Home Server OS

I decided to turn an old pc into a plex/ftp server, and I'm not sure what OS to use. I have some linux experience, but not on a server. I used Windows Server 2003 a lot in the past, but I don't know how practical newer versions are for a simple home network server. Any input?

Other urls found in this thread:

psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountwindowsfstab
linode.com/docs/tools-reference/tools/limiting-access-with-sftp-jails-on-debian-and-ubuntu
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SFTP_chroot
howtoforge.com/tutorial/samba-server-ubuntu-16-04/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

ubuntu server

I second this.

I run Ubuntu server on an old hp server with Plex and it's great. I also use it as a NAS in general. Through the Plex app I'm able to watch anything on the server, as well as listen to all of my music without the need to store it on my phone.

On top of that, I have an old mac mini hooked up to my TV running kodi and it pulls content from the Plex server directly to my TV, as well as giving me all of the apps available to MacOS, so it's like having a smart TV on steroids, and I use my old iPhone 6S+ as a remote/trackpad/keyboard. It's pretty much the perfect setup, though I'm considering building a firewire enclosure for a bunch of HDDs and moving my content to the Mac mini that way and installing Plex on it to eliminate the bulky ass p4-era dual xeon hp server.

my linux experience is somewhat limited, and my terminal knowledge prettymuch adds up to "sudo apt-get install". Can I make ubuntu server run plex and an ftp server with just a couple google searches, or am I going to have to actually learn linux commands?

Probably one Google search

why does Sup Forums have such a boner for plex? are you all retarded?

Awesome, I'll give it a shot soon.

What's wrong with plex? Is there a better alternative?

I tried emby and plex. Plex seemed better for me. If you don't stream put it on a Lodi pc.

Kodi......

Installing ubuntu server now. I'll keep posting as I go in case anyone gives a shit.

Never heard of it before now, but when I looked into it I found it was formerly XBMC, which I used quite a bit back when I was also using Windows Server 2003. Gonna give that a shot, too. Still installing Ubuntu server though, I had actually just started downloading the image when I posted last.

It's installed, time to see how many google searches it takes.

>ftp server
Use openssh as sftp server.

installing kodi now, I'll try that next.

kodi is a "desktop" application. Do you plan to connect your server to the tv?

FreeBSD, my dude

apache2 is very low overhead

no, I assumed there's kodi server software that will stream my files to a kodi app on another box. I may have just installed regular old kodi on my server though, now that you mention it..

Also, just to be a complicated asshole, I didn't bother reformatting my storage drive, as I didn't want to move around 2tb all day. My storage drive is NTFS, so before I fuck anything else up, I should probably find out how to make ubuntu server mount it at startup. I'm going to stop counting google searches now, as I seem to be especially bad at this.

If you want to use Plex, you should use Ubuntu Server. Plex support for other distros is bad. Windows Server post-2008 is shit.

Add an entry to your fstab. Here is what mine is:
/dev/sdb1 /Data ntfs-3g uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=007,fmask=117 0 0


You'll need to change the /dev/sdb to your disk and uid and gid to your corresponding user id and user's group id. Also, make sure you have ntfs-3g installed.

>barely know shit about anything not windows
>need more space decide to build a nas
>build a freenas box
>start fucking around with plugins
>install plex plugin
>buy an odroid c2 for plex client
>start fucking around with jails
>create a ventrilo servers since that's all me and my other 2 friends have used to communicate for years

so far so gud. only downside is once i learned about plex i started downloading fucking everything. got 6x 3TB drives expecting them to last me 10 years on zfs2. i filled up all my space in about one year.

if you have used linux desktop i cant see why you seem reluctant to use linux as a server.
you have experience of fixing linux issues.
If you can install software you can install servers. All a server is, is a bit of software that reacts to certainconditions such as listening on a port until someone wants to access whatever that server process allows.
You can install servers on any desktop distro, theres not really anything special about a server distro except that it has a desktop environment.
just try setting up what you want in a virtual machine - run a virtual environment then mess with the server software on a distro -
it should take a week or so before you realise what I am saying is that its really simple once you try to set servers up - simpler than you think

K odi not really a server. Connect to tv with HDMI. Play your local media.

I'm trying to do this, but I cant seem to find my uid or gid. Should it show up somewhere in sudo fdisk -l?

id

you mean the zillion-character disk identifier?

oh wait i just saw what youre talking about. For some reason the partitions on my os drive all have an id column under fdisk, but the ntfs partition on my storage drive does not.

The command is literally 'id'.
If you did a standard install its 1000. Its the ID of your user. Linux does not know ntfs user / group permission and therefore you need to tell it at mount time and every file will be owned by that user. I've never used ntfs so this info may not be 100% accurate.

I'm just going to try 1000 and see if that works.

psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountwindowsfstab
this tutorial got me where I needed to be. It's automounting my drive, and I've realized kodi isn't what I was hoping for, so it's back to plex next.

P L A N
9
IT'S THE FUTURE

I'm pretty sure plex is installed and running, but I'm going to have to do another google search or two to figure out how to configure it. Probably from another machine on the network, right? Google time.

That was easy. Plex is doing it's thing, and my daughter is watching a movie from it. So far so good. time to tackle this

linode.com/docs/tools-reference/tools/limiting-access-with-sftp-jails-on-debian-and-ubuntu
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SFTP_chroot
It's not really needed. If you are the only one with access to it you can use your normal user.
To access it you can use filezilla.

I've tried a few things and I keep coming back to a problem where every connection is refused. I suspect my proprietary ISP router may be the culprit. I might just use samba instead as I will probably never have to access from outside the home.

howtoforge.com/tutorial/samba-server-ubuntu-16-04/
I'm trying to do this, but I don't actually have a domain name. Is the local ip of my server not enough? Do I need a static external IP? What if that's not an option? I really only want to do local network stuff here.

Have you installed openssh on the server? Have you selected sftp (ftp over ssh) in filezilla? If you use the local ip your ISP router should not matter.

You can just use the ip. You can completely skip pat 1.

I successfully got samba working, and can access it easily from both windows and linux, so I no longer need ftp. My server is up and running and doing what it needs to do. Thanks for the help, Sup Forums.

Isn't Plex owned by Facebook?

Maybe? I don't really give a shit, honestly.