Unraid provides real time data protection, whereas Snapraid with mergerfs provide disk pooling and scheduled snapshots. That's its greatest feature IMO - expandability and data protection without rigid expansion requirements.
AFAIK, it's one of a kind. Flexraid on Windows was the closest I had found (a product I still use on an old install - software and owner disappeared - although I did manage to track down the patent and the developer once, seems to have moved on to other interests/employment)
Ventoy is relatively new bootable USB creator supporting booting directly from ISOs instead of actually block by block copying (old fashioned - like dd or pv, quite like it). It works very well in most cases using popular distros, a bit glitchy on Macs LoL
I'm sure there's a reason mounting by ID isn't the default but that's always been a weird one for me and I make sure to swap it over when building a storage server.
It's usually the default in /etc/fstab for most distributions.
It's often simpler to just mount /dev/sda if you just connected it and need to do a one-off. But if you want something reliable, for automount for instance, I don't see why anyone would use something else than UUIDs. I even put those on stickers on my external hard drives.
I don't see why anyone would use something else than UUIDs
Some partitions don't have UUIDs, such as LUKS volumes with a detached header or plain dm-crypt volumes. In that case, I use a /by-id/wwn-* path to uniquely identify the partition. Of course, those lines are in /etc/crypttab, not in /etc/fstab.
I am talking about UUIDs, that basically any (Linux at least) filesystem has. Those are a bit like filesystem labels, but generated during filesystem creation. Their format makes collisions virtually impossible. LUKS volumes have one, and partitions inside them have a different one too.
This is my prefered way of identifying partitions, as they are persistent even when you move them around with lvm, dd, or others. I think that's also the default in many distributions.
PARTUUID is also a nice way to identify partitions when you can't rely on a partition UUID for some reason. It works like UUIDs, but instead of being stored inside the partition, that information is part of the GPT (GUID partition table).
If you are more interested in the drives than the partition content, by-id makes sense, though I think the use-case is rather narrow :)
"I even put those {UUIDs} on stickers on my external hard drives."
That's pure genius. Gonna steal that idea outright. LOL - I'ma go even one step further in my own personal setup, and encode it into a QR code sticker so I can just snap it right into my clipboard from KDE Connect on mah phone when I need to. ;)
TBH, I just handwrote those. Just like with git, the collisions are highly unlikely, and most of the time the first few letters are all that's needed before you can tab-complete.
QR codes aren't a bad idea, but clipboard sync doesn't work quite well on wlroots-based compositors in my experience :)
Just make sure to put a bit of ASCII below your QR code.
While playing with NixOS the other day I learned about /dev/disk/by-label which is the equivalent, but works with partition labels. So much more elegant than /dev/sda2.
They're filesystem labels. /dev/disk/by-label gets populated by udev [0]. The labels can be set with "e2label", "btrfs filesystem label", or other tools depending on the filesystem type.
Didn't know about Ventoy https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy but the possibility to install something in an USB and from now on being able to boot from any (and multiple) ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI that I copy there is pretty sweet.
The DLNA/UPNP server that came with my Synology NAS is surprisingly competent. I just wish it had more RAM and a faster CPU.
I also wanted a media server on my desktop, with mixed results... Gerbera and MiniDLNA are both annoying to configure and buggy. If there's something better out there, I didn't find it.
I mean, Plex is the go-to answer, and if you pay for the Plus Pass you can do hardware transcoding on Intel or Nvidia GPU's for smaller-screen devices.
AFAIK is just a bootloader that let you install DSM which is based on GPL software (DSM is basically a Linux distro), so it's a gray area, regardless of what Synology says.
Right. You have a license to use bash, or glibc, and anything else that synology uses. What you do not have a license to do is copy their entire product and run it on other hardware. This is not complicated. It's like pirating OS X and installing it on a hackingtosh. Just because apple uses some gpl and bsd licensed software doesn't mean you can just copy the entire thing.
The "issue that they have to fix" is that they haven't provided updated sources.. dunno, haven't checked on it in a while .
If every part of their entire product is GPL-licensed, then you do have that license. If there are portions which are not GPL-licensed, then you would need to secure a license for those portions.
I don't have an opinion on whether there is non-GPL software in a base install of Synology software using the XPenology bootloader as I haven't researched it. My opinion is confined to "copy their entire product" is not a determining factor with respect to GPL licensing. (IANAL.)
Their entire product is NOT gpl licensed. The xpenology people flat out lie about this and point to that sourceforge project which is just the gpl bits. The parts they are copying and installing are not free software
The xpenology people claim it is an "open source alternative" to synology. It is not. They are lying. They are just hacking at it until it runs unlicensed on non synology hardware.
Is OS X free software? If you hack up an open source bootloader that lets OS X run on non apple hardware does that magically make OS X free and open source?
This is not complicated. If you are using xpenology you are pirating software. If you are relying on xpenology to store important data you are a fucking idiot.
> If you are relying on xpenology to store important data you are a fucking idiot.
