Home Server for family pix & vids

[Jason Marks]

OK, here's the other adventure...

This summer I came to the realization that a cheap desktop could serve as a centralized repo of family pix and vids. The keyword is "cheap." It doesn't need to "do" much other than safely store and serve pix & vids to the family on the LAN.

I researched and bought the cheapest AMD ( fanboy *cough* ) based desktop with the intent of wiping out Windows and putting Ubuntu Server 20.04 ...

Bought an HP EliteDesk 705 G1 SFF running an AMD A4 PRO-7800B w/ 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hdd.

But, it came w/ Windows 10 Pro... and it was cheaper than buying Pro by itself! That was too tempting so, many hours were lost trying to figure out how to move W. Pro to a VM. Yet, even w/ all the research, it didn't bring over the license. So that ship has sailed. Also I did use Clonezilla to clone the 500GB hdd before going thru the install of Win10 Pro... in case I have to return it.

Installed Ubuntu Server 20.04... but things were ... wonky. Hard to initially describe. It just acted weird. Then after it was installed and I'd do, "sudo apt update" followed by "sudo apt upgrade" it'd drop the connection. Time out? But it would take a couple minutes for it to become responsive and I could reset the NIC and try again. I learned it was actually making progress so repeatedly issuing "sudo apt upgrade" was in fact working.

On top of this, being a relative Linux noob ( "DOS rulez!" He said, until he tried to install it in a VM. ) in a "less pain is better" mentality I tried to install a GUI. I get confused w/ the DE/DM/WM nomenclature. I ended up installing more than one login screen thingie, and I forget which GUI, but logg out/shutdown were greyed out ... research said something about not being connected w/ the root account. Fixing this turned out to be temporary as I'd have to redo it after each reboot.

To get past the wonky NIC I used a USB to Ethernet adapter ( purposed for a laptop w/o an RJ45 ). This worked! But I didn't (and still don't) think it good to have it as a permanent solution. Thoughts?

Then, I bought a 2TB hdd and an internal NIC.

The hdd upgrade happened first. Ubuntu Server 20.04 then "kubuntu-desktop" which is overkill, but I usually used Xubuntu in the past & well I wanted something w/ a bit more ... "Presentation!" - Megamind.

Forgot to mention, that this time, installing to the 2TB, the install kept crashing. When I caught on and restarted the installation w/o internet it was rock solid/normal. ( I'm pretty sure I was using the USB dongle. I've had trouble w/ USB devices powering down in Windows so that's what I assume was happening. )

At this point, I noticed I only had 200GiB and got the great fortune of learning yet another thing. LVM. (LVM was the default option. I just went w/ it. Little did I know.)

. there's vgdisplay & lvdisplay. To get the right names of vg's & lv's

. and then lvextend ... But there's more than one way ... and 2 of them are upper & lower "L"

. I kept mixing the 2 ways using the wrong cased arg.

. what worked: sudo lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv

** (that first arg is a lower-case "L") **

. then, sudo resize2fs /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv

. "df -h" & "inxi -Fxz" both confirmed it worked, AFAICT.

( inxi was a nice find. pretty prints full specs )

When I finally got around to installing the NIC, I found out that it was PCI and "Batgirl" ( I am not making this up! It's the name of/on the mobo. ) didn't have any PCI slots. Only PCIe. Duh. Where have I been?!

Eventually got back to the store and exchanged it for a PCIe NIC. TP-Link TG-3468. Not detected.

Similar issues to: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1199444/tp-link-tg-3468-ethernet-pci-card-not-working

But I haven't dug into it yet.

...

Given that the "SEVER" isn't stable in the serving department I haven't made much progress on learning/setting up samba. I'll link to a vid or 2 I watched, as they have conflicting setup instructions.

That's all for now.

More Q's to follow.

Thanks.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jason Marks (jym...@sbcglobal.net):

> This summer I came to the realization that a cheap desktop could serve
> as a centralized repo of family pix and vids.

Be warned that desktop boxen often make unsatisfactory servers for lots
of individually compelling reasons. And going as cheap as humanly
possible increases the challenges.

> Eventually got back to the store and exchanged it for a PCIe NIC.
> TP-Link TG-3468. Not detected.

This is a really cut-rate design. It replies on a Realtek
RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller chip and is
supported by the r8169 driver. You're not going to get a decent gigabit
NIC at a $12 price point, by the way.

If you want to not have problems, avoid NICs based on Realtek chips;
gravitate towards NICs with Intel chips.

Meantime, try a different PCIe slot if possible, and check the NIC and
motherboard documentation to see if there's settings to control IRQ
assignment.

