I'm looking for examples of people's setups for sharing. By "sharing" I'm talking about functions like "NAS", "File Server", "Media Server", "Backup Server", "Cloud", etc.

I'm currently set up with a Linux box acting as a file server (Samba). This same box also servers as a backup server for my other home computers. And on another Linux box I have a media server (Plex Media Server). This second server also contains all the video/audio/etc. media that it serves up (this data is currently not on the file server, only on the Plex server, so kind of a mis-mash of data storage). These different boxes are all accessible from my LAN. What I would like to do is expand that to external network access from a variety of devices (Android phones, iPads, laptops, etc.) for streaming video and file access, while still maintaining good security security.

I'm just wondering what people's experiences have been with things like FreeNAS, OwnCloud, Plex, etc. in setting up something like this. For example FreeNAS has a Plex plug-in. What are the pluses/minues of using that as opposed to a stand-alone Plex install? What about OwnCloud? What does that gain you vs. some other solution? Are people setting these things up in separate virtual machines to encapsulate functions, or as on "do all" system?

There are many different ways to procede. I'm just wondering what people's experiences have been on one path vs. another. I'm thinking of setting up a NAS on it's own box, and then having a separate server running VM's holding things like OwnCloud, Plex, etc. (each in their own VM possibly) and these apps accessing their data from the NAS. Any ideas or suggestions on a better way to do this? Alternate ideas for implementation?

while im not going to address all of your questions ill fill you in on what i do here at my house. sounds a lot like what you looking to do.



1. CentOS 6.x server
2. NFS for media sharing
3. PlexMediaServer
4. Backup storage
5. F@H SSMA F@H Team
6. Minecraft server

I dont personally run OpenCloud, but have it running on an other server that is a bit more powerful then mine. just has more RAM and faster HDDs then my personal server. OwnCloud is a mega resource hog, but man its brilliant if you have the horse power behind it.

I run all 5 of those services off of a single system. its an AND FX6350 with 8G RAM currently running a combination of sATA II and III drives. Im about to upgrade the HDDs to add sATA III drives and place them into a RAID of some type, to be determined.

If you have the hardware spreading the services out to separate hardwares would be ideal, but meh its just for my family. i dont need 3 or 4 "servers" running around my house.

I have at the most 7 connections to my server streaming media with ZERO issues with only about 1/2 being wired 10/100/1000 and the rest of a dual n-band wifi router.

just a side note, i had to create a script + cron job that runs every 15 min. to clear out the cache and free up the excess RAM that F@H tends to eat to improve streaming quality otherwise the audio would get out of sync when F@H was eating up to much RAM. That will be fixed in my next upgrade for the server when I drastically increase the RAM of the server.

hope that gives you a bit of insight. i know its not exactly what you were looking for, but it should be a start.

thanks for the info.

If your AMD FX6350 with 8G ram system won't run OwnCloud well, then my AMD Phenom II X6 1045T with 4Gb ram system certainly won't (both are 6 core CPUs, mine being an older generation). Your CPU is about 16% higher performance on average per an online comparison I found ( http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/329..._X6_1045T.html ). Plus, you have twice the memory that I do.

OwnCloud must be a real resource hog, as you say! I'm surprised it is so bad. I've found my current CPU has no problems keeping up with downloading large amounts of data, transcoding video, and streaming an HD video (via Plex Media Server) to my Roku all independantly but at the same time. I did run an OwnCloud test in a VM a while back (downloaded the image and ran it under VirtualBox). It seemed to work OK, but I didn't stress it or look to see how many resources it was consuming. I just fired it up and basically determined that "it worked".

well its heavy when you are sharing files. for some reason instead of just changing/modifying permissions to the file stored it makes a copy of those files into the other uses directory. thats what makes it so heavy. for just calendar, personal file storage, and things like that its amazing.

also keep in mind F@H uses 99% of all 6 of my cores.

if owncloud was the only thing i ran on the server it would be fine. i could even keep the NFS share running knowing that the bottleneck would be when a user is accessing shared files for the first time.

after all it is a cloud based service. it is designed to be used in and on hardware that one would find in a cloud. so multi-CPU with max or near max RAM per CPU, not just core with 10k - 15k rpm RAIDed arrays.