Well, may a lightning strike me if this isn't a textbook example of red herring!
I feel I owe you a response, having written the original comment.
First of all, you are not bringing any proof to the table, except your opinions.
You may be right, you may be not, but mentioning "important data" in the context of "the perfect media server" makes me think that you arguments are not very convincing after all.
What's so important in a media server?
Everyone of us who sets up a media server already owns the entire library, in digital or analog format, of media content that is going to be played from the server, so there is no problem if something gets lost, we can rebuild it, we have the technology, we can make it better than it was. Right? Right!
It would be ironic if we were arguing about how much GPL code there is in Synology DSM to use it to watch or listen to content downloaded illegally, wouldn't it?
Anyway, even though it is illegal (I own hundreds of DVDs, but I am not allowed to rip them and play them from my computer), I do it anyway.
Lets not forget about 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-??-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0
Having said that.
The Synology record on GPL violations is abysmal (just search for "Synology" on trac.ffmpeg.org or serviio forum or samba.org mailing list archive, if you don't believe me) I think using a bootloader to install the base Synology system (most of DSM is under the GPL, unfortunately for them that's how that license works) _only on x86_ (Synology runs on many other platforms) and then install Jellyfin or Plex (if Jellyfin doesn't work) and never use the Synology proprietary software again is fair use. It's a Linux distribution after all, there is nothing inherently illegal in running it.
I know about FreeNAS, but as a media server is too much work and some things do not work (Jellyfin for example) or are not as simple to set up.
iXsystems and Synology make money from selling HW.
In your example XPenology is a bootloader that lets you install Darwin on non Apple X86 HW or a better example would be iOS jailbreaking, which has been considered "not illegal" and never been tested in court (because Apple knows that losing that battle would be very bad for them).
p.s.: Anyway, using a NAS without setting up proper replication and backups to store "very important data" it's equally idiotic.
p.p.s.: you could ask, so why don't simply install Linux? And you would be right. IMO in the context of "the perfect media server" for people that do not know how to setup a Linux media server, but have a spare Dell Optiplex, it's a viable alternative and the risk are basically zero or, to be completely honest, less than watching TV show and movies illegally.
Honestly, I was very happy w/ using Kodi as a uPNP server (was on a dedicated laptop), but I switched to a Pi 4 with MiniDLNA and it is definitely a step backwards.
I have yet to mess with headless containerized Kodi on the Pi.
Interesting post. They do get a lot of things right, but I tend to prefer a full OSS stack, so jellyfin instead of plex, and btrfs instead of ZFS. I didn't know some parts they mentioned, I guess I'll investigate :)
One data point about btrfs, FWIW: I've been using it since 2016, the only "issue" I had is that it forced a failing drive into read-only, while other filesystems didn't detect the upcoming failure, thank checksuming for this.
The main missing feature for me is caching on faster disks, though there are some ways to get that. No mention of LVM nor LUKS either, I guess the understanding is either still a bit superficial (everyone has their own areas of interest), or they didn't want to complexify the setup too much.
For self-hosting, I can recommend https://yunohost.org/ which makes easy some traditionally hard parts of self-hosting, though it is quite opinionated (which isn't always a bad thing). Certainly saved me some time on maintenance, though I do see the limitations.
The holy grail of a "perfect homeserver" for me would be to run everything in GUIX, with a declarative configuration I can locally test before deploying, and rolling back. More packaging efforts are needed before this can become reality. I'd also like the option to have simple distributed storage, trough something like hypercore. This would help for backups, and for overcoming low-bandwidth links.
But maybe it's the Internet that needs to be fixed, with public key routing and content-based addressing, plus "heavy" clients and light, dumb servers instead of pushing everything to the browser.
I agree with the Btrfs vs ZFS point. Btrfs has been very stable for me for the past 4-5 years, provided you stay away from the unstable features (raid56 and more).
Btrfs raid1 on 4 drives has worked well for me. For media storage i use mergerfs and snapraid.
> Raid 1 usually means a mirrored disk - how does this work with 4 drives?
“RAID1” in btrfs means “two copies of each file are stored on two disks” - so it’s closer to RAID10 in mdadm terms. It’s pretty nice as you can do things like having 3 x 1TB drives + 1 x 3TB drive and it Just Works to give 3TB of usable space.
> Staying away from unstable features: Is RAID 5 & 6 really considered unstable still?
Yup :(
Also last time I checked (I’d love to be corrected about this) even RAID1 still isn’t ideal (in particular, when a drive fails in a RAID1 array, you only get one chance to mount it r/w and rebalance your data - after that, the array is read-only, and you need to recover by creating a new array on new disks and copy all the data across)
In case of brtfs with multiple devices it's possible to remove a failed/missing one.
1. unmount the FS
2. make sure the dead/missing/failing device is disconnected
3. mount using -o degraded option.
4. run btrfs device remove missing <mount point>
It depends on having at least as many good drives as required for mounting the FS (which is 2 for raid1).
