Homebuild Slimserver box .. which OS? which spec?

[Havoc]

It doesn't matter when you hook up the drives.

You need at least a single drive to install the OS. You can leave out the other drives if you don't feel sure when installing and want to be certain you don't overwrite something. If you add the drives later, then you will have to add them yourself in the /etc/fstab file. This isn't difficult, and there is a lot of info about it around.

If you add full drives, then you will have to make sure to use a filesystem that is suported. Linux supports lots of filesystems, but writing NTFS is often considered risky. (but there has been a lot of progress lately) However if you want to use one of the linux filesystems, you will have to add them empty (unless they were already in such a filesystem).

[tscales]

It doesn't matter when you hook up the drives.

You need at least a single drive to install the OS. You can leave out the other drives if you don't feel sure when installing and want to be certain you don't overwrite something. If you add the drives later, then you will have to add them yourself in the /etc/fstab file. This isn't difficult, and there is a lot of info about it around.

If you add full drives, then you will have to make sure to use a filesystem that is suported. Linux supports lots of filesystems, but writing NTFS is often considered risky. (but there has been a lot of progress lately) However if you want to use one of the linux filesystems, you will have to add them empty (unless they were already in such a filesystem).

Thank you very much - I was told that if I hook-up/install (internally or externally) the drives first and format them they will appear as all one volume - true? Or will they appear that way if I mount them after the fact?

I've a 20Gb inside my box that I'm installing FC5 on and then a 180 and 300 in external enclosures via firewire. Any concerns?

I formatted them with windows, so I'm guessing their NTFS which means FC5 will not be able to write to them? Hmmm, thats alittle undesirable.

Will I be able to unhook them and take them elsewhere?

Thanks again for the experienced response, I'm in new waters here and want the benfit of everyone's experience before I getr in over my head.

-tim

[Emissary]

Hi, I think Linux is the way to go if you're willing to experiment a little. Personally I would prefer a debian based distribution (like Ubuntu). I used 5.04/5.10 of Ubuntu for quite some time and a colleague is using Debian Sarge (3.1) and has reported no problems. But the primary factor for choosing a distribution should be as simple as how many people you know who use it. Nothing replaces someone who can be called or come over if you're stuck.

But if you want that little extra fun, do as I did and run Solaris Nevada with a zfs pool to store your music on

If you want to take the disks and plug them into other pcs (windows?) I'm afraid to tell you that there is no elegant way to do that. There are ways to mount linux filesystems on windows or to mount windows filesystems (ntfs, fat) on linux.

If you want to run ext2/3 as a filesystem which is considered stable and absolutely ok for a media server I would recommend to create a small fat32 partition on each of the disks and put a tool like
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm
on that partition. So you always have a tool to access that disk under windows with you

Another thing to consider is how valuable your data is to you. From the messages before it seems that you are not using any online data protection (RAID1/5). Do you do backups regularly?

Dominik

[Havoc]

I was told that if I hook-up/install (internally or externally) the drives first and format them they will appear as all one volume - true?

They won't appear as a single volume. In fact, the only very visible difference between windows and linux is that linux doesn't know the idea of "drive letters". So if you hook up a drive and format it, then you end up with a single large drive just like under windows. If you have more than one drive, then you end up with several empty drives.

Under linux you just have to partition your drive like under windows. Then you have to format your partition just like under windows. Only you have far more choices in filesystems.

Then comes the difference: under windows you give it a "drive letter", under linux you give it a "mount point". Now a mount point is nothing else than a directory in your "root". (this "root" has nothing to do with the root-user, it is the starting point of your linux install, the "/") You now can mount the partition manually with the "mount" command, or do this automatically at boot using the /etc/fstab file.

I don't have experience with firewire drives, but I guess it will be similar to USB. Most likely they will end up as "SCSI" drives. Meaning they will be known to the system as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc. (the partitions are then /dev/sda1 etc)

There has been a lot of progress writing to NTFS. It isn't labelled "experimental" anymore in the kernel I use so, best check with your distro (or the forums of it).

You can unhook drives (USB sure, so firewire I guess will do it also) by first unmounting them! Same as in windows you have to tell the OS to "safely remove hardware" when disconnecting a usb stick. Reason is to make sure all buffers to the disk are flushed. If they can be read on windows will depend on the filesystem used.

Another thing to consider is how valuable your data is to you. From the messages before it seems that you are not using any online data protection (RAID1/5). Do you do backups regularly?

Well, I don't think the files on my media-server worth a backup. At least I have the CD's to restore it from.

[tscales]

Thanks guys - yeah - the media I have is live music, which is I have burnt to CD and I may burn everything to DVD before I get started.

My buddy recomends Fedora 5, which sounds like it has a scanning problem with the latest version of SS but I won't be adding music that often so it may not matter to me.

ughhh - while I was transferring some data to my new 300Gb seagate drive I realized I formatted it as NFTS so i unplugged it (with out cancellin or anything) and now the drive can be read.

not too smart, am I - there goes that idea.

[dem]

Be sure to check out the thread I started about Perl performance issues in FC5. You'll want to avoid upgrading the version of Perl from the one that's initially installed.

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=25559

[monty77]

OK, I built my box

It's running ClarkConnect and I already have SS installed and working from the internal HDD.

I'd like to add a 300GB external USB drive to the box ....

I've mounted it and can read/write to it under Linux but when I share it and access it via windows file sharing on my mac I cannot copy files to the drive.

When I 'fdisk -l' the drive under X it shows it as being HPFS/NTFS which I'm guessing is the issue as Mac OS X can't write to NTFS partitions. How do I reformat the drive as something like the root drive? What FS does CC use by default?

I can share and write to other shares on the Linux box just fine via the Mac.

Cheers!
Adam

[Ramage]

OK, I built my box

It's running ClarkConnect and I already have SS installed and working from the internal HDD.

I'd like to add a 300GB external USB drive to the box ....

I've mounted it and can read/write to it under Linux but when I share it and access it via windows file sharing on my mac I cannot copy files to the drive.

When I 'fdisk -l' the drive under X it shows it as being HPFS/NTFS which I'm guessing is the issue as Mac OS X can't write to NTFS partitions. How do I reformat the drive as something like the root drive? What FS does CC use by default?

I can share and write to other shares on the Linux box just fine via the Mac.

Cheers!
Adam

See my previous post #6 in this thread. I used a USB drive which was partly formatted to VFAT which CC3.2 could read natively. Occasionally I get problems with file/folder permissions when modifying and copying across SMB share in windows. (I use XP)

Check that the permissions are correct for rw. As I understand it Samba doesn't care about the file system types. CC uses ext3 by default.

[tscales]

More good info - thanks guys - keep it coming.

Okay - I'm gonna document my progress this week as I back up my old win2k machine and wipe it clean and install Fedora(red hat) and try to get it working as a network files server and music machine for the squeezebox house.

I got my 300Gb drive working again and formatted it as a Linux EXT3 drive. I then used a little utility to read/write to it from win2k and xp - here's the link... (i think)

http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs

So I added all my FLACs to that drive and now I think I can begin the installation, however, once I added the files, switched to another pc and added files from there, I wasn't able to read that drive again with either pc. I'm assume that drive will be readable once I have Fedora up and running, but you know what they say about assumptions.

-tim

[rrnwexec]

I'm about to do this very thing with an old Dell Precision workstation and Fedora C5 (which I'm totally new to)

My question, is do I want to hook up the drives to the box before during or after the install of Fedora? Full or empty?

-tim

The drives can be added later. When you plug them in FC5 should auto-detect and mount them on your desktop, provided that they are formatted.

Cheers,
Randall