It’s been a busy little while, so I haven’t had time to get this written up. So lets see what I can still remember.
Installing Ubuntu Server was as easy as you’d expect. Booting into it wasn’t. Turns out that the BIOS on this box is setup not to boot from the ODD SATA port. It’ll boot from any of the four drives, or from USB; but not from that extra SATA port. My friend’s, who already has the box running, solution was to setup a RAID, where the ODD SATA is RAID number 0, which then allows it to be booted from. I went for a much simpler solution, after noticing that the install process lets you select the location of the GRUB loader. This server has a USB port and a MicroSD card reader inside the case, both bootable. I have plenty of spare MicroSD cards lying around (seriously, since when is 1GB or 2GB big enough for anybody?), so I just inserted one, and reinstalled specifying the MicroSD card as the location for the GRUB.
It felt good to have my new box booting up and actually running. I got its static IP and OpenSSH setup, checked I could access it through Putty, and finally got it up on the shelf and off my desk. Everything from this point on I’ve done in Putty, with no monitor attached to the server. Lets face it, its not like there’s any difference between one white-on-black text interface and another.
Next, I turned my attention to mounting my drives. The mount command is simple enough, but obviously I want my drives to be available right away after boot; so it was time to learn about ‘fstab’ and ‘UUID’s. Luckily this is a fairly straightforward process, especially since my drives only have a single partition on each, other than having to write down the long UUID to copy from the terminal output to the fstab file. I haven’t been able to work with copy & paste in PuTTY. One thing I started to realise at this point is that while Ubuntu boots nice and quickly, the server itself doesn’t. So each time I want to see if my fiddling has worked, I pretty much have time to make a cup of tea. From looking through various guides etc. I simply used:
UUID=<UUID> /mnt/<mountpoint> ext4 defaults 0 2
for each of my additional drives. After a reboot, I had access to all of my files and media as it was on my old NAS. I spent a little time clearing out the directory structures it had left behind, program files etc. to leave a nice, clean access to all of my files.
NFS and Samba were just as easy to get set up as they had been on the virtual machines. Although with so many different things I wanted to share, I had to add a lot of different entries into each file. Thankfully there’s no need to reboot after each edit, the services can simply be restarted to pick up the new settings. Samba is simple enough to test, since I’m managing the server over SSH on PuTTY in Windows. NFS required me to test in one of the VMs 0nce again; but after some work, both seemed to be working. I’m not 100% happy with some of my setup, since I’m just allowing open access to anyone on some of these shares. Chances are I’ll be fine, but I’ll want to come back at some point to try and tighten up my user management.
Emby server has a very good set of installation instructions. The main new part for me was adding the new repository, but this means it’ll be kept up to date when I perform other apt-get upgrades. Everything else related to Emby is managed through its web GUI, so straight forward stuff.
In fact, I was surprised at how simple it was to get the majority of things working. FTP just kinda worked, I just needed to make symlinks from my home directory to the other places I need to access. Even Transmission wasn’t too bad to get going and allow my remote GUI to connect. Ont thing that started to get harder from this point was keeping track of the different ports and services I was using. I took some time to make a list of computers and services to plan my external port mapping, and got things like FTP, SSH and Transmission forwarded. Internally I’ve just used the defaults for simplicity; externally I’ve made sure they’re set to something completely different.
Next Up:
Bash-ing things around
This post, re-published here with permission, was originally published on Nathanael’s site here.
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