[Jason Marks]

TYVM for the concise reply. ( I'm aware & "working on" the concise thing. )

2 wrongs don't ... Missing that the first NIC was PCI and then getting a non-Linux working PCIe NIC...

• Granted the cheapest ( but I spent $15 !!! *face-palm* /humor ) doesn't always win
• I vaguely rem dial-up modems that were "Windows only". Same concept?
• I did try to compile Ethernet drivers -- very new territory for me -- for the on mobo built in NIC.
• being a noob, I downloaded code for wrong chips 2x, but even when I (supposedly) had the right model/code I still couldn't get it working.
• (whispers) there's a chance that I bought a NIC w/ the same chip as the wonky one built in.
• (shhh. don't tell anyone.)
• Most likely both are Realtek.
• Not to disparage the co, but it's not their NICs, but rather that they don't support Linux w/ drivers, right?

As for the box itself, I'm a budget constrained noob. Since the goal is to be able serve pix/vids to the family on the LAN*... which IMHO wouldn't require much oomph. ( A working NIC would be nice ). But I've read somewhere ... that someone took a low end "chromebook" and used it as such. What am I missing?

* side benefits are:

• freeing up 0.5TB on my primary laptop
• being able to do stuff while uploading pix/vids ( not that I'm that efficient )
• allowing the rest of the fam to reminisce at their leisure, not mine. (Wait! I love my family!!)
• supporting/encouraging the rest of the fam to backup their pix/vids w/o my help!

In the other extreme, I recently discovered a "homelab" community on reddit. For now, I'll just say that what they do is mind boggling, and ... how do they pay their electric bill?

peace & 42

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[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jason Marks (jym...@sbcglobal.net):

> OK, here's the other adventure...
> This summer I came to the realization that a cheap desktop could serve
> as a centralized repo of family pix and vids. The keyword is "cheap."

I was in a hurry, earlier, and couldn't elaborate on this at the time.
A bit more now follows:

Desktop boxes in general are poorly designed for 24x7 server operation,
don't have adequate cooling (can develop heat buildup leading to early
compnent failure and unreliable operation), tend to have really cruddy
I/O and unreliable I/O and storage hardware, and (at least for many
years, not sure anymore) many had ATX PSU / motherboard combinationss
that couldn't be configured to boot back to fully 'up' mode after losing
power. That is, many such units, after regaining power, came back up to
a 'standby' mode until an operator restarted them -- a highly
undesirable thing in a server. Also, desktop boxes tend to have bloated
CPUs / video but feeble and unexpandable (or poorly expandable) RAM.
This is a headache for Linux server usage, because Linux servers are
often bottlenecked on RAM and I/O, and almost never on CPU.

Also, at the point of purchase, desktop boxes are excessively expensive
for what you get, compared to (say) a two-year-old used server box.

Used to be, you could walk into Weird Stuff Warehouse and get a bunch of
adequate used server boxes practically for free. But Weird Stuff
Warehouse is sadly gone into the mists of Silicon Valley history. I
don't know where one would go for such offerings, now, unless perhaps
the Electronics Fleamarket.

The most common headache with server-class boxes, when adopted for home
server use, is noise: The fans tend to be excessively noisy for in-home
use. Over time, this can become kinda intolerable.

What would help would be if hardware manufacturers would recognise the
existence of a home server market, and target it with small fanless or
very quiet, compact boxes that are nonetheless able to house substantial
RAM (like 8GB-32GB) and RAID1-mirrored storage. But the manufacturers
don't do that. One market that's _close_ to what's needed is the HTPC
(home theater PC) class of small computer. often mini-ITX form factor
for the case and motherboard. If you're careful about CPU (avoid
bloat), you can have a silent, fanless unit that has good RAM and is
backed by a RAIDed pair of SSDs (likewise silent).

It doesn't need to "do" much other than safely store and serve pix & vids to the family on the LAN.

> I researched and bought the cheapest AMD ( fanboy *cough* ) based
> desktop with the intent of wiping out Windows and putting Ubuntu
> Server 20.04 ... Bought an HP EliteDesk 705 G1 SFF running an AMD A4
> PRO-7800B w/ 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hdd.

The problem with Small Form Factor PCs is that, to cram everything into
a tiny, thin case, serious compromises needed to be made.

The AMD A-series A10 PRO-7800B (or similar, as there are several they
use) APU is perfectly fine. Since this is a
CPU aimed at the laptop market, it runs cool, which you definitely want,
and a Linux server isn't going to be CPU-bottlenecked in any plausible
scenario, anyway.

