Free Your Media: How to Build a Home Media Server

I got Netflix a years ago and first it was first they took away everything on Discovery Channel I call that the great Discovery Channel purge of 2013 I'm still upset about and take away Survivorman they took away she River monsters they took away Mythbusters and I was like you know I can deal with it they've got much other good shows they recently took away house they took away 30 rock which now that on 30 rock I don't even know why I have the service anymore because all it is is Netflix originals I had to buy house on DVD what you're saying is you're tired of companies ripping the media from under you yeah so now I'm paying for the service I'm not even using you're also paying a dollar more than you used to oh yeah yeah that went through right so you've the problem that you what you've done here is you've put the control of your media and the hands of evil corporations I have never get it and I think it's time that you and everybody out there did something about it and I think you can be the champion of the masses and show them how to take control of their media again and then you'll never go through the Discovery Channel purge of 2013 ever again [Music] so building your home server is really exciting I'm excited for you because the home server is sort of a gateway drug I mean I know you're not like super into like all the crazy stuff but once you've got a media server and you see what all it does it'll lead to other things well I'm excited to have it because I have a lot of photos and crafts that I need to back up anyway and I had been thinking about getting like an external hard drive or something for it but I just haven't pulled the trigger on it and this is probably right around through right time to do it anyway right after Christmas and and we got a lot of people who are not like you they are sort of in the opposite situation where they're like hey I got a server tell me what to do what do i do that's like well why did you get a server I understand you know you want to play with it media server for all the reasons we just listed you want to create your own media library they're gonna keep forever and set it up for your own use now some of the things we didn't talk about is if you're a cord cutter and your parents visit what do you do how do you entertain all right it's such a struggle to get them to understand how to use Netflix they don't understand me now something like Plex it's got a nice little interface you can sort of recreate Netflix for them and if we're gonna go down that road then you get into like hey virtual machine for your guests and stuff like that this video we're just gonna talk about media servers but we might build on it in the future well just the media server possibilities because the next version will probably do some test drives or not just plex media server but also unread and some other Linux distributions different things that you might be able to build but yeah this first video is just the hardware possibilities now some people might want a low power device that doesn't make a lot of noise it's like a server that's gonna be like loud and noisy trying to power and then raise your electric bill and all kinds of problems you could do this on a Raspberry Pi although it's not gonna be transcoding any 4k video or anything like that but hook up an external hard drive and serve media you could do that on Raspberry Pi so let's talk about setting up your media server and prepping it so that you can start to rip all your own media plus set it up for normal use when people visit so you guys have sold me on the idea of a home server for all my storage solution needs where do we get started I don't know where to go well you're not gonna buy anything but I mean wouldn't you need some sort of components that I mean Wells I don't have plus so for the audience they might have to do a little legwork and find something find a place to get some junk server but you're in luck you just have to go to the basement yeah I don't really want to go to the basement that's you have to go to the base I don't I don't want to though but that's where it is can one of you guys help me carry it out so we've acquired our server and now I want to talk about testing it testing your used hardware is so important because you never know I mean maybe it overheats maybe it does something weird you're gonna need a bootable diagnostic CD and that's gonna vary from hardware to hardware maybe to manufacturer OEM Diagnostics run testing on your hardware make sure the memory is good and all the hardware is good yeah make sure you give it a stress test for the heat now after that you think about hard drives only after that because you don't wanna run out and buy new hard drives and find out that your servers not good or they don't work with them only some older servers only worked with drives up to 2 terabytes the used hardware is great to experiment with not just on the hardware side but also the software side as well now when you're talking about what hardware to get something like a Raspberry Pi that'll do 1080 video well that's all it'll do yeah I mean you can you can Network a hard drive with a Raspberry Pi but music and 1080p and it's just because it is a file server it's not gonna do virtual machines or transcoding or any of that fancy stuff so in the age of 4k you probably want to get something a little more decent than that and that's another reason you use hardware so good you can get a great used server for like 50 bucks uses a little bit