"Downie" OMV Server

LOG

May 17th, 2020

After piecing together the system, and loaded a 30 day trial version of UnRAID on the USB stick, I only had 1 Gig of RAM that was used in Zeus.  Unfortunately UnRAID now requires a minimum of 2 Gigs to run.  The screen started to load and got to a point when a message showed up during the boot process that the "System was deadlocked on memory".  I've ordered 4 Gigs of RAM off of ebay, and waiting for it to arrive shortly.

May 30th, 2020

The new memory came in.  Installed without issues, and the system powered up.  Only problem is that the old harddrives used are pretty bad, with one outright disabling itself due to failure.  So what I might do is swap out some of the smaller drives in Zeus for larger capacity one, and use those drive in Cronus.

Most likely Cronus will be used for testing different VM, run some dockers, and store non media files to offload them from taking up space on Zeus.  I'm still thinking of moving all my music and the LMS docker over as well.  But before doing all that, there will be some hardware upgrades required to pull it all off, and will have to pay for a full version of UnRAID.

Feb 15th, 2021

I decided not to use the above system for the Cronus build.  In the past, the Linux dockers for bit torrenting that I had tried on the UnRAID setup never allowed for RSS feeds.  So for the longest time, I was using a separate system with Windows 7 for schedule torrent downloads.  Recently I discovered that the newer version of the docker for qbittorrent with VPN had been updated, now including  a RSS feed option, so I can do all torrent downloading with the UnRAID setup...add to it that I finally got Sonarr to work This led to the decommission of the Windows torrenting setup.

That machine was a HP 8000 Elite with a HP 3647h motherboard.  The LGA775 processor is a Core2Quad Q8400 running @ 2.66GHz.  It's populated with 4Gigs of DDR3 memory, but can be boosted to 16Gig.  The FSB is 1333Mhz (indicates the speed of the RAM should I add more down the road).  It also has on board GigLAN. It has 4 or 5 SATA interfaces.

I started to test UnRAID on the system, and it appears to be working flawless right now.  It currently has 2x 500Gig drives in a 1 Parity, 1 Data setup using UnRAID's 30-day trial.  It will eventually need a larger power supply, and updated drives along with a pro membership.  As is, it should be able to house 5 to 6 hard drives.  Which will make for a very modest UnRAID setup.

Apr 3rd, 2021

Since the UnRAID trial period had ended, and I ran into an issue that I couldn't access Logitech Media Server when the docker was installed, even though I had setup the docker configuration the same as the LMS on Zeus, I decided to try different server OS.  I looked at FreeNAS, but the hardware spec of the HP computer are too low.  I'm now trying out OpenMediaVault.  It is actively still being developed and appears to be a decent solution for older hardware.

It installed easily enough, and I setup the 2 500 Gig drives in a RAID Stripe configuration.  If I end up utilizing it more, then I will update the drives to something larger and set it up as a RAID 5 or bigger.  Just need to figure out the final plans with it.

I was able to put and LMS docker on board, and it loads fine.  I loaded a Plex docker, but I think I'm going to stay with the Plex setup on Zeus, since it is working so well.

I ended up migrated my music to this new Cronus setup, and freed up space on Zeus.  The main reason was that I started having issues with the onboard LAN controller on Zeus and that made LMS very unreliable.  Since the transfer, LMS has been flawlessly running on Cronus.

Dec 27th, 2021

After removing the 2x 1Tb drives from the UnRAID server, and knowing they are still good drives, I decided to utilize them in Cronus.  Adding the additional Bytecc SATA controller,  I ended up re-configuring the system from scratch and changing its RAID from RAID 0 (Striping) to a RAID 5 setup.  That at least gives me some protection for if a drive should fail.  Now since the Logitech Media Server had to be redone, I really looked at some of the extra apps and plugins and decided to build it up as much as possible, taking advantage of all the streaming services available.  System was back up and running within 24hrs.

Next thing that will most likely have to be replaced on this system will be the power supply.  I also might look into adding additional memory as well.  Finally, I will also look into utilizing some of the additional hard drive space and move some backups and documents from the Zeus UnRAID server to Cronus.

Jan 8th, 2022

Welcome to a new year, and new look.  I decided to give my Cronus OMV machine a new web server look, as I got tired of the standard blue on white plain screen.  I like the "dark" themes, and looked around for instruction on how to get a dark theme on OMV.  Though not as easily done as just downloading a theme pack plugin, I did find this site that easily explained how to setup a custom theme.  The code is here.  Though it worked rather well, and I got my basic dark theme, I noticed that the OMV logo and some other details were missing from the top bar, and I wanted to also spruce up the login backdrop.  To add backdrops and images, I found this OMV forum site that explains the two once you dig into the different posts and understand the theme-custom.css file. 

