Microserver setup (which OS mainly!)

andywiltshire

Established Member
Joined
Apr 4, 2006
Messages
777
Reaction score
32
Points
167
Location
Brighton
Hey guys!

Been searching the forums for answers but thought I'd start my own thread... Please refer me to another thread if you think it'll answer what I am after.

I have just got hold of the n40l, it has an 30gb Ssd under the ODD and the standard 250gb in bay 1 ( will move to ODD at some point).

Now I just want some guidance to get the server up and running and was ideally after WHS2011 but I'm not sure I will have much luck acquiring it so am after the next best thing!

I would like the server to store media for use with my HTPC and wdtv live, back up my pc and laptops, install a shared printer, use as a torrent server, is all that possible?

Thanks in advance for any advice forthcoming
 
You're correct, I don't think you'll have any luck getting a copy of WHS 2011 (unless you get a used one). It was discontinued by Microsoft nearly a year ago. The replacement OS from Microsoft is Windows Server 2012 Essentials - however, it's very difficult to justify for home use because of the price.

Windows 7 and 8, and pretty much any modern Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Centos etc.) will do what you want, but will require some setup and configuration to do it. The main task that WHS 2011 made easier was automated backup of connected PCs and laptops, but this is reasonably straightforward to set up with other software - it just takes a bit more configuration.
 
I used Ubuntu on my Microserver and it works just fine. I had no experience of this OS until I installed it so give it a go - it's free!
 
I installed xpenlogy couple of weeks back on N36L. It very stable and unbelievably fast. I have 5gb am but I think it would run on 2g as I have never seen it use more than 10% cpu. The synology mobile apps are excellent on both ios and android . The DSM 5 is great too. The usb 3.0 pci card worked without issues.

I plan to upgrade the fans as its on all the time and add another network card to try link aggregation. I probably don't need to, but the second hand intel pro pci cards are only about £10.
 
CPU Usage isn't (much) a function of how much RAM you have installed. CPU is consumed by apps that need CPU (try transcoding a video - it'll eat it alive) and RAM is consumed by apps that need RAM (try running a couple of virtual machines.) I'm running 2GB RAM under Linux performing basic file sharing to (rarely more than) a couple of clients and it's just fine. But if I transcode a video, it eats all the CPU and if I start some vGuests, there goes the RAM (and it starts to page a bit.)

Have you got a switch/router that supports (standards based) link aggregation..? LA needs compliant kit both end of the network cables and appropriate software and NIC drivers in the host. There's more to it that just adding a second NIC and plugging in.
 
Sorry @mickevh, meant memory but typed cpu. CPU is 99% soon as I add any files to photo folder busy creating the thumnails. N36L is not capable of transcoding avi's, so I have turned it off in . Though I have never had buffering


Thanks @cjed. As the system is headless now, I can remove the graphics card; saved me a lot of future headaches.
Are the Intel Pro 1000 PCI-e better than the one on N36L? I also noticed they are mainly dual port.

Has anyone noticed that even with large amount of ram it seem to use swap space. I have added
vm.swappiness=0 to /etc/sysctl.conf and I doesn't use swap space anymore

One more question, Can buffer_cache be modified and would this increase performance? Its seems to only using 512MB effectively. The rest is allocated to cache.

Currently my 5GB is allocated as below:
156.7MB - Reserved
244MB - Used
36.6MB - Buffer (and its the only one that shows on the graph whilst coverting photo and video thumbnails)
4.4GB - Cached
130MB - Free
 
Has anyone noticed that even with large amount of ram it seem to use swap space. I have added
vm.swappiness=0 to /etc/sysctl.conf and I doesn't use swap space anymore

Seen that - swap file usage is minimal until I start some VGuests, thence it pages out to swap even though there's plenty of free RAM available. Maybe it's a VMWare "thing."

I'm using a general purpose Linux distro. A Turnkey NAS distro might be a bit more "optimised" to use memory to improve file system performance (caching and all that.) Though in SOHO, which such a small amount of concurrent client access and little "thrashing" of the the volume catalogues etc, it's not something I tend to worry about. Mines working just fine OOTB, so I just let it get on with it.
 

The latest video from AVForums

TV Buying Guide - Which TV Is Best For You?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom