Hey folks, hopefully a quick one. A friend of mine has an old Netgear Media server with a 500GB internal disk. It’s well dated at this stage and barely runs. Thing is, it has a bunch of movies/shows (therapeutic type stuff) that he doesn’t want to lose. It was previously hooked up directly to a TV and that’s how it “served” content in a center where he works.
I’ve personally tried Rockstor on an old HP ProDesk G4 at home and it always seemed pretty solid to me and “appeared” as a “source” to my TV’s (across my home network). I was thinking of something similar for this friend. There is a rack at this place so i suppose something could get mounted in there, but i’m thinking of “donating” the device to them. So, i imagine i need some kind of hardware box with, say a 1TB NVME storage and dump the 500GB of movies from the old Netgear onto this? The setup does not need to be super-modern, with RAID, etc, just needs to be able to be accessible from the TV’s in the center where he works (they are networked). Any thoughts at all? I’m relatively tech-savvy and can/have setup Linux distros onto bare hardware before. Open to any suggestions you may have. TIA.
@simulacra75 welcome to the Rockstor community.
Most hardware from up to the last 8-10 years should be fine for this. Ideally something that doesn’t suck immense amounts of power when sitting idle for most of the time.
For remote access a decent network card would be important, so it doesn’t become an additional bottleneck to access it from off-site. The NVME storage will work (if it works with the hardware you’re going to use), otherwise some decent spinning disks could do the job (and maybe a simple RAID to get some sort of “recovery options”).
Of course, as always recommended, since the NAS by itself is not a backup strategy to at least have another physical backup separate from this (that’s where the NVME in an enclosure could come in, or just a good USB stick).
Assuming the media is video and/or audio files, the jellyfin Rockon could be the free option for serving up the material externally, alternatively Plex.
Otherwise, a Tailscale setup (which is now available on Rockstor both as a Rockon as well as “native” (see prerequisites in the documentation) would tunnel into the server and then the media can be called up from there.
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Thanks for the input, all media is video and it only needs to be accessible on the LAN via TV’S that will be on the same network, so something like DLNA (or equivalent) should be fine
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Oh, sorry, I misunderstood and thought the server was separate from where the TVs were located.
The Rockon recommendations of jellyfin, plex (or even emby, but I haven’t tried that in a while) serving also as DLNA servers still stand.
You could also install something like minidlna instead (I am not sure how much more development/security updates will happen on this, though). Each of these should be discoverable as DLNA servers by the respective clients on the TVs.
On Plex you just have to enable the DLNA server under the server settings (I think emby is very similar) and possibly restart the Rockon.
For jellyfin you have to install the DLNA plug in (via their WebUI) and enable it.
I have not used minidlna, but there seem to be quite a few tutorials out there, and it seems as simple as updating the configuration file with the path to the video directory and restarting the minidlna service (systemctl restart minidlna), YMMV.
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