Ubuntu or FreeNAS

[henri]

Hi all,

Looks like i'm being shunned by Microsoft and won't get on the Windows Home Server beta group...its been a week now! Therefore i've been looking up Linux/Unix based solutions for a media server.

I have:
PIII 1.0 GHz
512 RAM
30GB IDE
500GB SATA
250GB SATA
4x SATA PCI card

I need a file server that can server to Vista MC and XP desktops. I need some external access to the data via HTTP/FTP

I need to be able to combine multiple hard drives into the one virtual drive just as Windows Home Server does

I don't know whether to go for FreeNAS or a full Linux OS like Ubuntu?

What would be great is if the server could automatically down sample video files store on it and stream them over the internet on an on demand basis (ie you can access your media over the internet and have them down sampled so that they are faster to access.

[arkay]

Well, it's all doable except for the last bit. You'd need a grunty PC to be able to transcode and stream live video. Plus there's nothing I know of that does it out of the box.

As for the rest I don't think you'd get very far with Ubuntu on such a lowly specced machine. You'd have to look at some of the lighter versions of linux with low resource window managers etc.

With that config I'd suggest giving freenas a try and see how you go. If it's not functional enough you could then try rolling your own with a version of linux but performance wise I doubt any version would be quicker than freenas.

Cheers,

Arkay.

[henri]

Will FreeNAS automatically pick up the PCI card? or will i need to install drivers etc?

[arkay]

It should. Only way to know for sure is to try it.

Cheers,

Arkay.

[BILBOBoggles]

FYI - My main server box is a P3 450mhz with 196m ram, it's running ubuntu in "SERVER" mode without any GUI and I have been unable to push it past 10% CPU utilisation with file serving. I've now got over 1TB online ;-). I have a Md5 checksum program that runs that does keep it 100% cpu for 12 hours, but even with that running every week the file serving is unaffected. (I have another ubunut box running GUI and it's similar spec wise and it's perfectly usable.)

I have just setup a FREENAS server as an experiment - so far it seems great - No installation just one CD and a floppy disc and you can dedicate your entire hard disk to files. I am not sure it handles spanning volumes accross multiple drives though - I'm still playing with it. I can do this on Ubuntu through the use of LVM, works well, but a bit tricky to manage. Freenas has built in RAID support, so I'll need to have a look at that and see if that replace LVM. I bought a PCI 4 port SATA card that uses the silicon image chip set, I beleive it is supported by FREEBSD - which is what FREENAS is based on. But I'd be interested to see how you go.

[PCgeek]

Originally Posted by BILBOBoggles

I have been unable to push it past 10% CPU utilisation with file serving.

Is this encoding and decoding video straight to a HTPC?