Login screen image - look in the theme-custom.css code at the top for .login-page, and add the following lines (as required):

{

/*body# */

.login-page {

/** background: #2e2e2e; */

background: url("/images/server.jpg") no-repeat center center fixed;

background-size: cover;

}

Note: some of the code is already resident in the theme-custom file already (if using the code from the link above), so only add the missing image file location lines mostly.

As for the logo and naming at the top of the OMV screen, in the forum post, user Agricola list his code for his custom display.  From his code, I added the the following lines to the same location in the theme-custom.css file as he indicated.

To add the OMV logo at the center of the the header, look for the '.x-workspace-navigation...' line as shown below:

.x-workspace-navigation-toolbar.x-toolbar-default {

   background: url("../images/header_logo.png");

   background: url("../images/header_logo.svg"),none;

   background-repeat: no-repeat;

   background-position: center;

   background-size: 80% 80%;

NOTE: make sure you don't remove the end '}'.  The background-color was already set by the custom theme code.

To add the custom name image above the left menu bar required creating a custom .png (used GIMP), and also a custom .svg file.  To create the custom .svg file, after creating the .png image, I just used the website PNG to SVG and it quickly did the convert.  Then upload the two files to the cronus server  (I used WinSCP).  The location of the images files is /var/www/openmediavault/images/.  In the theme-custom file, look for the line '.x-workspace-node-tree .x-panel-header-default' and add the following:

.x-workspace-node-tree .x-panel-header-default {

   border: 0px;

   background: url("../images/h2.png");

   background: url("../images/h2.svg"),none;

   background-repeat: no-repeat;

   background-position: center;

   background-size: 65% 65%;

NOTE: make sure you don't remove the end '}'.  Also the background-color was already setup by the custom theme code.

 After some playing around I was able to achieve what I wanted:

Jan 14th, 2023

Just over 2 years ago, Cronus was born.  I kept the names of my servers towards some ancient Greek mythology.   Now that the UnRAID server is currenlty undergoing some major upgrades after what appear to be a total motherboard fault, I decided to rename the servers to more of something that actually suits what they have been setup for.  In the the case of Cronus, its task was to provide the house with all sorts of music, since it was running the LMS backend.  So it would only be fitting to name the server after some famous musician, composer or artist.  I could have kept it traditional and all by calling the server Mozart, or Bach, but feel that those names have been used over, and are too common.  Then I decided to name it after somebody more to my time, and after an artist that directly influences me more...so I now introduce to you the music server "GROHL".

Long live "Grohl", both Dave and the music server.

Jan 17th, 2023

Now that I've ordered and waiting on a Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard with its 14 SATA ports for the defunct Zeus server, I moved the Promise SATA board over to the Grohl server and replaced the Bytecc SATA 150 board.  The Promise has a faster throughput than the Bytecc, so the boost will be helpful for the system overall. 

Feb 26th, 2023

Ran into some issues with the Spotify plugin called Spotty.  It just decided to stop working and unauthorize my login/password.  It also wouldn't allow to automatically re-authorize or setup any account with a username/password.  Also had issues with running a rudimentary setup on Spielberg.  Talking to the developer, the one suggestion he had was to run the docker on a host network, not a bridge network.  Strange as the setup I indicated above using Stacks in Portainer automatically creates a bridge connection, and it originally worked.

The other issue was that Portainer ended up crashing.  This was due to a recent update with the docker, and many have had issues with it ever since.

So once Portainer was finally back up and running, I figured out how to run the LMS docker now without using the Stack setup, and have set it up in host mode, and Spotty is working again.  I'll list the setup procedure above in the Server Setup section once I have time.

Mar 28th, 2023

Had some time over the weekend and decided to do a massive maintenance update to Grohl.  I've been running with OMV5 since I started using it, but OMV5 is now outdated.  So I decided I'd upgrade to OMV6 before total support for version 5 stopped.  I also wanted to take advantage of using some spare drives I had, and wanted to reconfigure the file system and RAID system to xfs and SnapRAID (respectively).

I also wanted to take advantage of using the OS on a USB stick, like the UnRAID setup.

Well...none of it went as planned (but of cours)....

In the end, the USB stick idea was too slow.  I was constantly waiting for things to load (upgrades and plugins).  The spare drives, I found out the hard way, were garbage.  I must have installed OMV6 about 5 or 6 times over before I finally got it working.  It was not a pleasent weekend with this system.  In the end though, I think it is now running the way I want, albeit, the OS drive is the same drive as I was using before, and it has quite a few errors recorded in S.M.A.R.T.  So I'm looking at replacing it with a SSD at some point soon.

I like the look of OMV6, and the addition of the dashboard really spices it up from what OMV5 main view showed:

To aid in setting OMV6 up, I followed a Youtuber by the name Techno Dad Life.  Very good video to get the basics of OMV6 up and running: