Building a media server

S

souar

Hey,

I am now a self confessed idiot to all this... so rather hoping someone can poke me in the right direction! I'm beginning the building of a server tomorrow which a small group of us want to act as a central hub for all our media. However most of us are going off to uni soon and therefore can't easily share things so thought we'd give a server some thought.

Hardware wise we're fine, we've got a couple of old tower servers and a never ending supply of HDD's, however I need some help on the software and networking side. Could someone just let me know what I need to consider when it comes to achieving this. Specifically we want to be able to hold all our music, photos and videos on the server and be able to access them anywhere with an internet connection. Is this easy to achieve and roughly how do I?

I'm aware of the complete idiocy of such a question ha but got to start somewhere I guess!

Thanks and really appreciate some help!

Souar
 
First you have to give some details, otherwise it's a very vague approach and you could get stuck in the middle by a seemingly small detail:

Fistly
1) How many users will share their data?https://www.dropbox.com/teams
2) Do you want to stream data or sync & backup? If you stream data what operating systems/player the users use? If you choose to sync, then you might end up with a desktop computer having tones of GB or maybe TB of 'foreign data', you sure that's what you want?
3) Do you need private/public folders?
4) How many Mb/s upstream will this server or set of servers have?
5) Is your data worthy enough to backup it up and use a RAID or maybe 2 computers 1 main and 1 for backup?
6) Will you host sensitive data also or just media?

Second
Have you thought of using a service like Dropbox Teams which solves all your problems for a fee?
 
Thanks for the reply atmosx.

This is the best detail I can give you in reply to your questions, I hope it helps clear things up!

1) We use Dropbox (in its basic package at the moment) but filled it to capacity within seconds. Teams is an option, one I've looked at in relation to work as well but we want to use a server as a experiment and to just start learning about all this, thought it could be fun.
2) Streaming would be preferable (obviously connection speeds become an issue there) which is why I'm also not adverse to the whole idea of syncing & backup. I guess its dependent on what we are using, which is a mixture of windows and mac and then some iTunes but mostly the music is then put onto other devices and anything we use on our machines is mostly used for shows and events so we have separate software for that (traktor/ableton/scratch etc). This would require us to be able to take the music and other data and copy it off the server onto our machines. We want this to act as the central hub where we store everything and then can take it and put it back as we need and want, since all of our machines are getting to the point of being completely full and sharing data is proving tricky.
3) Private folders would be useful of course for some little things but almost everything we want to put up there is what we share anyway so it would run mostly on public folders.
4) We were going to station the server where we could get the best upstream speeds possible (most likely my office which sits less then 20 meters from the fiber optic junction box) but it wouldn't be anything like the dedicated server speeds we could rent obviously.
5) We're all running on laptops and moving to all ends of the country so we wanted something that could allow us to just have a central server that we can all access. All the data is, is just a mixture of media we all use and need on a daily basis. It's important for us to be able to get to it and have it accessible and stored safely so we thought a server could be a good idea?
6) There will be nothing particularly sensitive on it, certainly nothing that could infringe any part of the data protection act. It's all just going to be media, almost all of it created and owned by ourselves.

I hope this is of some use, and really appreciate the help!
 
Hello,

I understand that your amount of the quantity of data in terms of GB/PB is "much". As a storage online server, the best you can use imho is Amazon S3.

If you want to proceed however with the initial setup that you had in mind, that's how I'd do it (just an idea):

1) First install FreeBSD on the server, and create a backup strategy. Using a second machine which you can connect via LAN as a backup server is the best solution, since sending every now and then huge amounts of data on the server will cost you money in terms of storage and bandwidth (resulting in slow connections). If you decide to go online tarsnap is a good option to keep an eye on.

2a) Once the backup computer (local/remote) is set, the easiest way I can think of is sshFS. It's easy to setup even as an automated process on windows an mac.

2b) If you want to set-up a VPN, go with OpenVPN which will give access (as a TAP server) to Time Machine backups and other goodie, I'm not sure how you can handle private/public spaces but it's easy to configure on every single machine and there are fancy GUI clients for a small fee for mac and windows. It's maybe the most user-friendly solution.

2c) If you want to get really into 'deep' you could try L2TP IPSEC but I warn you, it's not easy to setup and it's not as flexible as OpenVPN. However even iPhones support it.

Good luck :-)
 
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