AFAIK the FritzBox switchs mainly to the faster DNS Server. I tried to use Quad9 with cloudfare as the second DNS server, most of the time cloudfare was the used since it was a bit faster.
Nice! Would you mind sharing the configuration for permanently mounting? I tried it in the past but I never really could get it to work right consistently.
I’ll look up the exact info when I get home and provide links if I can find them again.
The summary is that I had to add a line to /etc/fstab with the ip and folder route of the nas drive and folder, then the mount point in linux, the file system type for the mount, options that give login creds/group id + establish permissions I want to apply to the mount, and an option that keeps the drive from trying to mount until my network is connected.
Finally, for that last option to work, I had to enable a process that I forget the name of. I think it was in systemd, but I was able to initiate it from the command line.
Since I don’t know your level of expertise, I’ll go step by step. Forgive me if you already know how to do some of this.
In terminal, type “sudo nano /etc/fstab” (without quotes). This brings up a file where you can add the mount point so it mounts at boot and set options for the mount. Go to the end of the file and enter a line like the following, substituting your info in the appropriate places:
//[static ip for nas]/[top level folder on nas you want to mount] /[mount point in Linux] [file system type for mount] [mount options, nas login credentials, permissions] 0 0
Mine looks like this: //192.168.1.0/Media /mnt/Media cifs _netdev,user=anonymouse,password=*****,uid=1000,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0
The “_netdev” option is the one that delays the mount until after your network is up. The “file_mode” & “dir_mode” set the mount permissions. There is info out there showing how to insert a reference to a credentials file instead of placing them in fstab in plain text, but I didn’t bother since I have my computer and user profile pretty well locked down.
To get _netdev to work, I had to enter the following in terminal (without quotes): “sudo systemctl enable systemd-networkd-wait-online”.
I couldn’t find all the sites I visited while setting this up, but here are a few:
I have already went ahead and bought a hetzner dedicated box, I just couldn’t find a similar performance dedicated box on any other provider’s for what hetzner provided at this moment and I really needed one now.
In your case, instead of getting a dedicated server and putting proxmox on it, I would check if it might not be cheaper to just get individual virtual servers directly.
Other than that, sure, I have been a customer for many years now, and I have always been a fan of Hetzner’s price to quality ratio.
You should definitely set up pihole but I don’t think it’ll block ads on streaming apps unless I’m wrong and someone can point me to something that explains how I can set that up.
I case anyone is interested, I have Plex up and running now and wife is happy, some feedback on how it went
Why it went:
I needed to install Plex specifically, because all the set-top boxes we use support plex but are fairly locked down. Wife likes their interface and remote control and doesn’t want to change (they are simple to use< Australia Telstra boxes, all free)
I choose Mint, I thought I’d prefer a GUI to make the install easier and also wanted to see what Linux desktops were like these days
How it went
Install was trivial when I chose “simple” - I tried advanced to format the two drives I had (which were messy with many partitions I wanted blown away), but when I tried one method it told me I had a Boot drive but no NIF or NEF drive (or something) in order to boot - when I told it to install that type (Found it in the list) it told me I had no boot drive now (Online help for Mint install on Mint web site was out of date and the GUI didn’t match what I saw - a common theme - so made it harder) - Gave up, choose SIMPLE. No idea what it installed but it worked
Lot more raw command line that you’d expect from a GUI, In fact not sure the GUI does anything at all. I used the command line commands for almost the entire install
The Networking failed and was as bad as Windows off the bat. HOWEVER fixing any networking issues was much easier than windows (I still have network issues in my windows machines from 5 years ago, never could fix them) but the two issues I had with Mint, (1) plex could not be seen (answer: ufw opened one port) and (2) Windows could not see and share a Mint drive (answer: Samba installed with one line and permission set on a folder) were fixed in a few minutes
Man you can trash your OS with one command! Reinstalled once because I did a chown on the wrong folder and gave plex the sole ownership of the entire drive whereupon nothing ran anymore!
