Be Excellent To Each Other

Well, it appears that both my old Athlon XP machine and my even older G4 Powermac are refusing to POST and offering my no useful diagnosis. Once upon a time I'd have had them in pieces by now and be swapping RAM about but, fuck it, I'm 30 now. I'm just going to throw money at the problem, where "the problem" = "I need a big chuck of RAIDed storage on my network, primarily as a backup target from my laptops and to share media to the TV via the PS3.".

Original plan was to put together a 3x500Gb RAID-5 array but having looked at the price of RAID-5 NAS boxes I'm scared now. The only exception I can see is the Thecus N3200 3-bay unit, for around £225, but not only is that a bit too expensive but it's very new and doesn't seem to be hacked at all yet.

Extensive googling has suggested the Dlink DNS-323 for around £150 as the leading 2-bay RAID-1 server. I can stack this with 2x500Gb disks and keep one of the 500Gb ones back in my Shuttle PC, where I can do occasional offline backups of the RAID array. I'd be losing storage space on the array but I've audited what space I'm using at the moment and it would only be about 250Gb; so I don't think it's the biggest problem. Plus there's tons of hacked versions of the DNS-323 software with, e.g., much more sophisticated bittorrent clients.

So, the RMD bit: does anyone have one of these, or something similar, or any advice to offer?

I've got a DNS-323 with 2x500GB drives in RAID 0. I haven't hacked it yet, but will soon have to for 360-streaming. The complete lack of information on the Twonky website is all that's put me off.

It's alright - the hackability and performance (according to smallnetbuilder) were what swung it for me. It sits next to our sofa and the fan is too noisy for that really - even after hours of the drives having been spun down, it's a constant "pfuhhhhhhhhhhh". The web interface is okay, and it hasn't crashed.

Edit: I'm using RAID 0 because I intend, once I'm comfortable with hacking it and the prices have done the 6-monthly thing, to buy a USB enclosure and 1TB drive for doing replications of it. I also intend, at some point, to have occasional backups of laptops to the NAS.

Going by my usual track record what's in fact going to happen is that I'll do no such thing, and be pissed off when a drive fails.

Shouldn't it do that out of the box? It has a UPnP server, doesn't it?

Ah, I was going to ask about this. I ripped a Shuttle-based media centre PC out of my living room on grounds it was too noisy, and even now the fan noise from Sky HD in standby annoys me somewhat. So this is going to be a live-under-stairs-by-router box, then, not a live-under-TV box.

Hmm, yes. Y'know in RAID-0 that the "0" stands for how much data you're going to get back when a disk fails? Personally, having a track record very much like yours, I think I would have put it as RAID-1 out of the box and switched it to RAID-0 when I got the 1Tb disk.

Nope, the 360 wants a Media Center Extender, or whatever it's called - TwonkyMedia has it, the older thing in the 323 doesn't. The PS3 mostly works I think, because it has a DLNA server thing.

Hm, it probably wouldn't register from the other side of the room; this is literally half a metre from my head and it doesn't bother me too much.

Ooooh, smarty man!

Ah, of course, I'd forgotten that the 360 can't talk UPnP. No worries for me, I'd be using the PS3 for streaming onto, not the 360, on grounds of fan noise. Although short term I might stick to using the 360 as my Logitech Harmony can't control the PS3.

Oh, that sounds promising then. It'd be nicer to have it under the TV; it fits there better and it means I can stream to the consoles over ethernet instead of wireless.

If you do take the plunge, get quiet disks; I can only hear the WD Caviars in mine (rated about 27dB) when they're spinning up (it's set to spin the disks down after 20 minutes idle, which the 1.04 firmware cocks up by refreshing the iTunes/UPnP servers ever 10 minutes - but all the timeouts are configurable, including being disable-able); even taking a battering with a dozen torrents at 1.7MB/240KB per sec the clunkety-clunks are only just audible over the fan (which doesn't ever really seem to speed up from minimum).

Too late! I've already bought them as I thought I was going to be building it around one of my desktops this week. Except! I bought Samsung Spinpoint disks which are really quiet. Which works out well really. Thanks for the info, BikNorton, I think I'll be buying one come payday.

There is some other cool stuff people hack it to do - for instance, instead of using RAID1, some people use a single drive with a cron job to occasionally duplicate it to the other - so the second drive is only ever spinning long enough to do the imaging.

There's a whole forum and wiki about it. It scares me, usually.

Edit: Oh, apparently the fan isn't really speed-controlled out of the box. I really have to start haxx0ring mine.

I imagine that's just cron+rsync. I have something else in mind though. I'm going to RAID1 it, then I'm going to use some rsync scripts to back up the key "documents" and "photos" bits of the drive into a series of historical snapshots like Time Machine for the Mac (info here). Thus I can have up-to-the-second protection against accidental deletes.

I've already found that, lots of interesting stuff there. I'm a Lunix fpr0tter so I'm comfortable with all this stuff. I can report back if you like.

Aha, I'll defintely be doing that, and I'll cut that crummy plastic fan guard out of the back too. I bet I have a nice chromed 40mm one somewhere to replace it with.

That would be cool, although I'm pretty comfortable with stuff like that myself normally*; it mostly comes down to laziness and the hassle of fixing it when I fuck it.

* the Twonky stuff is fairly spectacularly poorly documented though. The wiki says the 1.04 firmware should improve 360 support, but I haven't made it work yet.

I've never had any favourable impressions of TwonkyMedia's stuff, plus it costs cash money. I will be investigating uShare, which I believe is the best-of-breed open source uPnP server, and is reported working with the Xbox 360 and DNS-323.

Aces!

uShare works on my Ubuntu PC streaming to 360. Fuppes also works. TwonkyMedia was the easiest to actually get working though: just unpack and run. The others required a little bit of fiddling (nothing too heavy, don't be put off if you don't want to pay).

I recommend uShare for you, I think.

fun_plug 0.4 with uShare works an absolute treat, and was a piece of cake to install.

After the last post, we used the 360 to watch last week's Lost, and after the usual mess of trailing cables from the laptop by the bed, it really feels like it's all starting to gel like I wanted it to.

If I stick a new extra drive in mu Unbunto box, how easy is to make that drive a shared network drive so that normal PC's* can use it.

* Eg PC's running Windows.

Really easy I think - I think you can just specify a directory as a smb share, and then it'll appear to a windows machine on the network. On my Ubuntu box I right click on a dir in file browser and it gives me options to share like in windows.

Cheers. 750 gb Samsung drive ordered along with another 500 gb drive for other purposes.

Ok, so the big fat drive is here. 750 gigs which I believe is enough to hold as many as 7 Amstrad games.

Installed GParted to partition in. All partitioned and formatted using ext3 filesystem.

Thing is, it doesn't appear anywhere. Do I need to mount it* or perform some Linux type magic in order to be able to use the beast?


* Fnar fnar.

Should have appeared under /media/hdX1, where X is a letter between b and something like f (depending on your computer). You would have seen this hdX1 go past whilst using gparted. It's probably best to create a more usable symlink; suppose it's /media/hdc1 for the sake of argument, something like:



This will create a directory in your home area called Video that actually lives on the big 750Gb disk. Then you can share that. This is easier than mucking about under /media all the time.

Obviously change Video to something appropriate, like Stuff, or perhaps do this a few times for Video and Audio and Documents. I dunno what you're putting on it so I can't be more specific.
gawk, date, grep, touch, finger, unzip, strip, mount, fsck, fsck, fsck, yes, yes, yes, unmount, make clean, zip, sleep.

Nope. All I have under media is:

cdrom cdrom0 floppy floppy0

That's as myself and the same for root.

Under Gparted I can see:

/dev/sda1 (which is my normal hd)

and

/dev/sdb1 (which has one ext partition with 11.16gb used and 687 unused). - How it's used 11 gig lord only knows.

What it does say is that sdb1 is not mounted. However no option is offered to mount it.


System Monitor can only see:

/dev/sda1

So something is amiss somewhere, probably to do with mounting.

It's not auto-mounting. The only way I know how to deal with this is old-fashioned hand-editing /etc/fstab.

You don't want to do that, and Ubuntu doesn't want you to either.

Edit: Does this help?

Hmm, blkid seems to suggest that Ubunto has decided to use the disk as a swap disk, which explains the 11 gig of usage.

Last night I got round to hacking the fan control based on the wiki. Important things to note for having it auto-run

1) Use /fanctrl for LOGDIR in the script, not /log
2) In the fun_plug script (assuming 0.4), do

This puts the script into ramdisk before running it; my box was still poking the first hard disk (and therefore not spinning down) when run from it, which it shouldn't have. I was using to properly detach it from the boot session, but it wasn't* and the script hung around because of it.

This morning, silent box with two spun down disks and the fan turned off! Woo!

Also consider adding to fun_plug to get rid of the print spooler, unless you're going to use it as a print hub of course.

uShare, while generally great, doesn't automatically rescan or appear to have options for such, so after downloading stuff it's necessary to log in and . Bah. Another server is getting some love at the moment, I might try that instead.

* on firmware 1.05, which I had to upgrade to last night - 1.04 was spewing mdadm warnings into the dmesg output.

I forgot to add that I got one of these last week. I've found the community docs a bit thin -- missing out steps and suchlike in walk throughs -- so I've started my own documentation series on my blog: http://www.fscked.co.uk/index.php/tag/dns323/.

I need to do that fan control thing right after making Transmission/Clutch work.

I'm going to be ditching the Unbunto box after the Jesuscomputer arrives. They'll no longer be any need as apparently OSX can do everything I need without being a pain in the ass.

I did get the 750 gig disk working in the end, but still can't successfully share it. I'll donate that disk to the Jesuscomputer instead.

Fair enough, Chinnyhill. You spent enough on that Mac so it should ideally do everything! Also it's "Ubuntu"

Unbonto sounds funnier, though.

I think they drink that in the Congo.

Yes, typo. And one I frequently make.

Jesuscomputer status update:

"Shipped to CHINNYTOWN, GB 05 Jun 2008
Estimated Delivery Date 14 Jun 2008 (Subject to change)
Current Delivery Status In Transit to Customer - Shipment on Schedule 09 Jun 2008
Signed By "


So perhaps that means it might be here Monday (the 9th) or by the end of the week. The guy who I ordered from said they always give the latest date possible and it will probably arrive earlier. Certainly the shipping date was supposed to be the 6th but actually shipped on the 5th.

Everything else is here, Final Cut, memory and XP. Oh, apart from the HD from Ebuyer which isn't critical.

It's abit like Christmas 1992 all over again (Amiga 1200). Or Christmas 1990 (GX 4000).

They're going to stop making them in a year?

I'm bringing my kiss of death to Apple. Any technology I buy into becomes obsolete in double quick time.

The trick would have been making Apple give you money not to buy one then.

I tried that one with Atari but it didn't work.

Still, at least I didn't kill the Amiga.

Well I'm going to carry on poking stuff into here! I agree about the community stuff, I've had to wing bits of the few things I've done and they're the necessities

There's not much else I intend to do to mine; get the UPnP AV server working nicely (maybe as simple as adding a cron job, once an hour ask it to restart nicely, so existing streams don't die - assuming it's written properly!), maybe replace the built-in iTunes server with Firefly, and also maybe a Torrent client - but then, it's not exactly hard or slow to uTorrent stuff on the laptop directly into the NAS' slathering maw.

I shall trickle updates into this thread for you.

