Can you use an HP T620 Thin Client as a FreeNAS Server?

[Music] hello youtube in today's video we're going to take another look at the hp t620 thin client here and we're going to run freeness on it to see if we can turn a little box like this into a fully functional low powered nas now obviously we can't use much internal storage so we'll have to rely on external storage to make a system like this functional as a nas we have a couple of options here we have usb3 ports for reasonably quick storage you can use external ssds or hard drives with this these front usb 2 ports are not that suitable for storage as such on the back we also only have usb 2. so realistically we can use about two drives on here we could even put those in our raid pool which is fun with a simple mirror array so we still have redundancy across external hard drives you could possibly just lay them underneath like this if you have your uh regulate type of uh external drive like this you can just plug it in right there and have it like that or you could have a couple of these set up next to it this is a simple hard drive dock this way you can use external three half inch hard drives so in terms of this video we're going to be using this one i just pulled this out of storage yeah i've got storage full of storage pun intended this came out of the mac pro 2008 this was its original blue drive but the drive is wiped it's fully working you can just put it in a toaster like this and we'll have 220 gigabytes of storage to deal with i do have bigger drives but you know just grab whatever was handy so we're going to go with freenas here today because that is the most universally used nas solution and if we zoom in on the screen here a little bit we can see the system requirements a 64-bit processor check we have that an operating system drive of eight gigabytes preferably usb drive well we have a flash disk this is the original eight gigabyte flash module that came with think line so we'll be reinstalling that to put free nas on it so at least we'll have it on solid state media eight gigabytes of ram check and stator or sash drive controller with hardware array functionally disabled well yeah we don't have a rate controller at all at least one direct attached disk it does not specify that it has to be sata or sas specifically we'll find out if usb works with freenas i actually haven't checked so we're gonna see how that works and one physical network port we also have one of those so we should be good so i guess the first thing we really need to do is to open it up and put the old ssd back in and uh install freehands on it and see how that goes see if we can get a usb just to show up at all if we can't then we'll have to uh find another solution but i'm gonna guess so we'll be fine with this taking apart the hp t620 incline is reasonably easy we just go to the back we pull this notch over here carefully pry that off and we should be able to dislodge the top cover here and now we're greeted with the insides putting the cover aside you can see the beefy heatsink here under here is the ram over there torx all right i fix it to the rescue these ifixit kits really are very very valuable when you're working on hardware all right one upside to using security torx to secure an ssd is that those horrible little m.2 screws you find on usual pc motherboards they just strip if you just look at them wrong even if you have a proper screwdriver it is insane how easily those screws strip you'd almost think that they're made out of some really useless material like not even proper aluminum anyway here's our old sandisk we just need to uh get them acquainted with each other because there's this little thingamabob here on the ssd just have to fuse these together a little bit so it'll stick together and then you screw it down to the board obviously we could have gone with just a usb flash drive i mean this thing client has internal usb ports has one over here and obviously one over there and that would have been absolutely fine that's also how i used to run my old thing client as a little web server just put in an internal usb flash drive and boot from that linux systems typically are quite easy with that i really don't care what kind of storage you're running on as long as they can address it and it's not quite on properly yet needs a little persuasion all right as it would turn out i have it upside down as to when i started so it will copy a live video that way all right so it's back together now the ssd should be working so all we need to do is to set it up and boot from a freeness install usb and get it installed okay everything is set up here on the right you can barely see the hard drive over there that will be utilizing gonna turn on i think light it should start booting from usb immediately also power on the hard drive there we go let's boot into freenas installer friends is soon to be replaced by its enterprise cousin which is truenass and it will soon be named truenas core as the free alternative to the the main operating system that ix systems is exploiting let's see one drive to install on that is excellent we'll need to find a password i couldn't do uefi boot because the system is new enough to support it disk is too small to install freeness right i said eight gigabytes would be enough this one is eight gigabytes okay i guess we'll retry see if we have any other options otherwise we'll have to do something else we're currently booting from a 32 gigabyte usb flash drive so that would usually be enough install as it's like just 7.5 gigs apparently it needs like actually full 8.0 gigs i also want to press whoa okay that was weird oh it actually picked up the hard drive now as direct attached storage all right i want to proceed maybe bios will work maybe uefi is the issue so that's one thing to note if you're installing a uefi mode apparently you need exactly eight gigabytes not formatted eight gigabytes which is in practice about 7.5 7.6 something like that so that's good to know so i guess we're just going to let this run and uh as soon as it's installed we'll go from there so the install has finally finished we're prompted to remove the install media and we'll do that it's a very tight usb port that's what he said and reboot this system right now just control delete it there we go friends is now finally booting up i put the 128 gigabyte ssd back in there it installed just fine i wanted to create a swap partition that's why it immediately aired out on the smaller drive it's probably a bug but oh well at least it is now trying to boot up so that's good right it's enabling networking so i'll just have to wait for that to do its thing then we can set a static ip address and then take a look at the web interface side of things and uh mounted driving windows so we can get a better look at it the usb hard drive is powered up again so we should be able to use that and uh we'll just uh let do his thing because this is definitely going to take a little while and there we are it has finally finished booting up so now we can get a look at all the settings first of all we should configure our network so i'm gonna go and type in letter one and hit enter i only have one network interface i'll zoom in on the bottom of the screen there we go so you can see what's going on here so let's see we only have one interface which is a real tech enabled card so it's called re remove current settings yes network okay apparently that does not work anymore it only resets the interface now there we go let's see dhcp we want that turned off what's like before yes interface name well we'll just stick to what it gave us ipv4 address let's turn them lock on shall we [Applause] let's give it to 30 24 for 24 bits so that mask no ipv6 and it is set now we need to configure our default gateway which is option four in my case no ipv6 and i'm integrating dns so we can resolve names dns domain local sure let's keep that observer one 1.17 and one one we don't need a third one everything should be set right now so this is all we really need to do in terms of command line work here we can now go to a web browser and go from there and here we are at the plex media server dashboard we have our cpu usage right here currently most of the memory is being taken by the cache for the file system but not to worry everything is running well this is not a typical use case so yeah servers are using a bit we're using smb that's enabled for some file sharing obviously we have a couple of jails running a couple plugins so let's take a look around down here in interface we can see the network interface that is currently up no vlans assigned we have full gigabit speeds here we have the data pool for our uh important storage media that's the 320 gigabyte hard drive that we've attached to the drive toaster and that is all we can see around here in terms of disk pools it is a basic configuration we have an io cage so we can use the jails and we have plex data data set here that i've used to put all the plex data on that we can use in our demonstration shortly this data set has been mounted as a share to the jail that runs plex media server jails are basically isolated pieces of information it's just sort of a piece of your storage that's completely isolated from the main system and to get data to those jails you mount existing data sets to the jail in their configuration what i mean by that is you go to jails down here do it for full load in this case it's mounted to plex so we expand that and go to mount points and here we can see the share that has been mounted to this particular jail and which path it is mounted to in this case the root directory and then plex within the jail itself and the full path on the freeness server is this one so installing plex media server and minecraft can be done via the plugin section here there's a vast variety of plugins you can install i currently have a minecraft server and black media server running here for demonstration purposes so you can see that it is running very well on here we'll take a look at how it performs transcoding media shortly now let's go back here to the main dashboard at the moment the cpu is running at about 55 degrees it maxes out around 60 and is of course passively cooled if you go to plex media server over here this is the our test server here we have a variety of content we have a 720p movie we have a 1080p h.265 rick and morty season this will probably chug very hard because the gpu that's built into this soc cannot transcode h.265 this is regular h264 720p and this is sd quality so let's just click