Much faster, better software generally, the trans-coding for videos seems better, the speed of the desktop “server” is faster and Plex is madly playing everything nice and clearly with great response time.
Stuff changes a LOT between versions apparently- many suggestions online failed for me because the suggested folders or files no longer existed or had been moved or changed. Likewise Mints own sites screen shots doesn’t match reality.
People are confused a lot - One of the common issues is Plex cannot see the folders where your videos are, as Plex runs under its own user - The number of different methods people have used to get around this is outstanding! And every one is thumbed up as “the answer that solved my problems!” From changing the user Plex uses to root or other users that already have permissions, to adding plex ownership of folders or even changing permissions of the folders to either something safe, or just ROOT ROOT ROOT. It is hard to know what you should be doing (Even changing permissions there were apparently at many programs to use, not sure which was the right method… chown, setfacl, chmod (I know they are different, I glanced at the docs but with so much to learn it becomes a bit overwhelming and you just take the first suggestion and stick with it)
Edit: at any rate, works fine now ty all for suggestions. Now I am getting annoyed I don’t have ALL the services running on the server and am starting to see what else I can run and how… all without interrupting my wifes streaming of course!
Keep in mind that support for SMB is technically either available or not, in each so app. I don’t believe anything hides SMB from apps, on Debian derivatives, by default. (It seems inconvenient, but, anecdotally, it causes fewer headaches. Access over SMB is different enough from local storage that lying to apps about it causes issues…specifically the kind of issues we see with network shares on Windows.)
SMB is old enough that a huge number of apps support it, but it’s still extra code that each app might not include.
For apps that don’t support SMB, I sync a folder between Synology and a local drive, using the sync app that Synology provides.
Can you even trust Topton from a security perspective compared to we’ll know brands to not have firmware that installs backdoor or have a built in backdoor in the bios?
Every hour via Restic to a local Mino instance on my NAS. Once a day to backblaze B2. Once a week to an offline HDD in my fire safe.
Keep in mind the more often you backup the less total time each backup should take to run. If your backup software isn’t too heavy to run and stores backups incrementally, there is little penalty to frequent backups.
If you are more interested in running apps than having a NAS, I recommend trying CasaOS. TrueNAS is great, but I found CasaOS significantly more straightforward, especially when it comes to smb shares (it’s like two clicks).
Also TrueNAS uses ZFS which is good for what it is, but means you basically need a machine running TrueNAS to read/write the drives in case something goes wrong.
that is kinda what I’m trying to do. truenas is nice and all but its also pretty advanced and not beginner friendly when it comes to a lot of things. I’ve heard a lot about casaos from a youtuber that I like to watch, but I never realized that it was more of a nas os than just a platform to run applications. I’ll give it a shot! thanks for the recommendation.
Compared to TrueNAS, CasaOS is more of a “platform for running apps”, but unless you’re storing dozens of terabytes of improtant data in RAID or something, it’s still probably the easier/lower maitenence option.
I recently migrated my Plex server to a box running Proxmox with Plex in an LXC container. Very little resource overhead, and it’s been rock solid ever since. No ragrets.
I only have the OS on the sd card and I pop that out and dd a copy to my backup drive every 6 months or so. For that reason I like to use small sd cards like 8gb size. All other drives on the machine are external or network drives and those have their own backup routine with rsync.
Do you use only the sd card or what kind of storage system do you have on your sbc?
The SBC is only running with a SD Card and nother else plugged in. But I suppose my best bet is to run a script with rsync and save what I need using rsync over SSH to my storage server
The only down side I can see with that setup is that should the sd card fail you’ll have to reinstall the OS on a new card and then install and configure all the programs you had before. For my set up that would be a pain in the neck but it depends on your specific use case.
You don’t need to pop it out to DD the SD card, you can do it while it’s running. I like to pipe DD through gzip to get a compressed image as the output so I’m not sitting on 16gb file for 3gb worth of files.
You can have it written to an external drive, or you can use tools like sshfs and ftpfs to mount remote servers as local drives then write to those. I use the sshfs route.
This will create an .img that you can just write directly to an sd card and boot from.
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