Through Geek Glasses

[peter-ungvari]

Moving from Synology NAS to HPE Proliant Microserver Gen10 - Pt.3 ClearOS, Web UI

First Impressions After Unboxing My New Precious

Opened the front panel. Then disassemled the machine. Looked very neat. HPE engineers know how to build a microserver, I must admit. No hardware added yet, assembled it to the original form.

There is no manual. All right. One page brochure recommends to set up ClearOS, a web based OS. Is it similar to DSM of Synology? Will I get the same user experience? YouTube videos of ClearOS look promising. Let's do it!

Monitor And Keyboard, Please!

There are display port on the back. But I ain't got no monitor. And I don't have keyboard either, since I use laptops only. I hope those won't be neccessary. Or I can purchase keyboard and DP-HDMI converter for my TV. So I can use the TV as monitor.

Next step: burning ClearOS installer to a bootable USB pendrive on my laptop. No problem, easy-peasy.

Power cord, USB pendrive and network cable attached to microserver, ready to boot, right? Wrong. At least the machine did not get IP. What's wrong? For a NAS this would be enough. Except a NAS does not require bootable media to start. But this is a microserver.

OK, I bought keyboard and adaptor for my TV. Let's see...

Installing ClearOS

For BIOS setup press <f2> or <del>... Time passes and a boot menu apears. Mass storage device is listed there. OK, so I could set to boot from it. And a usual linux setup screen apeared on the screen. Language picked up, partitioning... What? This time there are no disks in the microserver. Only the USB drive. Which is read only according to the setup program. It is not like a "Live CD", a bootable medium the OS can start from. It's an installer only.

Okay, an another USB drive is needed if I want the OS on a USB drive instead of a HDD or SSD. For that (or for BIOS upgrade?) the microserver has a USB slot inside. I was curious if this little machine can work with the OS on a flash drive, so I picked this approach. The installation went all right. Apart from partitioning (used recommended settings, hit next button) and setting root password no questions was asked. I could customize the installation package I think, but I did not bother.

After ClearOS installation on first boot a network interface setup screen welcomed me. I could pick whether to use firewall (server mode) and set up the 1st network interface (with strage name instead of eth0) to use DHCP.

Ah, at last! The server had an IP address on LAN. Great! I suggest to google and RTFM (read the manual) about server modes and interface settings. If the server connects to a router and "External" interface should be configured in order to have the router set as gateway.

Tada, the web UI became alive. I could continue setting the machine up from my laptop.

Install Phase II: Web UI

After logging in to the web UI, oneshould pick up the ClearOS edition to be used. Community Edition is free. The rest is not. Registration is mandatory, but no personal data is required. After comleting these steps the web UI is fully functional. "Marketplace" is available to install applications for the web UI.

Disk Management App?

OK, so far so good. Could be a bit smoother but all right. Where is the disk management app? o_O There is no such thing. Or at least I could not find it for the newest stable version of ClearOS. On the other hand SSH acccess could be configured. So disk arrays can be added manually. ClearOS is a CentOS-based linux system. Am I a linux expert or what?

Conclusions

Monitor and keyboard are required for the setup of the boot device and the network. Mouse is good to have.

As I tried ClearOS can be installed to and used from an USB drive, different from the installation medium. This can be done in another PC (even on a laptop). Drivers do not matter. Everything required to operate a microserver will be installed anyway.

Regarding to network setup options RTFM is recommended.

Linux knowledge or willingness to learn is strongly recommended if you want to use a microserver with ClearOS.

[peter-ungvari]

Moving from Synology NAS to HPE Proliant Microserver Gen10 - Pt.2 What Are They Used For?

Safe place for my personal documents with automatic backup

Media Center - video and music collection - accessed from PC, Smart TV, smartphone

Web server for my stupid web pages

Git server for some of my pet projects (barely used, since BitBucket and GitHub offers better services)

VPN server to be able my secret files and web pages safely outside home

I use small SSDs in all of my laptops, so a data vault is needed to store all the data I gathered and archived over time.

