Upgrading media server to Win11 - pro, cons

[Salt]

Starting with Linux is not that 'highly educated science' as most think.
The Laptop I'm writing on at this moment is Win10. Some weeks ago a problem to be solved occured, and it was only solvable with Linux.
So I took out one of my USB-Sticks and installed a bootable Linux on it. As you get all the functionality even in this scenario, I could solve the problem (almost).
So there is no need to 'kill' Win10 and overwrite with Linux, just install a USB drive and install Linux for testing and use the boot-menue in the bios (F11 or F12 in most cases) to start it.
Caveat 'secure boot' should be disabled in many cases, and legacy boot enabled.

 

[Chr1]

Think I will stick with Windows and just upgrade to Windows 11 via Rufus soon. I am quite happy, and I am pretty invested in Foobar2000 as I am using a few VSTs with it now. Yet to find a better solution to do this.

 

[Salt]

With a little tweaking Foobar is running on Linux too

 

[Chr1]

Indeed. But I am actually quite happy with Windows myself. Finding Windows 11 plenty snappy enough on my wee N100 MiniPCs. Don't really do anything particularly taxing however. Plex, Minimserver, Foobar2000 endpoints... Will switch to Linux if/when Windows isn't up to the task tho.

 

[Madlop26]

This unit is connected to the Internet but really doesn't do anything except be a network media server and Plex server.

If that is the case; no better option than a Synolgy NAS, which runs Plex server easily; plus, consumes less electricity, small device, many good apps for home networking, you get the layer of security of a RAID configuration for your files, I used it also for backups of multiple PCs and MACs, my music collection and surveillance videos; welcome to the 2020s

 

[Chr1]

I would be curious to know the energy consumption of the Synology NAS. I have a couple of twin drive Zyxel NAS boxes which I store films on (JBOD). They actually use as much power as my Beelink MiniPCs. (Appx 7W idle). I only power them on when needed now. My main Beelink PC uses appx 12W when used as both a server and endpoint (output to my main system.) So DSP/VSTs. No fan. Pretty power efficient really.

 

[restorer-john]

@Salt I've used the various Linux boxes/live USB installs etc around my house over the years to "fix" Windows problems. Make drives readable, fix partitioning issues whatever. I just get sick of Windows wanting to do updates when I want to use my machine. I get sick of it monopolizing my hardware resources by prioritizing its stupid, unnecessary housekeeping and random time-wasting tasks for modules I never use, want or care about, at startup.

There's always a straw that breaks the camel's back, but W11 deciding to destroy the file allocation table on a CF card the other day, when I needed to get some important shots I'd just taken was it. That camera, card and card reader have been used for over a decade, across various OSs, cards, cameras you name it. No other OS has/had a problem, but W11 had to kill it- so much so even the camera and all the computers thought it was blank. Tried a few options including the classic Recuva (which found all the old photos). The only thing that fixed it was to drop the card into a completely different Canon DSLR (an old 40D) and somehow it was all fine. And that was just a fluke- I was about to give-up.

I wouldn't upgrade anything to W11. I did it on 2 of my machines and bought one new W11 laptop. That one is now awaiting its turn to be turned into a Linux Mint machine for my 87yo mum to look up recipes. No other use for it.

MS and especially W11 is a long term abusive partner who has ratcheted up the coercive control to the point where the partner doesn't remember how good it was before they first met, letalone how awesome it is once you break up.

 

[Madlop26]

I would be curious to know the energy consumption of the Synology NAS. I have a couple of twin drive Zyxel NAS boxes which I store films on. They actually use as much power as my Beelink MiniPCs. (Appx 7W idle). I only power them on when needed now. My main Beelink PC uses appx 12W when used as both a server and endpoint (output to my main system.) So DSP/VSTs. No fan. Pretty power efficient really.

My synology DS220+ idle is 9.7 watts, $25/year in my area

 

[Chr1]

So I guess my point is that PCs can be as efficient as NAS boxes now. Whilst being more flexible, I'd argue.