play on rekordboard you will start playing the pilot episode it's going to buffer here for a little bit in the bottom left corner and it should start playing now there we go if you go back to the dashboard we can see how much the cpu is working to get this media transcoded to a format that we can watch it is not entirely pegged so it will still buffer the episode just fine just not that quickly it will barely scrape by transcoding this on purely cpu horsepower that much is obvious all right if you go to a 720p h.264 this should last or it should be able to do this a little bit better there we go it's playing already and as you can see here by while that truck is reversing in the background this is running just fine it can handle this no problem at all so h.264 not a problem at all okay sd quality should not be an issue either so we'll open up the very first episode of eddie well as a matter of fact this is as it appears a codec that it cannot handle either this has to be transcoded to h264 format and that needs the cpu as well so i probably need to run all of this through handbrake make it h.264 and then it will probably play just fine so that is very important when you have an underpowered cpu that you are running the right codex so let's take a look at the hangover this is h264720p this worked fine again with the family guy episode let's see what it's doing now eight percent there we go now this is running now it's definitely playing it's skipping along nicely we can skip through the movie no problem at all so that works absolutely fine so yeah stick to h.264 and the gpu will do the most of the dirty work and the cpu is not loaded as much so i guess if you want to run an hp t620 thin client and you want to run a plex media server on it make sure all your content is in h.264 it'll run just fine as it turns out good to know very good to know indeed okay so that covers plugs for now also not to get a copyright strike which i probably will anyway yay demonetization anyway let's go to minecraft now this is the web interface for mine os we have a server configuration right here it is a basic 1.16.1 which is the latest version as of today i will put my minecraft interface over here allow all that jazz this is a fresh windows install on my pc at the moment so that's the other minecraft server let's make a direct connection to 1121x81.230 if it will allow us at all connection refused oh my let's refresh this page i'm i really don't expect it to still be oh yeah it's down actually okay right apparently the server crashed because it took too long to respond okay let's start it up again it is up at the moment at least you think it thinks it is cpu is maxed out again trying to render the world okay minecraft servers are also notoriously difficult to run on a cpu very low clock speed this one is definitely one of those let's see if it's possible to actually go and connect to this particular server okay so i let it sit for a while and as it turns out when we go to the log here on the server we can see it went out of memory and it crashed again so every time it reaches full 100 loading it just crashes out so yeah i guess i said to conclude that minecraft doesn't want to run on this cpu was also pegged at 100 for like 15 minutes so yeah it really wasn't going to run that that well either so uh just for shifting google's i decided to install one of the community plugins that you can see over here and install the unifi controller which is like this so you can make a controller yourself call it that whatever next and log in with your ubiq counter advanced setup or whatever and now you can add all of your uh wireless access points and whatnot so that also runs on freeness which is pretty nice including some other things like uh openvpn so you can have vpn server except nzbd for a nzb server for news groups downloads and all that grafana for making dashboards for yourself and all that nice stuff and be media server let's get into that and uh a variety of other stuff so yeah overall i'd say uh freeness on an hp t620 thing client whoops is definitely something that works particularly well it's fine to add some storage to it it'll do that just fine you can have a one gigabit connection to it so you can transfer files at some decent rate of speed and if you have some lighter plug-ins like that vpn server or unified controller or heck even a plex media server if you have the proper codec setup it's just fine for that it really seems to work pretty well all things considered and of course being very very compact it's not that hard to uh hide somewhere else just get some usb drives that are pretty big like with those three and a half inch ones like wd my book or whatever just get a couple of eight terabytes of those and put all your media stuff on there and backups and uh it's a nice little compact solution so that completely concludes our little overview of the hp t620 running freeness and our little installation sensation as the computer client would call it hope you enjoyed the video i thank you all for watching and i'll see you guys in the next one you

Channel: Tech for PC & Mac

Views: 30,584

Keywords: HP, Hewlett-Packard, thin client, T620, FreeNAS, TrueNAS core, setup, Plex

Id: J5o63IHTKNU

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020