Download manager for ftp, web and torrents

'coz I'm a geek

These features I used (more or less frequently) are all supported by the applications of the NAS. So In the following parts of this article series I will set the microserver to be capable for the same.

Disclaimer

I do not and would not encourage anybody to use their NAS or their server to download or store any illegal content. Everybody should take care and responsibility for the data on their machines as well as sharing content.

[peter-ungvari]

Moving from Synology NAS to HPE Proliant Microserver Gen10 - Pt.1 Why to Move

Apple With Pear

I am comparing apple with pear. Or I am explaining why to choose pear over apple. In some cases. This is opinionated. My aim with this series is to provide some information about the gains and drawbacks of choosing a microserver over a NAS.

Cheap Synology NAS Are Great

Really.

It gives fast as possible Windows shares, good download app, music and data accessible from phone, fool-proof and very easy set up for even VPN, git server, web server, backup. It works perfectly with my smart TV. Its DLNA server indexes immediately the media I download with or upload to the NAS. Just a few clicks on the web UI and everything is set a work perfectly. I still like it for many its fantastic features.

Photo upload, editing is very limited and cumbersome in my opinion using the NAS. But this might be subjective. And this is not why I wanted to change it for a microserver.

Rage Against My NAS

It was pure rage against my NAS why I bought a HPE microserver. By two reasons: 1. The web interface it provides uses ExtJS web framework. Sot it could not be fast, ever. Trust me. As a developer I know this framework well. I don't have minutes to wait for page loads/window content refreshes. 2. Very low (< 10 M/s transfer speed from/to USB 3.0 external SSD drive). This was extremely annoying when I wanted to copy 40G of family photos and videos.

My very very cheap noname chinese phone (which works fine and what I like very much actually) has a lot stronger hardware than my Synology NAS (DS214se). Clearly this a very cheap, entry-level model. Of course I could purchase an expensive one with better hardware. But ExtJS remains the same and I am not sure about external drives either. Nevertheless, the price per GBs of RAM and per CPU cores are extremely high when we are speaking about NAS. Regardless we pick Synology or other brands.

My Decision

To be honest I never thought of purchasing a new NAS. The old one is not good enough for my needs, so it's better to try something else, right?

Hovever probably DS418 would have been sufficient. The 2-bay predecessor satisfied me for 2 years.

The Numbers

Synology DS214se

This is my old NAS.

CPU: Marwell Armada 370 800MHz SoC

RAM: DDR3 256M

Storage: 2 x SATA II (3Gb/s), max. 12T

USB: 2x USB 2.0

Network: 1Gb/s

Released in 2014

Current Price (01/2018): $200-250 (used)

HPE Proliant Microserver Gen10

This is the microserver I picked.

CPU: AMD Opteron™ X3216 Processor (1.6-3.0GHz/2 compute cores/4 graphic cores/1MB/12-15W)

RAM: DDR4 8G ECC

Storage: 4+1x SATA III (6Gb/s), max. 16T+?T

USB: 4x USB 3.0 + 3x USB 2.0

Network: Dual port 1Gb/s

Misc: PCIe3 x4, PCIe3 x8 (low profile), VGA, 2x Display Port

Released in Q3 2017

Current Price (01/2018): $350-400 (new)

Synology DS418

This is a new NAS for the same price I could have picked instead of a microserver, as an upgrade to my old one.

CPU: Realtek RTD1296 Quad Core 1.4 GHz

RAM: DDR4 2G

Storage: 4x SATA III(?), max. 48T

USB: 2x USB 3.0

Network: Dual port 1Gb/s

Released in Q4 2017

Current Price (01/2018): $350-400 (new)

[peter-ungvari]

sick breakfast :(cold):

[peter-ungvari]

How to move steam games - Multiple SteamApps

You can add your SteamApps folder located in arbitrary file path to an existing Steam installation by the followings:

Start Steam, choose Steam > Settings > Downloads > Steam Library Folders > Add folder.

Create a new folder, on the disk you want your games, select it for addition.

An empty SteamApps folder will be created inside the folder you chose.

Quit from Steam client.

