Sr Vr.

I did that for about an hour before realising I should stop hahahahaha.

About 6 months ago I bought a CD transport for my hifi rack. I only listened to music for about an hour on it. I spent about two days just opening and closing the tray.

Everything these days is designed to be talked to, not interacted with. You forget how satisfying these mechanisms are tbh. No wonder kids today need fidget toys. When I was a kid you spent your whole life getting up to change records or turn over tapes :D
 
GPU came. Didn't realise the whole cooler assembly was metal, it's quite heavy tbh.

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Got an idea for stabilising the plane. Will get onto that later.

My buddy sent me three SSDs.

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So a huge shout out for that ! Then, after doing up a lot of screws.

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Should hold a copy of COD :D
 
May as well have ordered a long weight from Amazon, because that's what I got lol.

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She's now ready to be packed back into the box for transport home.

I threw in a cheeky offer on some Intel SSDs. Just 180gb, used. £14 each. Offer accepted, so I got 3. That should fill up the planes. Once it's all in and spanned I can then figure out what size backup drive I need.
 
OK. Apologies for the radio silence, it's been a bit of a crap week.

I got home and lugged everything I needed up the stairs. Sucked tbh. Started building it that night, and immediately noticed an issue. Whilst everything fits how I planned it to I did not realise the USB 3.0 header would be covered so tightly. I thought it was up the side of the board like 99% of the boards I have used in the past so didn't pay it much thought. That was a mistake. It doesn't fit no way no how. There may be a way around this, and I will try, but as of now no front USB.

I also realised very quickly that I should not have stopped after shortening the 24 and 8 pin. Space is a premium in this old chassis, so that bit me.

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That was after an over two hour fight with the PSU. Let me cover that also. Firstly the mesh grille was rubbing the fan. So I had to use the old frame as a spacer. Not a deal breaker. However, I soon realised the connector in the PSU for the fan made no sense. I figured it out eventually, and got a lovely electric shock for the convenience ffs. I also found out that yes it's a 140mm fan but Enermax used 120 mount holes. Meaning I had to drill the fan and mess around with it for ages. UGH. Then I found out it's just a hair too thick so had to mod that too ffs. I got that done, and then the next day I shortened the PCIE power cable.

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It's not finished (needs final cable ties etc) but lesson learned from the past don't tie everything down until you are sure it all works.

I already had Ubuntu installed but it was giving some AMD error at launch. I got around that by connecting it to the network and installing a couple of updates via terminal. The rest? has been slow going, but that is what you get when you are in an alien OS that you have never really dug deeply into before.

It took me the best part of a day just to install the video driver. I downloaded them from Nvidia but they came packaged as a .run file. I then became blinkered by this, and it cost me a few hours. Firstly when I tried to launch it it was telling me I needed to be logged in as root. However, when I did that I could not see the DIR structure. I then found a way to make myself root, and launched it. Then it told me it was unhappy about something else. Many hours had passed now and I was peed off with it so I started having a look around Ubuntu and happened across the software update part that also has "other devices" listed. Sure enough, there it was.

However, I then noticed another problem. See if you can spot it.

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I will come back to that shortly. The next step was figuring out how the heck you combine volumes in Ubuntu. Back to school I went. Found out that it was all done by terminal unless you used a GUI. Cool, so I set about finding one. I eventually found the respository for KDE partition manager. However, when I watched a guide on the internet it was making no sense and didn't even look like the one I was using. I then looked at the help guide, but again the GUI was completely different.

It seems it has been updated (the GUI/app) but the documentation hasn't. Eventually after a few hours I figured it out. And created my spanned volumes.

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Which all worked beautifully. However, you will note something is missing. Look closer...

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Yup, no Revodrive X3. Now if you cast your mind back to the first picture of Ubuntu you can see it is there. However, it is there in four parts. That is how the drive works. Four 250gb Sandforce SATA SSDs all hiding behind a Marvell controller. Now when I first saw this I figured "Hmm, no RAID but I can span the volumes to make the drive back up into one piece". Only you can't. It only allows you access to the first 250gb. The rest? can not be partitioned or formatted in any shape or form. So basically? that will have to come out. There was a hacked together user driver created in 2011, but I can't find it.

The good news is that you can see, we have the rest of the SSDs all picking up, detected and spanned into volumes.

So basically the rig is now ready to be set up for Nextcloud. That is literally the final step, now that I have all of the hardware up and running how it should be.
 
Shame about the revodrive. Have you run Nextcloud before? It's a lovely system. I manage one system with just over 100 users using it. Added built-in document editing too with Collabora.

Nextcloud's update schedule is really fast, sometimes it's hard to keep up. Make sure you do though otherwise you get left behind and updating becomes a problem.
 
I spent about five hours ripping out hair trying to install it in Windows.

Then I realised you can't LOL. There's a app to access a nextcloud from Windows but it only runs in Linux or in a VM on Windows running Linux.