more power and runs a little bit hotter so the fans are louder but if you can stick it under the floor in a basement or something like that they run pretty good I mean it's a good show it's a good value so once you've checked all those boxes you have tested your hardware you've got your hard drives you make sure they work and everything's ready to go then we can think about putting software on it and the software is gonna be somewhat fun that's gonna be our next step hey I cut the server yeah from the basement we're filming you know we're filming you're making a ton of noise oh I got the server though right job we can get started now let's get started so you've been to the basement you had your adventure in the basement you came back alive and you've brought an artifact and so that's we got to a dual cpu-z on X 5650 and it looks like it's pretty complete yep 72 K bytes of RAM like there's just tons of RAM in this yeah our two raid controllers are 10 terabytes of hard drives our fans and lots of other people's dust yeah in this too because it did come from the basement it's used about other people's skin hope yes so we got lucky and had a pretty complete system here for our media server you might not get that lucky but this is pretty much ready to go now we should mention we're probably going to use ZFS so we might not run these hard drives through the RAID controller we might run them directly because ZFS will perform better with that but they're there if we need them which we don't so I think it's time to see if this thing will boot uid oh that's that one [Applause] all I can feel the dust yeah earlier we turned it on it attached to there just I don't know if anyone can even hear what we're doing right now yeah probably not [Applause] now if you're new to servers this is normal this is the boot sequence it will calm down in a moment some servers as long as you have the top off they will always run like this but not this one now we don't know anything about this servers help we do now but we did when we started so we have all of this RAM this is a lot of RAM a lot of bad things could happen and we have hard drives from every different kind of vendor that there is in this thing they've none of them match yeah so what we did is we used our ultimate boot CD that's not a CD no it's a compact disc well it's what's called ultimate boot CD that we burn to USB and we tested our memory and we stress tested our hard drives overnight you're really going to punish these garbage dumps to your PC's to make sure that they're gonna do what you want them to do this one does we're satisfied with it we're ready to go and now we have our freenas installer so this is the software part correct this is what we're going to use as our file server to serve our media okay where do we start tell me what to do well we're gonna install ok so 5.5 terabytes we know we have more than that so this is already can think has another raid setup and this is not what we want because again we don't want to use these controllers we're gonna have to set this up for ZFS so we're gonna have to go back and reset all that so go ahead and reboot so we need to get rid of the logical drive that's already there so go ahead and delete that logical drive yep okay that's fine every three Chris energy continued okay now we want to create one car I think there might have been a second one but if you go to delete again I will create one alright let's create one and then you select a lobster with a total date that's a terabyte rain - no fault tolerance press f8 save the configuration is that fine yep KU o f6 I'm done entered all right so what does that do exactly so we don't want to use these drives together as a raid we actually want them all to be separate so what you're doing is you're deleting the old set up which is using them together and you're creating them individually as logical drives okay so we have four physical hard drives now we have four logical hard drives as well what does that mean that means it's treating them individually instead of as a unit it's treating them as snowflakes as a cookie swapping them together so in theory could you put like one thing on this and then back it up on the different one yes if we were gonna use the raid controllers but we're not okay let's just wanted to know now what I need to do I'm gonna go ahead and reboot we've made a terrible mistake we need to install freeness on a drive that isn't going to be used for storage as you can see here all we have are our four hard drives and we're doing that just so we don't have to use up our valuable storage space on something that isn't really that important in the long term that's right but all we have is our four hard drives so what we're gonna do instead is we're gonna use this USB our master USB against up so go ahead pop that in there install upgrade all right so you've got the USB in there go back to install upgrade let's see if they recognize it fantastic oh it did so we got our little 30 gigabyte USB and that's where we're gonna put FreeNAS okay this will erase all partitions and data it's nothing but MLP fanfic so yeah we can just okay great I was you know I was working on really big Silmarillion fanfic but are you sure won't delete that I've got so many backups okay so you know it's telling you enterprise hardware I mean this is a server I don't really know enough about this machine so BIOS is actually just the safe option so we'll just do that okay cool complete now what I do so as if you hadn't jumped ahead remove the boot media that's the