Replace the empty SteamApps folder with the SteamApps folder holding your games (eg. by moving it).

Start Steam and enjoy your games.

Alternative 1:

You can have multiple Steam installations with SteamApps under the installation folders. Steam folders can be copied as is.

Alternative 2:

You can make links (symlink or hardlink, even in windows systems with a proper tool) to link the desired SteamApps folder to a subfolder of your Steam installation.

[peter-ungvari]

Race condition

When multiple actors try to perform actions on a shared resource concurrently, and the outcome would depend on the order the actions performed is the phenomenon of race condition.

Race conditions result an unexpected, non-determininstic behaviour, so they should be avoided.

[peter-ungvari]

Video edit commands

Cut and join mp4 (AVC+AAC):

ffmpeg -y -i "source1.mp4" -to <end_time> -c copy -bsf h264_mp4toannexb out1.ts ffmpeg -y -ss <start time> -i "source2.mp4" -c copy -bsf h264_mp4toannexb out2.ts ffmpeg -y -i "concat:out1.ts|out2.ts" -c copy -bsf aac_adtstoasc "final_output.mp4"

Transcode DV or MPEG2 to MPEG4, keep interlaced PAL:

ffmpeg -y -i <source> -c:v libx264 -preset medium -pass 1 -b:v 1900k -flags +ilme+ildct -an -f mp4 NUL ffmpeg -y -i <source> -c:v libx264 -preset medium -pass 2 -b:v 1900k -flags +ilme+ildct -strict -2 -c:a aac -ab 128k -f mp4 <output>

[peter-ungvari]

Time zones? Different time units? Why?

[peter-ungvari]

I think he is right.

[peter-ungvari]

Just created some slides about monads in Scala, hope you enjoy.

[peter-ungvari]

CloudBees RUN@cloud play2 app deployment

Every time I previously tried to deploy scala webapp developed with play framework 2 I got "504 Gateway Time-out". But the logs said no error.

Until I accidentally discovered a solution:

bees app:deploy -Rjava_version=1.7 <the other stuff...> bees app:update <APP_ID> disableProxyBuffering=true

CloudFoundry will stop offering free hosting at 30th June 2013, so the bees (or heroku?) will be the best can-be-free PaaS solution.

[panaxiom]

Documentation for getting a Play 2 project working with Sublime Text 2 is available, but sparse, so this post aims to consolidate the steps necessary to get you up and running quickly.

Once done, you should have a more semantically aware Sublime Text installation which highlights errors just...

[peter-ungvari]

My thesis is done

My thesis at Eötvös Loránd University is done.

It's about a success story of learning Scala, Play! framework 2, ReactiveMongo by myself and using these to develop a simple web application with common features like i18n and custom authentication with OpenID integration, in relatively short time.

The conclusion is: it is worth it.

[peter-ungvari]

Async authentication for Play Framework 2 scala

Click to read:

[peter-ungvari]

Play Framework 2 start on Windows with java7

play -Dfile.separator=\/ start

[peter-ungvari]

Play 2.1 scala app with mongodb deploy to CloudFoundry steps and tips

take a look on these posts:

http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/2012/05/31/cloud-foundry-now-supports-play/

http://aleksandarglavas.blogspot.hu/2013/02/play-21-integration-with-cloudfoundry.html

on Windows: make sure you have ruby DevKit installed properly.

get auto-reconfiguration-0.6.5.jar and play-java-jpa_2.10-2.1.0.jar and place it to the lib folder of application root (create the lib subfolder if needed)

create a new config file, include application.conf and append db conf there:

include "application.conf" mongodb.uri=${?cloud.services.mongodb.connection.url} mongodb.password=${?cloud.services.mongodb.connection.password} mongodb.user=${?cloud.services.mongodb.connection.username}

build the dist package specifying the newly create configuration, the -D option must prepend the name of the dist command.

play -Dconfig.file=conf/dist.cloudfoundry.conf dist

vmc push the app, but don't try to save the configuration. push fails

be happy, you've just spared some hours of agony :)

[hugocf]

by Joshua Bloch, Principal Software Engineer at Google