so it's for those of us who get frustrated installing all the libraries and compiling and making when necessary, all the cascading dependencies.

Funny thing is I got into Macs in the 80s to avoid commandlines and never really escaped, having the BSD unix features accessible in Mac OS X has been very useful.

[cimorene]

Oh, now google's telling me it's for coding javascript. I've never tried coding anything outside of q-basic in middle school, so that seems like it's a little more adventurous by default than just the stuff we were doing!

[msilverstar]

all your unix shell stuff is pretty close to coding

[cimorene]

I can see that, although I mostly use the results I get from googling, as opposed to remembering what the commands actually mean...

[cimorene]

There is a LOT less command line stuff needed now even for the intermediate-level tasks and applications I use compared to 10 years ago in the Ubuntu-derived Linux world. The trend, controversially, has been towards smoothing the user experience into a more foolproof or noob-proof GUI, which has already started driving power and intermediate users up into Debian and other varieties, because of course, that decreases the flexibility. For example, the newest iterations of the file browsers have removed a lot of right-click menu options and settings which are now unavailable or hidden and accessed only through secret keyboard commands. I wouldn't swear, but I think for several years now it's been possible to completely avoid the command line in Ubuntu - I still use it as a shortcut for speed though.