Gentoo

A little while back I discussed my (at the time) recent purchase of an Acer H340 Windows Home Server. At that time I was just getting into ripping my DVDs into x264 / DIVX formatted video files. At about 1.5-gigabyte per movie, it seemed like it would take me forever to fill up the 4-terabytes of space the server afforded me. I figured by the time that happened storage would be more dense and a new, similar solution would be available to replace my “aging” H340 server. Of course, as usual, I underestimated my enthusiasm in filling the device. See, shortly after I began this project I started modifying what I was filling my library with.

With my discovery of the PS3MediaServer package, I found serenity in being able to transcode higher resolution rips. Now all the sudden a whole new world of ripped 720p and 1080p BluRay media opened to me. This of course went great for a while. I was able to watch all sorts of great movies on my nice LCD TV in uber high-resolution and my little media server was chugging away, doing its best to keep up with all the transcoding I threw its way. Soon, the 2-terabytes that drive duplication afforded me filled up, so I deduplicated my TV show archive and made my way to 3 -terabytes. Which I of course filled equally fast.

After removing almost all duplication, I started to notice other issues. Every once in a while the server would just hang while trying to transfer data to it. At first it was very occasionally; about once every 2-3 days. Unfortunately, soon this mutated into every time I would do so, within 5-minutes of starting a copy job.

Around the same time, I started noticing that the server would hang anytime I would remote desktop into it. It wouldn’t happen as soon as I entered it, however usually as soon as I tried to open explorer, the whole UI would just hang. Needless to say, after a few days of this, I just shut it off. It was clear I had exceeded the capabilities of the machine. I think the extreme amount of data and media that I was asking it to index was just simply causing the little Atom processor too much trouble. Causing kernel panics and the like.

I still stand by that it is a great little server, however I think I tried to do too much with it. It intended as a backup server that also could share some files. However as a full media server, it just did not have the processing power to keep up.

A New Solution

This led me with a huge gap to fill. So after a couple weeks of looking around and trying to convince myself that I did not need to spend the money to buy a full-out server, I did anyway. I did not go with 2-terabyte drives, as I am always wary with the largest hard disk size, however I did decide to go with 1.5-terabyte drives. Seven of them to be exact. I currently have 10.5 terabytes in a RAID 5 array, giving me approximately 9-terabytes of space (minus the file-system overhead of course). I tried not to go too overboard. I bought a modest dual-core processor with 4-gigs of RAM. I really only splurged on the hard disks and the case itself. As I would be running this constantly, I needed to be sure the hard disks remained cool, so fans and space were a real consideration.

I decided on the Supermicro CSE-743T-645B Pedestal Chassis, with eight hot-swappable hard disk bays. The goal being that if a drive dies, I want to be able to replace it easily and start the recovery process right away. The case is a little obtuse to work with and had I researched a little better I would have probably gone with a Supermicro server motherboard. Being that all the connectors (fans, front control panel)  are very specific to their hardware, one of their boards would have been a more direct fit. However with a bit of research and common sense (and the inclusion of a fan controller) I was able to get it all up and running with a cheaper Asus motherboard.

While I did jump back on forth on Linux distros: from Debian Lenny, to Ubuntu, finally settling into my old favorite Gentoo. It required a bit more work to get it set up, however in the end I truly believe you are more familiar with you system and what is installed and how to make changes because of the extra set up time. Currently I have not done much with it aside from setting up my hard disk array.

Next Steps

After a little research, it seems that I will be switching from PS3MediaServer to the MediaTomb. As MediaTomb runs as a service, it will integrate better into a Linux server, because it will be available as soon as I turn the machine on. The lower footprint of the software will also be advantageous, leaving the server to do other fun things, like acting as a torrent box.

Once I get a little further I will share the setup of MediaTomb here, as from what I can tell, it is a little tricky under Gentoo. Until then though, I will be copying data from the old system onto the new server. I’m doing it through a CIFS share, from the server, so hopefully it will be a little lighter-weight on the poor Atom processor.

I still highly recommend the H340 as a Windows backup solution. It was very easy to set up. However as a large media server, it fails miserably. Had I known when I bought it that I’d be dealing with so many more movies, I would have probably skipped that step. I am hopeful though that I will be able to sell the little server to someone who can give it a more proper home.

With the H340, I feel like I got a puppy because it was cute and then made it plow the fields out back. It didn’t survive very long out there.