NAS II - Shuttle

I was using a TS-201 QNAP NAS to store all my data. This little device runs an enbedded linux and not only acts as a NAS but a BitTorrent Download station and a DLNA Media Server to stream content to my PS3. It really is a cool bit of kit.

The only problem is, once you have seen what it can do you want more! A whole group for modding the TS-201 has sprang up. The QNAP download station was pretty basic, so I loaded a BitTornado client and wrote a custom PHP front end. But with only a cut down OS and small internal memory there were limits to how much you could customise the TS-201. Added to this QNAP have not released an official firmware for over a year. I am currently running a Beta because this is the only one that supports the PS3 over DLNA.

Since the QNAP was just using Linux I thought I would take the 500Gb disks out of the TS-201 NAS and put them in my unused SK22G2 Shuttle and install Linux. With a full OS and 500Mb of RAM there are no limits on what I can load onto it!

I removed all the PCI cards, and took out the DVD drive. I installed CentOS 5.1 from an external USB DVD drive. The plan is to keep the power consumption and heat down in the NAS. To help with cooling I mounted the second disk drive in the 5.25 DVD bay using some brackets.

The stripped down spec looked like this:

Building a custom NAS:

To install using software RAID you need to install CentOS using the graphical install program. The text install did not let me create a Volume Group for LVM. Its a little tricky to configure RAID but once you get your head round it things start to take shape.

After the install the file system layout looks like this:

[root@vader ~]# df -k

Filesystem           			1K-blocks	Used		Available	Use%	Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroupSW01-LogVol01	5427652		1286960		3860528		26%	/
/dev/mapper/VolGroupSW01-LogVol02	10158648	211080		9423280		3%	/var
/dev/mapper/VolGroupSW01-LogVol03	455366520	248766500	187796432	57%	/data
/dev/md0                		101018		11740		84062		13%	/boot
tmpfs					224740		0		224740		0%	/dev/shm

The plan is to put all my data on LogVol03 which is mounted on /data.

These Logical volumes can easily be resized: Resizing RAID Logical Volumes.

The Logical Volumes are on top of RAID1 giving data redundancy: How to recover a RAID disk.

I chose the server version of CentOS because this will be a headless Linux server. But even using custom selection of packages a lot of junk is installed. For example bluetooth drivers! It just needs a bit of effort disabling unused services and removing packages that are not required.

[root@vader ~]# cat /etc//samba/smb.conf

[global]
        workgroup = SKYNET
        server string = VADAR NAS
        netbios name = VADER

        security = user
        passdb backend = tdbsam

[steve]
        comment = Steve
        path = /data/steve/
        read only = no
        guest ok = no

[vader]
        comment = Vader
        path = /data/vader/
        read only = no
        guest ok = no

[video]
        comment = Video
        path = /data/video/
        read only = no
        guest ok = no

[root@vader ~]# smbpasswd –a swatts
	New SMB password: ********
	Retype new SMB password:********

I looked at a few Media Servers for the new NAS. MediaTomb had a few good write ups and apparently a good GUI. Obviously whoever wrote this report has no idea what a good GUI should look like. MediaTomb GUI is terrible, and once again lack of good documentation lets another Open Source project down.

Fuppes is another free Media Server. I downloaded and ran it on Windows where it managed to transcode the WMV files to MPEG2 on the fly so the PS3 could view them. Unfortunately it was a different story on Linux. After struggling to compile Fuppes with ffmpeg it would not transcode any content. So for a time I used it just as a simple Media Server and it worked fine. But then it started segmentation faulting on me. I assume it could not handle one of the filenames in the media library. You get what you pay for.

This all led me back to Twonky Media Server which I used on the QNAP TS-201 NAS. I loaded the eval of this on and it worked fine. Also shows me how out of date the Twonky Media server was on the TS-201 and highlights the failings of QNAPs policy of no updates for a year!

Memcoder is a multi purpose encoder for Linux and part of the mplayer suite. Since the NAS has the same horse power as my desktop I can offload DVD and other encodes to the NAS. Here's an example of two pass DivX Encoding.

Pass 1. This will give you an indication of bitrate to use.

mencoder -ovc xvid -xvidencopts profile=dxnhtntsc:pass=1:quant_type=mpeg:nopacked input.wmv -oac mp3lame  -o /dev/null

Pass 2. Feed the bitrate parameter into the second pass -xvidencopts bitrate=x:

mencoder -ovc xvid -xvidencopts quant_type=mpeg:pass=2:bitrate=1000:nopacked input.wmv -oac mp3lame -o output.avi

Note the cryptic command line. Encoding video files is a total mine field! Steve'sGuide to encoding to DivX/Xvid.

For a headless BitTorrent download station that I can leave on 24x7 I downloaded the latest BitTornado code and updated my own PHP front end:

The PHP front end executes btdownloadheadless.py which forks and downloads the torrent:

HOME=/data/video/NEW/; export HOME; /data/vader/web/torrent/BitTornado/btdownloadheadless.py 
/data/video/NEW/.transfers/_isoHunt__Angel___Complete_Season_4___DVD_Rip.torrent 
--saveas "/data/video/NEW//incoming/Angel - Complete Season 4 - DVD Rip" --display_interval 1 
--max_download_rate 0 --max_upload_rate 0 --max_uploads 4 --minport 49160 --maxport 49300 
--rerequest_interval 1800  --super_seeder 0 --max_connections 40 | /data/vader/web/torrent/log.pl 
/data/video/NEW/.transfers/_isoHunt__Angel___Complete_Season_4___DVD_Rip.torrent.stat 1> 
/data/video/NEW/.transfers/_isoHunt__Angel___Complete_Season_4___DVD_Rip.torrent.error 2> 
/data/video/NEW/.transfers/_isoHunt__Angel___Complete_Season_4___DVD_Rip.torrent.error & echo $!

The hard part is dealing with btdownloadheadless.py status output. Every x seconds it echos the torrent status to stdin. I got round this by piping it to my perl program log.pl which reads the stdin and writes the latest info to a torrent.stat file.

Vader NAS II.

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