> Also last time I checked (I’d love to be corrected about this) even RAID1 still isn’t ideal (in particular, when a drive fails in a RAID1 array, you only get one chance to mount it r/w and rebalance your data - after that, the array is read-only, and you need to recover by creating a new array on new disks and copy all the data across)
That being said, the bug only causes the filesystem to become permanently degraded if the number of devices fall below the required number of devices needed for the raid type, and IIRC was caused by btrfs being unable to write metadata correctly. If you had a 3 drive raid1 pool, and one of the drives failed, it would happily continue working in degraded state.
IIRC btrfs operates on chunks of 1gb instead on the drives themselves. So each chunk is present on two drives for raid1. Data point: I have 10 disks between 1 and 4 TB in a single btrfs raid1 (failure rates don't matter for that private build-from-scrap backup server with a few hours uptime/week).
Don't know if raid5/6 are still considered unstable, but would be very interested as well.
//edit: shish2k was a bit faster and says nope to raid5/6
But TBH, I am fine with some down time in case of a drive failure on my personal server. I try to maintain up-to-date backups anyway, and that's a low-probability event, especially without many drives.
> Interesting post. They do get a lot of things right, but I tend to prefer a full OSS stack, so jellyfin instead of plex, and btrfs instead of ZFS.
Liking the view on Jellyfin over Plex. I'm a relatively long time Plex user (switched over from XBMC (now Kodi) to Plex in ~2011), but also immensely dissatisfied with the direction they've taken, focusing on growth to satisfy PE backers over the needs of the user base that enabled them to even qualify for any PE money. It looks to me that their focus is increasingly on "collecting analytics" on their users behaviours (logging everything they watch) and providing ad-supported streaming services, instead of trying to provide the best self hosted media streaming service (as it was when I started using Plex).
> One data point about btrfs, FWIW: I've been using it since 2016, the only "issue" I had is that it forced a failing drive into read-only, while other filesystems didn't detect the upcoming failure, thank checksuming for this.
One more data point about BTRFS, is that it doesn't support parity-stripe based redundancy models (raid5/6, raidz{1..n}, etc), which makes it less interesting for a lot of people.
Another note about ZFS is that it doesn't allow for growing of parity-stripe based volumes (although there's a tweet referenced in TFA that notes there should be a pull request with that feature expected soon). This can make it very expensive for people who don't have the funds to buy disks in groups of 6 at a time (my personal preference for a raidz2 zpool)
BTRFS [..] doesn't support parity-stripe based redundancy models (raid5/6)
Before someone looks at man btrfs-device and gets confused: doesn't reliably support those levels. Support for parity-based redundancy models has been in the code for ages, but that part of the code is not considered mature.
> One more data point about BTRFS, is that it doesn't support parity-stripe based redundancy models (raid5/6, raidz{1..n}, etc), which makes it less interesting for a lot of people.
It does however support raid1 on multiple drives, and raid1c3 and raid1c4 for increased redundancy.
With Btrfs raid1, you can pool I.e 4 drives, meaning it will store 2 copies of each file on different devices. It’s not your traditional raid1. With raid1c3 it will store 3 copies of each file, and raid1c4 stores 4 copies.
So while technically not raid5, a 3+ drive Btrfs raid1 pool will provide almost the same redundancy. Think of it more like raid10.
I thought OpenZFS is OSS, it's just that the license is GPL-incompatible and thus distribution in e.g. Debian is an issue, but it's perfectly fine to pull the source and compile the module oneself.
It is open source, but I wouldn't exactly call it free as in freedom due to GPL-incompatibility. It has less eyes on it, requires more maintenance due to being out-of-tree, and coming from Oracle, it sounds like a legal minefield. Not that I personally risk anything, but I feel like btrfs is more future-proof (safer from being discontinued). Plus, it works OOTB on most Linux computers. Its ubiquity allows me to use it in numerous places. It is quite flexible and doesn't require that much resources (I hear ZFS is quite RAM-hungry?). It isn't perfect either, use what suits you!
Only if you use deduplication (off by default), in which case the rule of thumb is 1-5GB of RAM per 1TB of disk. Otherwise you can get away with less memory.
OpenZFS has been based on the non-Oracle illumos fork of Solaris for >10 years, and has considerable backing from both corporate and community sources.
The CDDL is a non-issue in most cases, and actually preferable to the GPL as it allows for the code to be integrated into BSD and Solaris-derived systems.
The most serious backing seems to be from LLNL, which slightly concerns me as the funding situation for the work could be more perilous than a corporate source.
> It is open source, but I wouldn't exactly call it free as in freedom due to GPL-incompatibility
The CDDL is essentially the same license as the GPL except it only applies to the files under the CDDL as opposed to the GPL which imposes its rules to the entire project for every project that links it. Any software under the CDDL is exactly as free as in freedom as GPL code.
>Its ubiquity allows me to use it in numerous places
Does btrfs work on anything except Linux? Apparently ReactOS too creating limited Windows support, but it's not very portable. It's a strange thing to praise btrfs for when comparing to ZFS.
I tried Jellyfin but the front end apps (Apple TV, Roku etc) are either non existent or very inferior compared to Plex. It’s a shame because the server worked great for my purposes (even has the DVR functionality I use in Plex!). I suppose it just highlights how difficult it actually is to do this stuff: sharing a front end across multiple incompatible platforms is something an open source project struggles to do.
Plex seems like they’re in a bind. They need to diversify their user base because their current one is very heavily based on people sharing pirated content (every time I point this out someone says they they only use Plex with Blurays they’ve legally purchased and ripped... and good for you! But you’re not close to the normal user) and I figure they’re in constant fear of legal action shutting them down. At least the streaming, DVR etc functionality allows them to make a plausible claim that people use their product for entirely legal means. I’ve gotten enough value out of my lifetime subscription that I won’t feel cheated if Plex disappears, but it’s good to know solutions like Jellyfin are nearly there when/if it does.
> I tried Jellyfin but the front end apps (Apple TV, Roku etc) are either non existent or very inferior compared to Plex.
Apparently Infuse[0] supports Jellyfin now. I use it with Plex and have found it to be far and away the best TV media front end. So you might want to take a look at it.
Unfortunately I make heavy use of the DVR functionality (live TV, TV guide, looking at upcoming recordings etc) that both Jellyfin and Plex provide, but third party clients like Infuse ignore. But thanks for the suggestion! Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to pair Infuse with some kind of third party DVR client in the future.
Plex disappearing would be the best thing to happen to Jellyfin tbh. It would force a huge amount of new users their way and with those eyeballs would come progress.
I agree with your take in the first sentence so much unfortunately.
One thing I will not run is btrfs, aka ENOSPCfs. I saw it fail again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, and again, and again. Then I saw it fail some more. The promised features never materialized, and the drama and surprising behaviors never ceased. All costs, no benefits? I'll leave that on the shelf, a few spots down from reiserfs (which was plenty sketchy BEFORE you know who did you know what).
As to file systems in general, I think they covered them very well..
As to Plex, he also mentioned the others:
Jellyfin and Emby are two notable players in this space (playback on any device) but we should also mention Kodi. Kodi is great if your use case is local only as automated media transcoding for the target device isn't something that this software does. But, for me, Plex is still the best overall in this category. It has the slickest UI and the most features. Despite this, the progress being made by Emby and Jellyfin recently is very impressive and these are both projects to watch closely.
Are there any decent alternatives to Plex that work with smart TVs? The only reason I'm still using Plex is because my TV has a client for it in its app store (as do most TVs).
I mean I ask for alternatives in another comment, because they are not perfect, but Gerbera and miniDLNA do work. My LG TV supports DLNA natively, no app needed, it's just another source, like HDMI3.
Or rather than making your panel dependent on some already-out-of-date-when-shipped embedded computing hardware, attach an external embedded computing device to the HDMI port (e.g. roku, firetv, appletv, shield, etc). and liberate your app experience to a more powerful device.
And most TV remotes will be able to control the third party box too, assuming it's not developed by total control-freaks beyond that of even a popular controlling fruit company - my fruitTV comes with the world's worst remote, but at least I can use my TV's remote to control the fruitTV too.
The guide briefly mentions Unraid, which I'm glad to see. But I understand it doesn't fit the criteria since it's not free. IMO it's worth every penny for those of us who want an experience without a lot of this sysadmin(for lack of a better term) stuff. Unraid has been the perfect home/media server experience for me.
Unraid is fantastic, well worth the money. Believe it's only $60 for up to 6 drives, and it's a one-time charge ($130 for unlimited). More than paid for itself considering how much time it saved me, and the "app store" (community apps) makes it dead simple to install additional services.
Alternatively, you can accomplish most of the same with OpenMediaVault just with less polish.
I’m curious if you’ve tried TrueNAS (was previously called FreeNAS). It offers a pretty streamlined GUI for the common stuff and is free and open source.
File systems like ZFS have software RAID which require all drives to bought up front. In order to add more capacity, the whole array must be more or less rebuilt from scratch:
Ceph gets it right but is too heavy weight for home use. Btrfs can add new drives to an heterogeneous pool and rebalance data but it still has problems with the parity implementation.
With ZFS you have two (soon to be three) options for expanding without buying the drives upfront:
1. Add more vdevs. For example, you can start with a pair of drives in a mirror. Then when you need more space, you can add another pair of drives in a mirror and add that mirror to your pool. This way lets you smoothly increase your available space over time but you do end up with half your drives being parity while still potentially suffering a data loss if two drives in a mirror break at the same time.
2. Replace all of your drives with larger drives (one at a time so the pool can resilver the data onto the drive). This is nice because you can do it as your old drives fail, but the new space won't be available until all drives have been replaced.
In addition to plex serving a bunch of video/music media, my home media server also serves:
- Old Videos Games via shared folders to local setups of retroarch via Steamlink to my TV. I have literally thousands of retro games available from Atari VCS to PS2 I can play at a moment's notice. Using playnite I've also pulled together all the games from Steam, Gog and Epic into one place which all streams relatively well to my TV via Steamlink.
- Books, Comic books, Papers, and Magazines. I use ubooquity over calibre since it just fits my style and needs better. I have almost 100,000 pieces of readable media organized and available.
- Photos, we travel a lot and I like photography. So I have hundreds of thousands of photos also served up via plex.
I use two computers to do this. One is a cheap file/media server that's running plex and ubooquity. It's attached to two Mediasonic 4-bay probox serving up somewhere around 70TB of raw storage. The other is a higher-end daily-use computer with a decent GPU that can push the steamlink games and emulate old games with filters really well. It has 32GB of RAM but only around 4.5TB of storage -- which is fine since I use the file serve for most everything.
I should probably consolidate both machines down to one higher-end system and offload my desktop activities to a lower-end system but this setup is more something that's grown organically over time and wasn't really "designed".
However, the end effect is, I can plop in front of my TV, and choose from a virtually unlimited collection of media. And when I want to read something, I'm exclusively tablet now on the couch or in bed, and have virtually unlimited amount of reading material available as well.
I'll watch, play, and read something pretty much every day, so this setup has proven itself immensely. It's also allowed me to eliminate rooms full of media, game systems, and other
The only remaining hangup that I'm not happy about is how to best handle audiobooks. Right now I shove them into plex as another audio library, but it's kind of a mess and plex thinks they're all music or something. Tbh, I don't really like how plex serves up audio anyways. I also love it if plex just supported ebooks in the way ubooquity does, then I could unify my servers and also more easily serve reading material outside my home network.
The last remaining media I really want to be able to serve up in someway without converting them all are old chiptunes, amiga mods and other demoscene tracker music. I have a huge collection but haven't yet found a good way to serve them up in a way I like and have them accessible in the ways I have my other media available.
I’ve found TrueNAS (previously FreeNAS) to be quite good and I’m surprised to see no mention of it in the article or this comment section.
I’ve had a pretty good experience running a basic NAS server for my family. It runs Plex well in a BSD jail and has a GUI that’s usable for everything I’ve needed so far. ZFS support made setting up a zraid pretty easy and it supports easy backups to a number of cloud providers. Of course it’s BSD so no native docker, but from what I’ve seen most people choose to run Docker in a vm instead of on native containers.
I’m thinking of trying out proxmox for my upcoming home server because I want to give GPU pass through a shot, but I’m definitely impressed with TrueNAS and would recommend it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadAFAIK, it's one of a kind. Flexraid on Windows was the closest I had found (a product I still use on an old install - software and owner disappeared - although I did manage to track down the patent and the developer once, seems to have moved on to other interests/employment)
It's often simpler to just mount /dev/sda if you just connected it and need to do a one-off. But if you want something reliable, for automount for instance, I don't see why anyone would use something else than UUIDs. I even put those on stickers on my external hard drives.
Another tip I like is using noauto,x-systemd.automount to mount on-demand, and unmount after a set inactivity timer: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.mou...
Some partitions don't have UUIDs, such as LUKS volumes with a detached header or plain dm-crypt volumes. In that case, I use a /by-id/wwn-* path to uniquely identify the partition. Of course, those lines are in /etc/crypttab, not in /etc/fstab.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Persistent_block_device...
I am talking about UUIDs, that basically any (Linux at least) filesystem has. Those are a bit like filesystem labels, but generated during filesystem creation. Their format makes collisions virtually impossible. LUKS volumes have one, and partitions inside them have a different one too.
This is my prefered way of identifying partitions, as they are persistent even when you move them around with lvm, dd, or others. I think that's also the default in many distributions.
PARTUUID is also a nice way to identify partitions when you can't rely on a partition UUID for some reason. It works like UUIDs, but instead of being stored inside the partition, that information is part of the GPT (GUID partition table).
If you are more interested in the drives than the partition content, by-id makes sense, though I think the use-case is rather narrow :)
uuid is different but you can access it with /dev/disk/by-uuid
That's pure genius. Gonna steal that idea outright. LOL - I'ma go even one step further in my own personal setup, and encode it into a QR code sticker so I can just snap it right into my clipboard from KDE Connect on mah phone when I need to. ;)
QR codes aren't a bad idea, but clipboard sync doesn't work quite well on wlroots-based compositors in my experience :)
Just make sure to put a bit of ASCII below your QR code.
for example, you dd a disk and by-uuid is ambiguous.
meanwhile by-id still finds the original disk
[0] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/master/rules.d/60-pe...
I also wanted a media server on my desktop, with mixed results... Gerbera and MiniDLNA are both annoying to configure and buggy. If there's something better out there, I didn't find it.
Of course, non free (as in freedom)
Have you tried xpenology?
After my first Synology died I bought a beefier refurbished workstation on workstation4u.de and installed xpenology on it.
It works surprisingly well.
https://xpenology.org
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/files/Synology%20NAS%...
There are also threads on various FSF mailing lists calling out Synology for GPL violations.
Of course you don't get to use Synology services like quickconnect, but that's understandable.
It's not free software. You didn't pay for it. you don't have a license to use it.
If synology is violating the gpl that means that they have issues to fix, it doesn't change what xpenology is.
There are other projects that are actually free software like FreeNAS.
That's not "an issue they have to fix" nor is it a grey area; it's the essence of the GPL license terms.
The "issue that they have to fix" is that they haven't provided updated sources.. dunno, haven't checked on it in a while .
I don't have an opinion on whether there is non-GPL software in a base install of Synology software using the XPenology bootloader as I haven't researched it. My opinion is confined to "copy their entire product" is not a determining factor with respect to GPL licensing. (IANAL.)
The xpenology people claim it is an "open source alternative" to synology. It is not. They are lying. They are just hacking at it until it runs unlicensed on non synology hardware.
Is OS X free software? If you hack up an open source bootloader that lets OS X run on non apple hardware does that magically make OS X free and open source?
This is not complicated. If you are using xpenology you are pirating software. If you are relying on xpenology to store important data you are a fucking idiot.
Well, may a lightning strike me if this isn't a textbook example of red herring!
I feel I owe you a response, having written the original comment.
First of all, you are not bringing any proof to the table, except your opinions.
You may be right, you may be not, but mentioning "important data" in the context of "the perfect media server" makes me think that you arguments are not very convincing after all.
What's so important in a media server?
Everyone of us who sets up a media server already owns the entire library, in digital or analog format, of media content that is going to be played from the server, so there is no problem if something gets lost, we can rebuild it, we have the technology, we can make it better than it was. Right? Right!
It would be ironic if we were arguing about how much GPL code there is in Synology DSM to use it to watch or listen to content downloaded illegally, wouldn't it?
Anyway, even though it is illegal (I own hundreds of DVDs, but I am not allowed to rip them and play them from my computer), I do it anyway.
Lets not forget about 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-??-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0
Having said that.
The Synology record on GPL violations is abysmal (just search for "Synology" on trac.ffmpeg.org or serviio forum or samba.org mailing list archive, if you don't believe me) I think using a bootloader to install the base Synology system (most of DSM is under the GPL, unfortunately for them that's how that license works) _only on x86_ (Synology runs on many other platforms) and then install Jellyfin or Plex (if Jellyfin doesn't work) and never use the Synology proprietary software again is fair use. It's a Linux distribution after all, there is nothing inherently illegal in running it.
I know about FreeNAS, but as a media server is too much work and some things do not work (Jellyfin for example) or are not as simple to set up.
iXsystems and Synology make money from selling HW.
In your example XPenology is a bootloader that lets you install Darwin on non Apple X86 HW or a better example would be iOS jailbreaking, which has been considered "not illegal" and never been tested in court (because Apple knows that losing that battle would be very bad for them).
p.s.: Anyway, using a NAS without setting up proper replication and backups to store "very important data" it's equally idiotic.
p.p.s.: you could ask, so why don't simply install Linux? And you would be right. IMO in the context of "the perfect media server" for people that do not know how to setup a Linux media server, but have a spare Dell Optiplex, it's a viable alternative and the risk are basically zero or, to be completely honest, less than watching TV show and movies illegally.
I have yet to mess with headless containerized Kodi on the Pi.
One data point about btrfs, FWIW: I've been using it since 2016, the only "issue" I had is that it forced a failing drive into read-only, while other filesystems didn't detect the upcoming failure, thank checksuming for this.
The main missing feature for me is caching on faster disks, though there are some ways to get that. No mention of LVM nor LUKS either, I guess the understanding is either still a bit superficial (everyone has their own areas of interest), or they didn't want to complexify the setup too much.
For self-hosting, I can recommend https://yunohost.org/ which makes easy some traditionally hard parts of self-hosting, though it is quite opinionated (which isn't always a bad thing). Certainly saved me some time on maintenance, though I do see the limitations.
The holy grail of a "perfect homeserver" for me would be to run everything in GUIX, with a declarative configuration I can locally test before deploying, and rolling back. More packaging efforts are needed before this can become reality. I'd also like the option to have simple distributed storage, trough something like hypercore. This would help for backups, and for overcoming low-bandwidth links.
But maybe it's the Internet that needs to be fixed, with public key routing and content-based addressing, plus "heavy" clients and light, dumb servers instead of pushing everything to the browser.
Btrfs raid1 on 4 drives has worked well for me. For media storage i use mergerfs and snapraid.
Staying away from unstable features: Is RAID 5 & 6 really considered unstable still?