So Windows would be a middle guy hence the removal.

Yeah I hear NC is the best basically. You need Apache and a load of other stuff first which is why I'd imagine it doesn't work under Windows natively.

My post was kinda negative tbh. When I got home I needed groceries. And that's how I ended up sitting on the kitchen floor for nearly 8 hours.

My alderlake rig was loading into win 11 and then the screen would start flashing. Not flickering, but straight out strobe. Four hours later I worked out it was Steam. Fixed that then I had no sound. Another four hours of stress and changing through 3 sound cards revealed my Beyer Dynamic T5P had mysteriously blown up whilst I was gone. Bye bye $1k worth of cans.

On the plus side the server is near silent, temps are amazing and those back planes are a sight to behold. When you boot the bugger it looks like WOPR lmao.
 
You can run it as a docker container that has all that preconfigured. Makes the setup much easier, but I prefer to do it myself. You'll learn a lot more if you set it up yourself too.

https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud
Readme: https://github.com/docker-library/docs/blob/master/nextcloud/README.md

Are you going to make this available outside your network?

Edit: Oh and I didn't take it as negative. I know how it is setting up this kind of stuff. I spent way too much last weekend moving my hyerhdr bias lighting to a rpi zero 2 w. I really need to write up notes so I don't have to figure it all out again next time I upgrade it. Btw, awesome project, pretty cheap to implement and looks so awesome for movies/games.
 
Yes mate. To the outside bit. My Freenas is great but I gave up trying to get it on the net. That's what this will be for. Tired of having 3 pcs at two different houses all with different music and stuff on them.

And yeah I'd sooner learn to do Linux whilst doing the cloud bit. I'm really rusty with it.

Plus I want to be able to share my films and music with my friends.
 
We are getting there, slowly.

I have installed and enabled and tested LAMP (all of the comonents like Apache, PHP etc). They are all working. Then I realised I would need a way to point at the rig. Which then took me on a huge side quest involving my dynamic IP and etc. A real head F for someone who doesn't know his arse from his networking elbow.

Thankfully my friend got me to the point where I needed to set up the router and etc. I figured before doing that I would put the rig back together and get it tidied and buttoned up.

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Booted it up and after about 10 minutes it shut down. Figured it was a loose pin on the PSU, as when I went to reboot it it immediately shut off. FFS, this rig doesn't want to be closed ! Took out the 24 pin cable and soldered any problematic pins. Started it back up started fine. 10 minutes later shut off again.

It turns out that some complete and total idiot with no brains unplugged the AIO pump wire to tidy it and other wires, yet forgot to plug it back in lmao. *whistles*. So with that finally figured out after the hoses were red hot it is now back up and functional again.

Last night I figured I would load up Transmission and see how it was for torrents. I mean, what is the point in grabbing movies and music from my PC then sending them to this right? may as well grab them directly on this. And that was when I realised that all of the volumes I had created are like this.

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That was why Transmission kept crashing, as I was trying to write to a volume it could not write to. So that's today's job and another side quest (they are all the same apart from the install drive ffs).
 
Issue solved.

Again I thought it would be immensely complicated but it was extremely simple.

Tried through terminal and no joy. Tried downloading repository that didn't exist any more and then found out Ubuntu has an app called disks.

Turns out they weren't formatted lmao.
 
I never install the desktop environment on my linux servers, but I do use webmin. It really helps with some of the basic tasks like formatting drives. It gives a really nice web interface to remotely manage linux servers. You might want to check it out.

https://webmin.com/download.html
 
Excellent thanks for that dude.

It's been a long fight thus far. One I ran out of energy for a few days back (since the new TV was delivered) and because of all of the hiccups and issues I've just left it. Not far to go though, I literally just need to call my buddy up and finish up getting the IP working etc. He's having a bit of a 'mare with his rig right now so I don't want to push things.
 
It's not dead. Bit dusty, but not dead.


I got frustrated with Linux to the point I stopped working on it. I got it to the point where it needed to go online. Little did I envisage just how much messing around that would be. I can't do that sort of thing any more. Mostly because I decided at some point that my mental health was too important to be getting into stuff that's complex and extremely time consuming. I don't need that escape any more, and getting it to the point where I could access it from outside was becoming more and more daunting. It meant a new router, paying for a static IP and god knows what else.

It just wasn't worth it. I then got side tracked with HIFI. The sub mainly, but also my new toy, the record deck.

TBH I had pretty much forgotten about this. Then my NAS started annoying me a couple of days back and I remembered.

So what did I do? got rid of Ubuntu. Firstly it meant losing a tb of very fast storage (the Revodrive) and secondly it was painfully slow to get it to do anything without spending hours reading. As such I got it to the point with Windows 11 in about 50 minutes, rather than the three bloody weeks it took me faffing around with Ubuntu.