That's so small and thin that you risk a heat problem (in server usage)
in spite of the low-power CPU. Also, it's so cramped in there that I
am _guessing_ there's no room for a mirrored pair of storage devices,
and also the case passive cooling isn't good to avoid the need for a
PSU fan. Not sure about the ability to add storage, actually.

You'll also notice that the optical drive slot appears to be specialised
for a tiny 'HP Slim SuperMulti DVD Writer Drive' assembly. I'm not sure
from the specs how many PCIe x16 expansion slots there are, but they're
limited in size: '2.5” low profile, 6.6” length'

> On top of this, being a relative Linux noob ( "DOS rulez!" He said,
> until he tried to install it in a VM. ) in a "less pain is better"
> mentality I tried to install a GUI. I get confused w/ the DE/DM/WM
> nomenclature.

'Display Manager' is just a (any) graphical login-screen application for
X11.

'Window Manager' is a privileged type of X11 application ('client')
whose purpose it is to manage interaction among the other X11 clients
and furnish/handle controls like scrollbars, close boxes, etc.

'Desktop Environment' is not a technical concept, really, but rather a
marketing concept. A DE is a suite of X11 clients, a window manager
(or a choice of window managers) and a set of graphics libraries shared
among all of the bundled X11 clients, and a few other things. A DE is
typically delivered as a metapackage that, upon installation, pulls in
as dependencies the entire suite.

There is a persistent misconception that desktop computing requires a
DE. This is not the case. It's just how marketing works.

On any modern Linux distribution, you can actually install or remove
whatever X11 applications you choose on an a la carte basis, without
regard to 'DE' affiliation.

By the way, you should consider omitting X11 entirely from a server.
Less bloat, less to go wrong, smaller security profile, etc. OTOH, it's
your box, and if you want desktop software on your server, fine, go for
it.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jason Marks (jym...@sbcglobal.net):

> TYVM for the concise reply.

YW. ;->

> 2 wrongs don't ... Missing that the first NIC was PCI and then getting a non-Linux working PCIe NIC...

That must have been vexing.

> - Granted the cheapest ( but I spent $15 !!! *face-palm* /humor ) doesn't always win
> - I vaguely rem dial-up modems that were "Windows only". Same concept?

Kind of. These $12 PCIe cards aren't quite that pathetic, but, e.g.,
skimp on buffer memory size and on just about everything else. And
they're by reputation just a bit flaky. I expect flaky when I hear
Realtek; sometimes it's OK, and sometimes you pay a hassle tax.

> - I did try to compile Ethernet drivers -- very new territory for

> me -- for the on mobo built in NIC.

If you find yourself needing to compile ethernet drivers for your NIC,
one or more of these things is the case, in my experience:

1. You're following questionable advice from somewhere like
Ubuntuforums that may not be even correct, let alone necessary.

2. You're an advanced Linux user who made a deliberate choice to buy
spanking-new hardware and don't mind the extreme hassle of crafting your
own drivers because you're devoted to The Shiny.

3. The hardware's actually defective or misconfigured.

4. There's a missing firmware file, prerequisite to the NIC being
anything beyond a doorstop.

> - Not to disparage the co, but it's not their NICs, but rather that

> they don't support Linux w/ drivers, right?

It's best not to expect drivers for Linux from a hardware manufacturer,
and, if the manufacturer offers one, use it only as a last resort. It
is greatly preferable to use maintained drivers from the open source
community. When developed, they are in general less brittle, are not
proprietary, and pose far fewer problems for you to maintain going
forward.

> As for the box itself, I'm a budget constrained noob.

Fine, but what's your time and frustration worth? You decide.

A suitably selected piece of used hardware that's -better- suited for
server roles would actually probably be cheaper or at least competitive.

> In the other extreme, I recently discovered a "homelab" community on
> reddit. For now, I'll just say that what they do is mind boggling, and
> ... how do they pay their electric bill?

The electric bill is a definite concern (as is noise), and is one reason
I mentioned things like HTPC-class hardware.

[Jason Marks]

TYVM for the advice and feedback.

Not much progress as I haven't been able to pick up an Intel NIC.
(Interestingly enough, the NIC I bought is no longer offered where I bought it!)

Perhaps labeling this a "server" is a bit of a misnomer. Is what I'm working towards more like a NAS?

Besides the NIC detection issue, I believe this box will work. It won't be up 24/7 and I hope to disable booting directly into KDE and only it when "needed".

One seemingly helpful video was:

How to turn an old laptop into a NAS Server - Beginners Guide

https://youtu.be/8ARldVpkxkA

... but the samba instructions differed from an earlier video I watched.

There is a plethora of "how to's" online, but does anybody have any favorites for this use case?

thanks in advance.

peace & 42

- jason