Thread, tutorial, software reccomendations needed

[Plugers]

Hi, I'm looking to build a home file server to hold all my music, video and other various software as me and my roommate have 6 PCs between us and want a common storage place.

I bought Jetway J7F4K1G5D-PBa motherboard and a gig of ram.

I have a gigabit lan at home. and will be putting 2 x WD 500gig sata drives and an older 300 gig I have laying around. Should I format as JABOD or have 3 shared drives?

Also, what software would work the best to be able to stream video/music while I'm at friends houses. I could do a FTP for file access, I know that.

Sorry for all the questions, I'm new to Linux and will be converting my other boxes to Ubuntu (possibly dual boot with windows in case I need it)

Thanks

 

[raz0rskyl1n3]

Note not sure how familiar you are so responding with a more detailed response.
Not sure what distro your going to use, I'm assuming Ubuntu, since that is the desktop distro you'll use. If so i'd wait for 8.04 the lts release, seeing as how you can keep that for a while. Either that or use 7.04 and just upgrade later. I really haven't used much of ubuntu so not to familiar with the upgrade process. If your still up in the air about a distro i'd recommend either ubuntu or centos(which is just a re badged red hat enterprise linux). I recommend centos because i find it very secure, and has lots of good gui configuration tools. Again many people have there own preferences to server distros,

As to the software the software i assume you'll want besides the mentioned multimedia streaming capabilites.
Samba to share network drives, this is a windows sharing client.
NFS (?) this is primarly a *nix file sharing service, while there is some software for windows.Obviously the less services you have running the better
FTP (?) not sure if you want that or not. If you want that I would recommend vsftpd, takes only a couple of minutes to setup and very easy.
Apache (?) this will depend on your software streaming choices. (music player daemon), there are plenty of web interfaces for it so you can stream across the internet, and client applications, don't know if there are any for Windows.

Streaming software
Music I use MPD (music player daemon), bit harder to set up but very flexible. It has web interfaces for streaming as well as client side applications, not sure if there are any for windows.
MPD Site http://www.musicpd.org/


Video, not to sure bout this i use myth, but that is a lot more than what you need. VLC seems to have a streaming capability, not sure if this will cover what you need or not.
VLC site http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/

Also if you want to stream outside your LAN, youll have to open the appropriate ports on your router/firewall.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Storage-wise, going with a RAID JBOD or an LVM would be the way to go for convenience sake. It took a day of fooling around to understand logical volume managers, but having both of my hard drives appear as one and writing one large partition makes things easy to work with.

As far as accessing (streaming) files across the internet, I would just run an ftp server to upload files and a web server (like apache) to serve files. And perhaps a ssh server if you need to remotely have access. You don't even need to change this configuration for your internal network either. But I would recommend you take a look at Samba. Its nice because you can set samba shares as mount points on your hard drive and have them just as easily accessible as normal folders.

Ubuntu is a solid choice.

 

[Plugers]

Thanks for the replies. I'll look into those.

I use VLC on my Win box and read that it could stream, just not familiar with much Linux software.

I've run SUSE ,Ubuntu and Kubuntu live CDs before and Tried Kubuntu on a 10 gig drive I had laying around, but at that time that PCs access was only wireless and I couldn't get that particular card to work.

I've been planning on switching to Linux far a bit, but just didn't take the jump yet. Also, I was building a new XP cd slipstreaming all updates, adding favorite apps, my drivers and rolling MCE into the disk as well and just finished that up.

Will I need a www.no-ip.com address as well to make it easier to access from across the web.

Is there any www.orb.com like app for Linux? or maybe something that can build a HTML page of your music directory to start the streams from?

EDIT: looks like MPD does that with the web client. I'll have to look into that more.

Thanks again for the ideas .

 

[raz0rskyl1n3]

As to accessing outside your LAN this depends on your ISP I took a quick look at the link for no-ip. I beleive that is what you want either that or something like dyndns. The thing to consider though is you will have to open various ports on your router, and also the ip that you get from your ISP. Also what router do you have, can you have it set to forward ports, or allow access to certain ports?
Also I'm unsure as to whether you have a statically set IP, or not. I know with Comcast the IP i have changes around quite a bit i believe to primarily limit hosting services.

I forgot to answer bout storage, but as sleepwalkerX said either RAID or lvm. One thing is I don't believe the Ubuntu installer has LVM support, at least last i checked. Whereas Cent/redhat does support for lvm via the installer. LVM isn't that hard either way sure someone can help you here no matter which distro you choose the key is to choose one your comfortable with. All distros have lvm capabilites not all have support from install though.

As to software, I just remebered fuppes a upnp client this may also suit what you need.
http://fuppes.ulrich-voelkel.de/

As to orb im unaware of anything like that for linux, however a upnp client may be rather close to that.

 

[jae]

theres one called jinzora, found it a week ago.. im still a linux noob so i didnt even bother tryin to compile it.

 

[Plugers]

Well I loaded Ubuntu 7.10 server, sett up ssh so I can run it through PuTTY.

I also installed Samba and set up 2 user accounts (for me and my room mate) there is also a all users drive.

Ubuntu Server had LVM at install, so I used that. Can LVM rebuild 1 large volume when a new drive is added? Should i have installed the LAMP bundle of software? I may just redo it when 8.04 comes out as I put it on my old IBM 45gig "Death"star hard drive, so I'm not comfortable with it's reliability.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Plugers
I may just redo it when 8.04 comes out as I put it on my old WD 45gig "Death"star hard drive, so I'm not comfortable with it's reliability.

as cheap as data storage is, theres no reason to keep any "death star" drives.

hit up fs/t for cheap storage if you must, i got 200 gigs last week for under 40 bucks.

 

[Plugers]

I do have a 500gig WD aaks series drive and a 300gig of which I can't remember the brand. My room mate has another 500gig. So I know I'll have enough space, I just figured I'd mess with the 45gig and just get used to a Linux server environment until 8,.04 LTS is final in a few weeks.