Building a home server

[Stratus_ss]

I just wanted to post an update to the mkv problem I was having. I got it worked out. It was a fairly simple setting in PS3 Media Server. There are a couple of decoders it seems to use, one called tsMuxer, and the other is called MEncoder. I basically disabled tsMuxer, restarted PS3 Media Server, and all is good. It's a little slow loading the files, but has been working well so far.

That makes sense, MEncoder is a linux standard. Basically it seems it was using the wrong codecs.

Glad you got that sorted!

 

[deadlysyn]

I also got Nomachine NX set up, and had I known of this before, I never would have bothered with TightVNC. I love the fact that I don't have to switch the input on my monitor to see what I am doing, everything feels as smooth as if it were my main rig, and I don't have to switch back to the Windows rig to mess with scroll bars to reach the edges of the screen. It was a bit of a pain to get set up, but once set up, it just works. Once I found I needed to use

gksu

instead of

sudo

to get it to do what I needed, it was fairly easy to set up. All in all, I am very impressed.

 

[TiZakit]

I'm also loving that Nomachine NX... I decided to try after you guys pointed it out. Very good. Thank you.

 

[deadlysyn]

I'm also loving that Nomachine NX... I decided to try after you guys pointed it out. Very good. Thank you.

The one thing I have noticed about it, is that if you need to restart or shutdown the rig, using the power symbol in the top right corner of Ubuntu just closes the Nomachine NX session. If you need to turn off or restart the rig, use

sudo shutdown -h 0

or

sudo reboot

 

[su root]

For backups... Full image backup: Clonezilla. For normal backups, I used Bacula for years to backup dozens of production servers, performed baremetal recovery about once a month (usually for testing), but did single file/directory recovery more often, worked brilliantly (though did have a performance hit when you reached the 10s of millions of files on a single system, but that may be fixed now).

I would also vote against FTP. NFS works really well across *nix platforms, and Samba usually works well all round.

If you are going to use rsync for backup, I would use it over ssh (rsync -ave ssh sourcefiles destserver:/destdir/ ..OR.. rsync -ave ssh sourceserver:/sourcefiles/ /destdir/). You may also want to look into rdiff-backup... it's like rsync, but does incremental backups.