(The caveat being that I use my NAS boxes in JBOD purely for media storage, and not RAID as a part of my backup strategy.)

 

[klettermann]

Thanks to all for the comments. It's true, the DL380 is a power hog, but I don't leave it on 24\7 and the scheduler shuts it down. I do like the redundant everything, the 132Gb EEC ram, the hardware raid and hot-swiping failing HDs. It's just fun and I'm too old to start with Linux now. And anyway, the data is on a 10Th raid 10 array and that's a PITA to move to something else. Conclusion: just keep going as is! Cheers,

 

[Brian Hall]

I'm running an enterprise grade media server on win10. Server is a wildly overspec'd HP DL380 G7. So, with Win10 going away I'm considering just ignoring it and carrying on. This unit is connected to the Internet but really doesn't do anything except be a network media server and Plex server. No web browsing, no downloading, no email.

To be clear, this thing is old - pathetic graphics, no sound card, etc etc and getting it to run Win10 wasn't straightforward. I'd expect the upgrade to be worse. Still, for my purposes it's just fine. So, is there really any reason to upgrade? Please, let's stay away from how this thing make no sense anyway It doesn't, I just like it. Thanks for any comments and cheers,

Plex server runs great on Linux. Linux runs great on almost any hardware. The only reason to stay with Windows (any version) is if you have some software you can't live without that won't run on Linux (most can now, including Windows only games).

 

[Hipocrates]

Thanks to all for the comments. It's true, the DL380 is a power hog, but I don't leave it on 24\7 and the scheduler shuts it down. I do like the redundant everything, the 132Gb EEC ram, the hardware raid and hot-swiping failing HDs. It's just fun and I'm too old to start with Linux now. And anyway, the data is on a 10Th raid 10 array and that's a PITA to move to something else. Conclusion: just keep going as is! Cheers,

Add a good firewall and that's it. Let the old beast doo his thing, I like windows 11 once is trimmed down as a desktop power user, not as a server, for your application you don't need it.

EDIT: Yes one could migrate the whole thing to Debian as a server, but the server is working fine as it is.

 

[klettermann]

Add a good firewall and that's it. Let the old beast doo his thing, I like windows 11 once is trimmed down as a desktop power user, not as a server, for your application you don't need it.

EDIT: Yes one could migrate the whole thing to Debian as a server, but the server is working fine as it is.

Terrific, yes! This is the kind of validation I was hoping for. It's behind Windows' firewall. Given that it works fine I have no interest in Linux etc - it wouldn't solve any problem that I can see. My concern was avoiding potential Win11 issues. Cheers,

 

[JeffS7444]

Terrific, yes! This is the kind of validation I was hoping for. It's behind Windows' firewall. Given that it works fine I have no interest in Linux etc - it wouldn't solve any problem that I can see. My concern was avoiding potential Win11 issues. Cheers,

This sounds completely and wonderfully bonkers

I never thought to "go off the reservation" with an old 2U server! With the OS switch, were you able to retain features like the hot-swap RAID and so forth? Hated to see the old servers get sold as scrap when they were cosmetically pretty much new, probably could have seriously maxed one out for personal use by picking the best parts from a stack of the things. Can non HP-branded SAS drives be used with the RAID card? I never had the guts to experiment on production systems, but could have snarfed a whole stack of NIB parts from my last employer - the things were obsolete by then, and destined for the recycler.

And (cough) any thoughts of running media servers as virtual machines? I was super impressed by how well a good cloud infrastructure allowed me to keep services available, particularly when you can slide VMs between multiple host machines.

 

[Hipocrates]

It's behind Windows' firewall.

Windows firewall can do the basics and you are familiar with so just be sure to monitor the ports to avoid suspicious activity, but you might want to improve that, a tiny PC and OPNsense could do wonders.

