Budget storage server

[Kei]

Originally Posted by Mysterae

Looking good Kei, interesting read. I liked the idea of using old hardware and re-purposing it, that while overspec'd for what it is, will do the job admirably.

I'm doing the same thing but not to the extent you are! I'll be using Windows 8.1 (so not a server in the true sense) but the use of a SATA III 8 port RAID card is tempting. One difference to your system is that mine'll be connected to the main tv as a media pc too.

It's been a while since you updated here, hows the system running?

System has been running faultlessly for a few months. The config remains unchanged, still using only 7 disks with 12TB capacity. It was moved into the loft as the noise from the fans was a bit excessive. I know it'll suffer some temperature extremes up there though, particularly in the summer.

I've been using it as a media server with plex, as an ftp server using sftp and as a teamspeak 3 server too. With the port fowarding set up, it all functions from outside too provided the correct user and passwords are known. I also set up fail2ban to deal with the persistent ssh attempts. (Though i may just nix the forwarding when I don't need it)

[remember300]

quite a nice little guide and build there, wish i saw it earlier, i whimped out and just got a nas drive but the other features like TS come in to their own when you have something like that.
Glad to see parts being used rather than lying around ... sadly when it comes to old pc cases i cut them up for mods lol ...
but a good way to make the most out of what ya had even if you had to throw a little more in to get it how you want.
and i look forward to seeing how it performs and lasts as you said in the extremes.

[Kei]

Well with most of summer gone it seems the server barely even broke a sweat in the loft. Not seen higher than 50 degrees out of it so far, but then I'm hardly taxing the cpu. RAID array is still in a nice healthy state with all 7 WD Se disks behaving as they should. Considering upgrading my LSI 8888elp to something with newer standards that would allow me to attach an LTO tape drive to it and run LTFS. Presently I can run a tape drive but I can't run LTFS as the HBA doesn't support it. Backup software like symantec backup exec would work but it's not as convenient and I'm not even sure you can get it or an equivalent for opensuse.

No idea on the power consumption as yet, need to consult the bills and run a comparison as we're nearly a year down the road.

[Kei]

Picked up a replacement GPU for the server. A nice tidy nvidia quadro NVS 310 with a measly 19.5W maximum power draw. The old FX3500 was a greedy card at 95W which was complete overkill for server purposes.
NVS310 by Kyle, on Flickr

I finally got VNC to work properly. It turned out that gnome 3 and even gnome classic DE's wouldn't play nicely with VNC due to hardware rendering being required. I've now switched to using XFCE which works perfectly. (and has the bonus of using less resources) I've also switched the login screen to lightdm which is easier on the hardware too. Space is getting chomped up quite quickly due to the expansion of my plex library. I think my handbrake encode quality might be a tad high as some of the bluray encodes are well above 20GB a piece.
Home Server by Kyle, on Flickr

[Kei]

Long overdue update. It ran faultlessly since completion, up until the end of march this year where something occurred with an update that broke samba. It seems that somehow a repository for a newer version of opensuse (42) added itself which then caused an incompatible version to install on my system running 13.1. I probably could have fixed it but it was far easier to just download the latest 42.2 iso and reinstall the os. Wiping the SSD and reinstalling took about half an hour. A few tweaks to the config, added repositories and programs and it was back to the way it was before the muck up. The array remounted to the same mount point and shared via samba and plex media server working as it should.

I went with straight XFCE instead of gnome or KDE this time. Something has made a fair difference as it uses 1GB less ram than before. Might be down to the fact that I've not yet reinstalled lsi megaraid storage manager.


Oddly it suffered from a complete freeze up the other day which it seems was caused by a kernel panic. Will be keeping an eye on it as it's the first crash I've had since I built it. The hardware is getting on a bit now, so I'm praying nothing is gonna go tits up on me.

[Kei]

All still running well since 2017. Nice and cool with the current winter temperatures. Starting to look at adding more disks (WD ultrastars as the Se is no longer made) and also considering an array rebuild as the stripe size of 256kb means that some folders stored on there are taking up vast amounts of space unnecessarily.