I was unimpressed with this which tells you to, in order, wget transmission, wget curl, funpkg -i transmission, start transmission. That didn't work. I rummaged around and found the log, after a bit of poking about, which was moaning it couldn't write to the lock dir. I did some chmodding and tried again and found it fell over because it couldn't load curl, which the instructions told me to download but never install. Now that barely slowed me down but non-nerds are just going to give up.

I'd like a report on that bit.

I want to be able to turn everything except the DNS-323 off. The laptops in my house mostly live in the lounge or "dining"[1] room and hence rarely get left on all night as they are closed when not being actually used.

[1] less euphemistically, "room which posesses big desk-like surface"

I've just modified a script for fun_plug 0.5 that restarts uShare, so that it works on fun_plug 0.4. It checks for a specified file once an hour (if present, deletes it and restarts ushare), and forces a refresh every 12 hours; testing it now.

I want to write a full-auto version, but I can't figure out at the moment how to tell if the hard disks are spun down. Except actually I just thought of a hacky way!

Edit: I've uploaded it to the DNS323 forum - the script source I'd put here was very buggy, and it turns out fonz' fun_plug has a better way of checking for the hard disks being spun down.

The second script is a fairly typical (re)start/stop script; putting it in fun_plug.d/start means it's auto-started when the NAS boots. The main difference is that it copies the main (first) script into the RAMdisk and runs it from there, which could help prevent the disks spinning out of idle (I learned this from learning about fan speed control, I don't know if it actually does anything).

The main script determines if it needs to restart uShare by getting the total size of the directory you uShare and comparing it to the last run; if they differ (ie files were added, removed or changed; not perfect but damned close!), it runs the uShare restart script. It waits 10 minutes between checks and - this is the clever bit - it checks to see if the hard disks are spun down.

I never did get around to writing up my DNS-323 hacking experiences. However, I am upgrading it this weekend (to firmware 1.07 and exchanging the 2x500Gb disk RAID-1 for a 2x1.5Tb non-RAID config) and have come across these excellent guides:

http://www.horto.ca/?p=10

FUCKING THREAD RESURRECT!

Anyway, my NAS is full up with downloaded films porn Linux Distros, and I'm 50/50ing between getting a proper media server or getting a bigger NAS (current one is 2TB).

Convince me, Beex!

PC Pro says the Synology DiskStation DS212j (catchy title!) is the one to get.

Two drive bays so if you don't raid you could get 6TB in there.

Hang on, they have 4TB hard drives now? Fucking hell!

8TB then.

£163 + the disks. Makes more sense than a 'proper' media server which any modern NAS basically does anyway.

I have a drobo and a netgear readynas nv+ v2 and just use them as pure data stores, I let the clients handle any media issues.
The drobo is very flexible but pretty slow, the netgear works well enough, but the software/firmware is a bit buggy at times.

Oh wait, that isn't entirely true, I do use air video on my iPad every so often and the iMac handles the serving of those as it is always on anyway.

Installed a DS212 (slightly bigger brother of the 212j) at work a few weeks back.

Really nice hardware, piss easy to set up, piss easy to administer - there's a nice desktop with everything you need that appears in a browser window.

There are apparently loads of add-on software packs you can download (from the nice desktop) that allow it to monitor security cameras and torrent "Linux distros" and do all kinds of other stuff, but I haven't tried them: we just needed a big chunk of extra storage quicksmart.

Doesn't it come with a torrent client? That's a bugger.

Yeah yeah, it has a torrent client all properly ported and packaged up for it, I just didn't install it. Because, you know, Questions might be asked about why the new NAS is already half full of weirdly-titled .xvid files...

Is it easy to use a NAS to store films and TV shows downloaded from iTunes, for example? I don't pirate stuff, but would be interested in something like this as and when I move to digital, as I've already done with music.

If you can move the files to a network share without itunes freaking out, then I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

That's what I'm worried about.

And if iTunes does freak out over that, damn, it's even shitter than I remember.