Man, I would have loved one of these when I was a kid! Times, they have certainly changed. Read on for more info, specs and build log...
My little brother and sister are 12 and 9 respectively and getting older now and as such have a greater need for a PC they can rely on for homework, games, general stuff. The PCs they are each using now aren't necessarily terrible or anything but are a bit dated in terms of specs and are almost ready for retirement. So I've taken this as an opportunity to upgrade them both or rather start from scratch! The machines they use now, as I said, are a bit antiquated and have issues far too often so it makes more sense just to get new stuff.
Current Spec:
Generic ATX case
Silver Power 400W PSU
Abit Fatal1ty F-I90HD mobo
1.8GHz Pentium e2160 (LGA775)
2/4GB DDR2-533 RAM
MSI Nvidia 8600GT 256MB GDDR3 (fanless :))
19" monitor (forget the brand, 1440x900, will be keeping these)
The PCs are about 5 or 6 years old at this point and are clearly showing their age. The Sims 3 is about as much as they'll run. I've had GTA IV run on one of them but it wasn't exactly what you'd call pretty (1024x768 yuck!)
I've already ordered the new parts and most of them have arrived. Still waiting on the PSUs and GPUs so everything else is still sitting in their boxes until tomorrow/end of week when I can get stuck into building.
New Spec:
BitFenix Shinobi ATX case
BeQuiet Pure Power L8 430W PSU (No experience with this brand, took a gamble)
Asus AMD Radeon 6670 1GB GDDR5 (nice perf bump over 8600GT)
Decent enough specs for the money I think. In total each machine cost £280.
You might be thinking, "Uh silly man, hasn't bought any storage." Ah well you see I already have a couple of 120GB SSDs and 320GB WD Blues which shall be making their way into these and should work away quite nicely.
See below for some pics. If I can be bothered I might post some benchmarks:
RAM for HP N40L ESXi build and SSD for...I'm not sure yet...can never have too many SSDs. Perhaps an ESXi datastore? Don't like that there's no TRIM support though :(
PROJECT: It's project time again...VMware ESXi on HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L
I've just finished uni for Christmas and I feel another project coming on.
I've had my HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L for almost a year now. Whenever I bought it I had the intention of using it as a backup server for all of the PCs in my house. It's a mix of Windows and Mac so I needed something to stick on the box that would play nice with both OSes. I was gonna run with Windows Home Server and RAID 1 and then try to hack Mac support but to be honest, as much as I like Windows, I prefer something *nix-like to be leaving on 24/7. I already had a media server NAS at that point running unRAID (a Slackware based NAS OS). So I decided to roll with unRAID again and install the CrashPlan add-on (install guide here) for PC backups in the house.
I can honestly say it's been one of those "set it and forget it" kind of things that has just worked! Just what you want really. I'm mainly just using it to store PC backups, Applications, MSDN .ISOs etc but I want to give it a bit more use.
I would like to install VMware ESXi (free virtual machine hypervisor) onto it and replicate my unRAID setup as it is currently but then also have other virtual machines running as well. I'm a computing student and I want to learn more about Windows Server, Active Directory and other products and there's only so much I can do on my MacBook Air.
Currently the HP N40L I have is only running with 2GB DDR3 RAM. I would need to upgrade this to be able to do what I want. I've had a read around on forums and apparently 8GB is the limit (what HP says). However, many people have been able to get 16GB fully working with no issues and no hacked BIOSes required. I hope this is true. I plan on installing ESXi and moving my unRAID setup over today and then if everything works I'm going to drop the 60 quid for 16GB of RAM and start playing with running multiple VMs.
Watch this space!
UPDATE 1: It would seem that 2GB of RAM is not enough to install ESXi (lots of insufficient memory messages in the log). Well in this household that is easily remedied. Bumped it up to 4GB and the installer has almost completed.
UPDATE 2: Done! After that first RAM hiccup, the rest of the install was painless. I now have my previous unRAID boot disk moved over and, after some forum reading, worked out how to pass disks through to the VM so that their physical characteristics could be picked up and so unRAID would be able to talk to the correct disks (it needs to know the serial number)
Below I have a screenshot of the vSphere client logged onto the ESXi host and the unRAID VM. Now I just need to learn what all the bells and whistles do!
Backup your home, your life, everything using CrashPlan and unRAID!
Jump to:
What is CrashPlan?
What do I need?
How do I do it?
Installing the plugin
Configuring the plugin
Adding a PC for backup
What is CrashPlan?