“RAID1” in btrfs means “two copies of each file are stored on two disks” - so it’s closer to RAID10 in mdadm terms. It’s pretty nice as you can do things like having 3 x 1TB drives + 1 x 3TB drive and it Just Works to give 3TB of usable space.
> Staying away from unstable features: Is RAID 5 & 6 really considered unstable still?
Yup :(
Also last time I checked (I’d love to be corrected about this) even RAID1 still isn’t ideal (in particular, when a drive fails in a RAID1 array, you only get one chance to mount it r/w and rebalance your data - after that, the array is read-only, and you need to recover by creating a new array on new disks and copy all the data across)
1. unmount the FS 2. make sure the dead/missing/failing device is disconnected 3. mount using -o degraded option. 4. run btrfs device remove missing <mount point>
It depends on having at least as many good drives as required for mounting the FS (which is 2 for raid1).
https://www.reddit.com/r/btrfs/comments/7os094/removing_a_de...
I think you're referring to this (https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg63370.html) bug, which was fixed in kernel >= 4.20 and >= 5.0 (according to https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/CAJCQCtTRseEwoN4cbsAaE_Y...)
That being said, the bug only causes the filesystem to become permanently degraded if the number of devices fall below the required number of devices needed for the raid type, and IIRC was caused by btrfs being unable to write metadata correctly. If you had a 3 drive raid1 pool, and one of the drives failed, it would happily continue working in degraded state.
Don't know if raid5/6 are still considered unstable, but would be very interested as well.
//edit: shish2k was a bit faster and says nope to raid5/6
But TBH, I am fine with some down time in case of a drive failure on my personal server. I try to maintain up-to-date backups anyway, and that's a low-probability event, especially without many drives.
Liking the view on Jellyfin over Plex. I'm a relatively long time Plex user (switched over from XBMC (now Kodi) to Plex in ~2011), but also immensely dissatisfied with the direction they've taken, focusing on growth to satisfy PE backers over the needs of the user base that enabled them to even qualify for any PE money. It looks to me that their focus is increasingly on "collecting analytics" on their users behaviours (logging everything they watch) and providing ad-supported streaming services, instead of trying to provide the best self hosted media streaming service (as it was when I started using Plex).
> One data point about btrfs, FWIW: I've been using it since 2016, the only "issue" I had is that it forced a failing drive into read-only, while other filesystems didn't detect the upcoming failure, thank checksuming for this.
One more data point about BTRFS, is that it doesn't support parity-stripe based redundancy models (raid5/6, raidz{1..n}, etc), which makes it less interesting for a lot of people.
Another note about ZFS is that it doesn't allow for growing of parity-stripe based volumes (although there's a tweet referenced in TFA that notes there should be a pull request with that feature expected soon). This can make it very expensive for people who don't have the funds to buy disks in groups of 6 at a time (my personal preference for a raidz2 zpool)
Before someone looks at man btrfs-device and gets confused: doesn't reliably support those levels. Support for parity-based redundancy models has been in the code for ages, but that part of the code is not considered mature.
It does however support raid1 on multiple drives, and raid1c3 and raid1c4 for increased redundancy.
With Btrfs raid1, you can pool I.e 4 drives, meaning it will store 2 copies of each file on different devices. It’s not your traditional raid1. With raid1c3 it will store 3 copies of each file, and raid1c4 stores 4 copies.
So while technically not raid5, a 3+ drive Btrfs raid1 pool will provide almost the same redundancy. Think of it more like raid10.
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/blob/master/LICENSE
Only if you use deduplication (off by default), in which case the rule of thumb is 1-5GB of RAM per 1TB of disk. Otherwise you can get away with less memory.
The CDDL is a non-issue in most cases, and actually preferable to the GPL as it allows for the code to be integrated into BSD and Solaris-derived systems.
The CDDL is essentially the same license as the GPL except it only applies to the files under the CDDL as opposed to the GPL which imposes its rules to the entire project for every project that links it. Any software under the CDDL is exactly as free as in freedom as GPL code.
CDDL: https://tldrlegal.com/license/common-development-and-distrib...
GPL: https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v2
Short description of the difference in the terms section on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...
>This is a free software license
People are free to dislike ZFS, but it certainly is free software
http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:CDDLv1.0
Does btrfs work on anything except Linux? Apparently ReactOS too creating limited Windows support, but it's not very portable. It's a strange thing to praise btrfs for when comparing to ZFS.
>coming from Oracle,
Fun fact, btrfs comes from Oracle.
Plex seems like they’re in a bind. They need to diversify their user base because their current one is very heavily based on people sharing pirated content (every time I point this out someone says they they only use Plex with Blurays they’ve legally purchased and ripped... and good for you! But you’re not close to the normal user) and I figure they’re in constant fear of legal action shutting them down. At least the streaming, DVR etc functionality allows them to make a plausible claim that people use their product for entirely legal means. I’ve gotten enough value out of my lifetime subscription that I won’t feel cheated if Plex disappears, but it’s good to know solutions like Jellyfin are nearly there when/if it does.