 

[klettermann]

This sounds completely and wonderfully bonkers

I never thought to "go off the reservation" with an old 2U server! With the OS switch, were you able to retain features like the hot-swap RAID and so forth? Hated to see the old servers get sold as scrap when they were cosmetically pretty much new, probably could have seriously maxed one out for personal use by picking the best parts from a stack of the things. Can non HP-branded SAS drives be used with the RAID card? I never had the guts to experiment on production systems, but could have snarfed a whole stack of NIB parts from my last employer - the things were obsolete by then, and destined for the recycler.

And (cough) any thoughts of running media servers as virtual machines? I was super impressed by how well a good cloud infrastructure allowed me to keep services available, particularly when you can slide VMs between multiple host machines.

There's a HP hardware raid card that does it all and easy to configure, p420 if I recall. It hot swaps, rebuilds new drived, any kind of raid and SAS or SATA but can't mix types in the same array. The OS uses a small SAS raid 10 array running HP 15k drives. Media is 10Tb sata raid 10. And 132Gb of EEC ram! I used to run Server 2012 so I could team the NICs, but lost that when i went with Win10 (easier UI).

At one point i did play with VMs but found that it wasn't good with streaming 4k stuff. I'm surprised this kind of thing isn't more common, especially since it's so plentiful and cheap on ebay. Go for it! Cheers,

 

[audio_tony]

I'm surprised this kind of thing isn't more common, especially since it's so plentiful and cheap on ebay.

Perhaps energy is cheap in your country, but here in the UK the cost of electricity is exorbitant.

The power these older servers draw is so great that it makes no sense finacially for many of us here.

15 years ago, I had a rack full of HP servers DL360 / 380 etc., along with a couple of Dell servers - total (constant) power consumption was 1kW.

Back then energy here was cheap(er) and heance this was affordable - but roll forward to today, with all the "net zero" energy initiatives (which we the consumer are paying for!!) it's simply not economically viable (for me at least).

Even the more recent HP models when fully loaded draw around 200w to 300w constantly. My Dell T20 with it's meagre 4th gen Intel i5 and 2x 4TB drives idles along at around 45watts. It runs an LSI MegaRAID SAS 2108 RAID controller.
It doesn't do a lot (file server, DNS, web server for the intranet, monitoring etc.).

Fortunately I don't need any more storage than this.

 

[JeffS7444]

There's a HP hardware raid card that does it all and easy to configure, p420 if I recall. It hot swaps, rebuilds new drived, any kind of raid and SAS or SATA but can't mix types in the same array. The OS uses a small SAS raid 10 array running HP 15k drives. Media is 10Tb sata raid 10. And 132Gb of EEC ram! I used to run Server 2012 so I could team the NICs, but lost that when i went with Win10 (easier UI).

At one point i did play with VMs but found that it wasn't good with streaming 4k stuff. I'm surprised this kind of thing isn't more common, especially since it's so plentiful and cheap on ebay. Go for it!

Nice! And maybe if I had an unused basement space, I could make that, plus the requisite 4-post rack, and companion NAS work. But in an urban apartment, not so much! The cooling fans in those HP servers can really shriek when they're running at full blast. Of course, I'd have wanted to get the lights-out subsystem working too, for the smug satisfaction of not actually needing to be present to fire the things up.

 

[Berwhale]

Thanks to all for the comments. It's true, the DL380 is a power hog, but I don't leave it on 24\7 and the scheduler shuts it down. I do like the redundant everything, the 132Gb EEC ram, the hardware raid and hot-swiping failing HDs. It's just fun and I'm too old to start with Linux now. And anyway, the data is on a 10Th raid 10 array and that's a PITA to move to something else. Conclusion: just keep going as is! Cheers,

That's sort of setup is designed to run 24/7. I'd be extremely worried about hardware failure if I was shutting it down and waking it up again every day.

 

[Berwhale]

I'm surprised this kind of thing isn't more common, especially since it's so plentiful and cheap on ebay. Go for it! Cheers,

I have an HP ML110 G7 and a Dell T20 sitting idle in the garage. I replaced them with a couple of Synology servers (One replicates to the other) and a Dell Optipex micro form factor PC as a hypervisor host (was ESXi, now Proxmox). It's a faster, smaller and quieter setup and saves a lot on my electricity bill.