black one okay nope nope that was not black there you go they're both kind of grayish black and go ahead and release this now you might notice this is kind of loud it doesn't stay this loud but even in its normal operation it's kinda loud now this is your server so you're probably not going to put this next to your TV which is where the media is going to come from and hopefully you've got a server closet or something like that but you really have to think about where you're gonna put this cuz it's loud what we're also monitoring the wattage right now we're at about 230 - but that's because it's on max fan it'll settle down to like 195 under load you might go up a little bit from that while you're reading for the disc so also keep in mind what this is gonna cost you whatever electricity cost where you live now of course we use the rackmount hardware because it's cool and it was literally just in the basement and we had it well you don't have to use it you can use a regular CPU case you can even use one and try to use something that you know silent fanless or something like that so why did we use freeness well there's a lot of options and a lot of there's a lot of sick of fans for unread primarily we use FreeNAS because of those first four letters free it's free own right is not free okay so you're gonna see some warnings here and don't panic it's saying that it can't get a network and that is obvious because we have not folks I say it's not hooked up to anything so this point fails to do this enough times that's gonna be the end of the installation kind of okay so we've got FreeNAS running from our USB it's set up to work with these drives in this hardware but the rest of the setup has to be done via a web client so we actually can't do it in this machine okay so what we'll have to do is actually plug a network into this thing and then move to another computer to set it up so what we're doing now is we're going to do the web GUI setup so we finish out our freenas installation we actually have not done anything with the drives yet other than delete the partitions everything so you're gonna clog in you set the password so your type of engine boot is your username suite now you can just click that wizard button we will do the easy way don't judge you don't know how those wizards identify she's a language English vol name that's up to you something simple I'll just call it the name of Todd pod code and so we got some choices here about what kind of a braid we want now they're they're easily labeled media that's what we want now of course this is all about how much redundancy you want media is sort of sacrificed redundancy for performance and capacity sounds good does what are we gonna do for the directory service though we're just gonna do the easy button solution we're gonna skip it okay can we do that what happens if we skip it apparently not everything just automatically works out for us okay sure name oh it's again we can make that up whatever we want okay we're gonna can I just call it tide pod is it hurt if it's sure so purpose I assume probably Windows but well ultimately for the media server part of this we're probably gonna use plex so SMB will work as some being block works with pretty much everything it's just some security issues but we're fine with that Sony did you fill out any of these others sighs ownership I kind of sit next uh we we probably don't okay with it we might want to allow guests but we probably only - let's just let's go for security next there's email and all these others do we need to change any of these settings we're skipping that - okay cool well you're about to leave the initial wizard and perform all pending saved actions are you sure I hate to leave the wizard but well I think we're ready well even the wizard we had to go we had a problem when we tried to access it so yeah it turns out that it restarts the service but doesn't start SMB so go ahead and click start on boot for SMB okay and start now oh it's oh it's thinking no it's writing now let's go back to that file browser and see if we can get to it okay so it turns out the wizard you know you can't really trust a wizard hat that's not actually a wizard hat it didn't do anything that we asked it to do it turns out it really was just a magician pretending to be a wizard because it didn't set up our share it didn't set up our user it didn't set up permissions way to go back and do all that which was annoying but hey you know free it's really nice so you have to deal with some some problems you could Google your way out of this pretty easily even though we ran into a lot of problems with the wizard and some of the other things with free Ness the reason people use it is you know of course because it's free but also because it has a ton of plugins which make it a lot more user friendly including one that we'll probably be doing another video on soon called Plex the important thing to remember is you now have control of all of your media you can hoard your media and always have it and not worry about Amazon or Disney deleting it someday the great Netflix purge of 2013 will no longer be embedded in my heart so now let's start legally ripping some media [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 218,634

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: yzljmEWXoKg

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ryanjoachim]

I like Wendel, but this is just a horribly awkward and not entirely useful video.

[u/djgizmo]

“Evil corporations”

Lol, what is this, a bad version of Mr Robot.