So she's staying local, and will replace my NAS.
 
I understand this idk when it was but i had a hard drive fail many years back so was using ubuntu live cd just so i could get online and browse, few days later freinds were concerned turned up we went out got a hard drive this was the ear of 80gb's being the norm.

Then decided i'd try switching to linux fully just to learn and see if it was worth using. I liked a lot of things about it but doing anything meant learning a ton about command prompts ect and in the end i got things working nicely not really good for gaming at all at that stage but i was having fun learning, then one day turned on PC went to load in and idk how or why but the whole OS was broken, at that point i installed windows and i've never been back LUL
 
Linux is designed for people who are completely invested in computers and like to spend 12 hour sessions.

I was that guy 20 years ago. I just ain't him any more. TBH? there is just no need to be. Windows has everything you need to do the same job in 1/10th the time.

I haven't begun the migration yet as I leave in the AM to finish the sub, but will sort that when I get back. I reckon it'll take 2-3 days and yeah no point starting it now as I will only have to power it all off before I leave.
 
Linux has it's uses and benifits and you need a brain and understanding to use it fully but windows as you say is so easy to use even for everyday people, but i do feel the people who have a lot of issues on windows generally are not keeping a tidy OS doing the updates cleaning the system getting rid of junk ect or rely on some unreliable program to do it for them without understanding what to do if it does it wrong or able to problem solve.

As much as i'd like a better system OS windows does it dam well, but i'm going to avoid windows 11 for as long as possible it's made some changes i don't like so i'll stick with win10 even on my new CPU as i think windows 12 will be when i'll feel more willing to move at that stage new DX13 ect ect more reason i feel, only thing windows 11 has i'd like is auto HDR otherwise i will stay put on win10 for now no idea if all my drivers for everything would work and far to many things installed to want to mess with.

Basically a full reinstall for me would take me weeks to sort out to get it anywhere near where i'm atm, fine i could update via windows update with new cpu, but that doesnt give me solid ground as it could all go horrid so while windows is the easiest to use i don't trust it one bit XD
 
It's not about a brain. It's learning. If you don't know how to do something you need to learn it. It would be fine if you already knew and had put it into action many times, but like I said it requires learning and many many hours in which to do so. Which years ago? I had all of the time in the world for. Now? not so much. Nor do I have the patience.

The fact is that Windows contains so much more than Ubuntu. For example the disc file systems and handling? it's all there. So to set up a span in Windows you go into Disc Management, delete the volumes and create a span. Then you format it.

On Linux? you have to spend hours upon hours finding the correct app as it does not span natively, download it through pulling it down, set it up, then go through many processes to get them spanned. Only that app doesn't format the drives afterward, so you then need an app that can format such volumes.

Meaning something I did in about a minute total took days. The brains say? use Windows. It's about being smart, not enjoying water torture. Same thing goes with the Nvidia driver. The ones Nvidia give you? don't work. Again you need to pull down modified drivers and etc. Instead of just typing "www.nvidia.co.uk" clicking on "drivers" and pressing a button.

Like I said, if I had time to pee around for days on end? it would be fine. I don't. I am only there for about two weeks at a time and if something starts to overwhelm me and or get very boring? I will ditch it. I'm not lazy, I have just learnt very well in 48 years the importance of time with little stress. And to budget that time more onto things that calm and relax me, not make me want to throw stuff out of the window lol.

Funny thing is Anthony did a video a few weeks back on LTT saying "If you want a cheap, easy to use server then you can just use Win10. It']s very easy to set up".

Which begs the question, if that is the answer, why would you want something that at the end will offer nothing more than Windows only will take you weeks of messing around to set up. Even if you are a pro on Linux with lots of experience you still need to perform the steps above. Which all take more time.

Now in a server environment with business dependency? yeah I get it. However they are not using Linux either. They use FreeNAS and other NAS apps, and server apps that are Linux based but have a different GUI (frontend) which has everything built in and usually uses its own custom file system.

But I have been having trouble with FreeNAS too, which is why I am about to ditch it. It doesn't matter how many times I seem to set the drive permissions after a couple of reboots it stops me putting stuff on it. Which is defeating the purpose of a back up. It also continually vanishes over my Fire TV, and I have to keep rebooting the Fire TV. Which might be the Fire TV but I have no idea, so will find out when I change it out.

Also you need to bear in mind. This is not a functioning PC. IE, it's headless. I don't sit on it and listen to music, watch videos, watch Youtube etc. I press a power button and it loads and shares files. So it doesn't need to do anything else.
 
Oh i fully understand that linux isn't worth the hassle generally as even setting up basic network audio and drivers can take a fair amount of work to get running correctly.

It's biggest issue is the UI design is crap the GUI in windows works so flawlessly that like you say why would you use anything else, but in big servers they tend to have very custom software that is licenced and costs more than i've earned in life lol
 
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