CrashPlan is a backup service that stores data into data center, offsite computers, attached drives or shared folders.
via Wikipedia
The CrashPlan software is similar to many of the competitors out there; Carbonite, Mozy, BackBlaze, DropBox etc in that a client sits on your PC watching to see if you've changed any files and uploads the changes when you do something. However with CrashPlan, not only can you buy a subscription for cloud storage there is also an "offline" component which allows you to back up several PCs to an external drive, a shared folder, another PC on the same network or even across the internet to a friend's.
CrashPlan supports a variety of platforms offering clients for Windows, Mac, Linux and Open Solaris as well as apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone (supporting CrashPlan+ subscription only)
Why can't I just choose my unRAID box as a destination on the CrashPlan software? [I hear you ask...]
As it happens, CrashPlan will not let you choose network locations as a backup destination! Hence the need for a plugin which will make your unRAID box appear to be like a standard PC as if you had a client on a Windows/Mac/Linux box.
What do I need?
You'll need a few thing before continuing:
An unRAID box - Obviously if you want to use an unRAID machine for CrashPlan you're gonna need one! It needs to be running version 5 beta 11 or later
A 2nd PC - You'll need another PC on the same network as your unRAID box, probably best to use one that you want to back up using CrashPlan.
CrashPlan PC Software - Grab the latest installer from here for your 2nd PC.
CrashPlan unRAID Plugin - Grab the plugin for your unRAID box from here. I'll show you what to do with it in a sec.
PuTTY - This is a great little tool for communicating with your unRAID box over telnet and SSH and giving you access to the command line...don't let that scare you! I will hold your hand through the process :) Grab the installer here.
How do I do it?
Before we start, I must say that this process should be a "one-time-only" kind of thing. Once you install the plugin and configure it to use your CrashPlan credentials you should be able to leave it and not worry about it again.
OK, let's crack on!
Installing the plugin
OK, if you haven't already, grab the unRAID plugin above, install the CrashPlan software on a PC of your choice and also install PuTTY on that same PC.
You can do this next part a few ways, whichever takes your fancy or is easiest for you:
Take the USB stick that your unRAID box boots off of and insert it into your PC, create a new folder within the config folder called "plugins" and place the downloaded unRAID plugin in there.
With your unRAID box on and the array started, open a explorer window and browse to \\\\<your unRAID box name/IP address here>\flash and create a new folder within the config folder called "plugins" and place the downloaded unRAID plugin in there.
Telnet to your unRAID box using PuTTY and issue the following commands:
This will download the CrashPlan Linux installer as well as a few other necessary packages. Don't worry if it looks like nothing is happening, the CrashPlan installer is around 20MB which may take a while to download.
Hopefully you will see a nice "plugin successfully installed" message.
If you browse to the "Settings" page of the web interface of your unRAID box you can confirm that it installed if you notice a new addition to the page.
Click the new icon to bring up the *ahem* extensive list of options. From here you will be able to start and stop the CrashPlan client running. You can also set the default install location. I've just got mine installed on the first disk but you could install it to a cache drive if you have one. I'm only running the free "Basic" (i.e. not Plus/Pro) version of unRAID for my backup box so can't use a cache drive.
Bear in mind this is just where the CrashPlan app will be installed, not the actual backed up data.
Once you've chosen a suitable install directory, start CrashPlan and click "Apply"
*If you're wondering why there is a dot before the folder name (/mnt/disk1/.crashplan) on my install, the reason is if you don't have it on a folder on the root of a drive, unRAID thinks it's a user share and creates a SMB network share for it!
That about does it for installing the plugin.
Configuring the plugin
In this section, we will be telling the unRAID plugin to use our CrashPlan credentials (not necessary to sign-up right now, you can do this during the setup process if you don't already have an account)
What we need to do now is log into CrashPlan with the unRAID plugin. How do we do that? There's no GUI on the unRAID web interface? Well this is where it gets a bit complicated. We need to create an SSH tunnel from our PC to our unRAID box and use the PC version of CrashPlan to setup the unRAID one i.e. PC CrashPlan frontend and unRAID plugin backend.