Apparently Infuse[0] supports Jellyfin now. I use it with Plex and have found it to be far and away the best TV media front end. So you might want to take a look at it.
0: https://firecore.com/infuse
I agree with your take in the first sentence so much unfortunately.
One thing I will not run is btrfs, aka ENOSPCfs. I saw it fail again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, and again, and again. Then I saw it fail some more. The promised features never materialized, and the drama and surprising behaviors never ceased. All costs, no benefits? I'll leave that on the shelf, a few spots down from reiserfs (which was plenty sketchy BEFORE you know who did you know what).
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/11/feedback/
As to file systems in general, I think they covered them very well..
As to Plex, he also mentioned the others:
Jellyfin and Emby are two notable players in this space (playback on any device) but we should also mention Kodi. Kodi is great if your use case is local only as automated media transcoding for the target device isn't something that this software does. But, for me, Plex is still the best overall in this category. It has the slickest UI and the most features. Despite this, the progress being made by Emby and Jellyfin recently is very impressive and these are both projects to watch closely.
Or rather than making your panel dependent on some already-out-of-date-when-shipped embedded computing hardware, attach an external embedded computing device to the HDMI port (e.g. roku, firetv, appletv, shield, etc). and liberate your app experience to a more powerful device.
A Fire TV Lite (2020) starts at $30.
Alternatively, you can accomplish most of the same with OpenMediaVault just with less polish.
File systems like ZFS have software RAID which require all drives to bought up front. In order to add more capacity, the whole array must be more or less rebuilt from scratch:
https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Growing#Expanding_exi...
Ceph gets it right but is too heavy weight for home use. Btrfs can add new drives to an heterogeneous pool and rebalance data but it still has problems with the parity implementation.
There's gotta be a way to do this...
1. Add more vdevs. For example, you can start with a pair of drives in a mirror. Then when you need more space, you can add another pair of drives in a mirror and add that mirror to your pool. This way lets you smoothly increase your available space over time but you do end up with half your drives being parity while still potentially suffering a data loss if two drives in a mirror break at the same time.
2. Replace all of your drives with larger drives (one at a time so the pool can resilver the data onto the drive). This is nice because you can do it as your old drives fail, but the new space won't be available until all drives have been replaced.
3. There is a feature under development for raidz expansion. (Raidz is like raid5/6). The work on the alpha is up at: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/8853
- Old Videos Games via shared folders to local setups of retroarch via Steamlink to my TV. I have literally thousands of retro games available from Atari VCS to PS2 I can play at a moment's notice. Using playnite I've also pulled together all the games from Steam, Gog and Epic into one place which all streams relatively well to my TV via Steamlink.
- Books, Comic books, Papers, and Magazines. I use ubooquity over calibre since it just fits my style and needs better. I have almost 100,000 pieces of readable media organized and available.
- Photos, we travel a lot and I like photography. So I have hundreds of thousands of photos also served up via plex.
I use two computers to do this. One is a cheap file/media server that's running plex and ubooquity. It's attached to two Mediasonic 4-bay probox serving up somewhere around 70TB of raw storage. The other is a higher-end daily-use computer with a decent GPU that can push the steamlink games and emulate old games with filters really well. It has 32GB of RAM but only around 4.5TB of storage -- which is fine since I use the file serve for most everything.
I should probably consolidate both machines down to one higher-end system and offload my desktop activities to a lower-end system but this setup is more something that's grown organically over time and wasn't really "designed".
However, the end effect is, I can plop in front of my TV, and choose from a virtually unlimited collection of media. And when I want to read something, I'm exclusively tablet now on the couch or in bed, and have virtually unlimited amount of reading material available as well.
I'll watch, play, and read something pretty much every day, so this setup has proven itself immensely. It's also allowed me to eliminate rooms full of media, game systems, and other
The only remaining hangup that I'm not happy about is how to best handle audiobooks. Right now I shove them into plex as another audio library, but it's kind of a mess and plex thinks they're all music or something. Tbh, I don't really like how plex serves up audio anyways. I also love it if plex just supported ebooks in the way ubooquity does, then I could unify my servers and also more easily serve reading material outside my home network.
The last remaining media I really want to be able to serve up in someway without converting them all are old chiptunes, amiga mods and other demoscene tracker music. I have a huge collection but haven't yet found a good way to serve them up in a way I like and have them accessible in the ways I have my other media available.
I’ve had a pretty good experience running a basic NAS server for my family. It runs Plex well in a BSD jail and has a GUI that’s usable for everything I’ve needed so far. ZFS support made setting up a zraid pretty easy and it supports easy backups to a number of cloud providers. Of course it’s BSD so no native docker, but from what I’ve seen most people choose to run Docker in a vm instead of on native containers.
I’m thinking of trying out proxmox for my upcoming home server because I want to give GPU pass through a shot, but I’m definitely impressed with TrueNAS and would recommend it.