On your PC browse to the install directory of CrashPlan:
C:/Program Files/CrashPlan/conf
In this folder there is a file called "ui.properties", right-click it and open it with WordPad
Add the following to the bottom of the code, save and close:
servicePort=4200
Now open up PuTTY, scroll down the left column until you reach "SSH", click the plus symbol and click on "Tunnels." You should see a window like below. Fill in the info:
Source Port: 4200
Destination Port: localhost:4243
Click "Add"
Scroll back up the left column and click on session to return the first screen and create a new saved session by adding in the connection details:
Host Name/IP address
Check the SSH radio button
Give the saved session an appropriate name
Click "Save"
Now whenever we need to SSH into the unRAID box we can just "Load" the saved session.
Click on the "Default Settings" session and click "Load" to reset the window. Now you should create a saved session just for Telnet this time. You only need to:
Insert the hostname/IP address
Check the Telnet radio button
Give the session a name
Click "Save"
Now you should have a session for both Telnet and SSH.
By default unRAID doesn't install SSH but was installed as an extra package with the CrashPlan plugin. We just need to enable it. To do this double click your newly created Telnet saved session and log into with your credentials again. Copy and paste (right click the PuTTY window) all of the following code at the PasteBin link below into the Telnet prompt, you may need to press enter a couple of times:
http://pastebin.com/YrvxRKCg
You should get a window like below.
SSH is now running!
Close that window and open another instance of PuTTY, this time choosing your SSH saved session. The first time you do this you'll get a prompt like below. Just say "Yes" as it's the unique key or "fingerprint" for that machine you are connecting to.
After clicking yes, log in again and just leave the PuTTY window open. Remember the whole business with "Tunnels" earlier, well that has just opened the tunnel to your unRAID box.
Now if you open up the CrashPlan PC software you will actually be connecting to the service on your unRAID box!
From here it's fairly self-explanatory, if you don't already have a CrashPlan account you can go ahead and create one, if you have one choose the existing account option.
Once you've logged in you will be presented with the CrashPlan home screen showing you which backup destinations are available etc.
From here you you can leave everything as-is and continue to the next section or you can have a look through the different settings available.
There are a few important setting you might want to tweak, namely the name of your unRAID box and the kinds of notifications you receive. CrashPlan will send you regular emails telling you if PCs are being backed up or if they haven't in a while.
Also if you click the "Configure" button for Inbound Backup, you can change the default location for storing all of the backup archives. You could choose a single disk or if you are going to have lots of backup data it may be wise to store them in a user share which will spread the data across drives using whatever split level you set for the share (see here for setting up shares)
That more or less covers the basic settings.
You can now close the CrashPlan instance from the tray in Windows as well as the PuTTY window you had open.
One more thing to do is go back to the CrashPlan install directory (C:/Program Files/CrashPlan/conf) and edit the "ui.properties" file with WordPad again. If you put a hash symbol # in front of the "servicePort=4200" code you added earlier, you will comment out that line so it won't be ran. This means whenever you open up CrashPlan on your PC it connects to the local settings and not unRAID's.
Adding a PC for backup
You can now add your PCs to be backed up to your unRAID box. To do this install CrashPlan on all of your PCs, log in using either the account you just created or your existing account. Now when you log in you'll be presented with your unRAID box as a destination :)
You can also change which files you want to be backed up:
Once you've finished choosing which files you do and don't want backed up, click the "Start Backup" button beside your unRAID box's name and let the magic begin!
UPDATE2: WORK ON THE WEBGUI HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY THE DYNAMIX PROJECT WHICH CAN BE FOUND HERE: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=30939.0 OR HERE http://bergware.github.io/dynamix/
UPDATE: THIS POST IS MORE OR LESS REDUNDANT NOW AS OF THE RELEASE OF UNRAID 5.0 FINAL, THE NEW GUI DESIGNED BY SPEEDING_ANT HAS BEEN BROUGHT ONBOARD TO BE THE OFFICIAL UI AS OPPOSED TO JUST AN ADD-ON. THE OPTION TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW GUI IS IN THE UTILS PAGE OF THE WEB CONFIG IN 5.0 FINAL. HOWEVER, ONE CAVEAT IS PRESENT WITH THE NEW UI - NO PLUGINS FOR IT...YET.
THIS SIMPLEFEATURES PLUGIN, AFAIK, STILL WORKS ON 5.0 FINAL SO USE IT IF YOU LIKE :)
By default, unRAID has a face only a mother could love! How's about we spruce that up a bit?
unRAID is a really cool NAS operating system but its UI leaves a lot to be desired. That's where one speeding_ant, unRAID forum member, comes in. He has gone and totally revamped the web interface to give it the look it deserves. Not only that there are extra plugins for added functionality!
To get a hold of this facelift head over to here for the download and instructions on how to install it.
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