Login at Kodi Home

pettergulbra · 2014-12-03, 23:20

Hi

I have an Pi I want to use as an headless server.

But, will it strong enough?

I have installed Raspbian on it now, the latest.
But will it manage to do torrenting, SQL for my Kodi setups and act as an server for my movies to my Kodi machines?

Or is to much for that little big thingy?

**popcornmix** · 2014-12-03, 23:26

Torrenting can be quite heavy on disk and cpu (depends a bit on your internet speed).
If you scheduled the torrent to just run at night, or limit the bandwidth I suspect you'd be okay.

Also depends on what you want from a file server.
You won't serve multiple Blu-Rays concurrently, but you'd probably be okay with a couple of 720p playing at the same time.

pettergulbra · 2014-12-04, 14:48

I have an 5/2 mbit line. Torrenting just at night almost.
Almost never happend that it palys more than one movie at the time.
All connections are cabled.

What way is the best to share the files to the rest of the network on an PI?
I`m not an linux guy, so now I`m no windows and use normal windows sharing.

**popcornmix** · 2014-12-04, 14:53

(2014-12-04, 14:48)pettergulbra Wrote: What way is the best to share the files to the rest of the network on an PI?
I`m not an linux guy, so now I`m no windows and use normal windows sharing.

If you have disks attached to Pi then linux formats (e.g. ext4) for the disks are more efficient.
For best network performance use NFS.
You can additionally export the same files through SMB if you need windows machines to access them, but the kodi clients should access the file using NFS as that is more efficient.

evangelion · 2014-12-04, 16:03

(2014-12-04, 14:53)popcornmix Wrote:
(2014-12-04, 14:48)pettergulbra Wrote: What way is the best to share the files to the rest of the network on an PI?
I`m not an linux guy, so now I`m no windows and use normal windows sharing.

If you have disks attached to Pi then linux formats (e.g. ext4) for the disks are more efficient.
For best network performance use NFS.
You can additionally export the same files through SMB if you need windows machines to access them, but the kodi clients should access the file using NFS as that is more efficient.

I've just recently set up a Model A Pi, with two powered hard drives attached via a non-powered hub, to act as 24/7 server. It's running the latest official OpenELEC version, purely because that's what I'm more comfortable with rather than having to start dabbling with Linux/Raspbian.

It works fine through SMB, and the UPnP capability works fine also, SMB takes a few seconds to start up due to the hard drives needing to spin-up, but all in all I'm happy with this.

I've just checked with the living room client Pi that I use to watch film and TV, but nothing loads when I try to add a source through NFS, so do I need to go down the Raspbian route to achieve this? Or format the drives as ext4? Or am I way off track?

wrxtasy · 2014-12-04, 17:18

I don't believe there is a NFS server with the Openelec distribution on the RPi.
http://openelec.tv/forum/76-network-file...nfs-server

However using RaspBMC it looks possible:
http://forum.osmc.tv/showthread.php?tid=7434
https://sites.google.com/a/teamalex.me.u...es-via-nfs

Gotta get your hands nice and dirty tho !

pettergulbra · 2014-12-04, 18:06

I want to format them with NTFS, so I can use them against Win machines also.

So the best is NFS, is this something that are built in to the Raspbian, and will it work with NTFS?

So as I have then understood, the PI will manage to run Deluge (torrent), MySQL (or similar) and act as file/media server for my setup?

evangelion · (This post was last modified: 2014-12-04, 18:21 by evangelion.)

@ wrxtasy: Thanks for that!

I'll investigate further ... the OpenELEC link isn't working at the mo, site maybe glitching ... but interesting that RaspBMC supports an inbuilt NFS server and OE doesn't? very surprising.

**popcornmix** · 2014-12-04, 18:40

(2014-12-04, 18:06)pettergulbra Wrote: I want to format them with NTFS, so I can use them against Win machines also.

So the best is NFS, is this something that are built in to the Raspbian, and will it work with NTFS?

Linux doesn't access NTFS efficiently. You will get much better performance if you format the disk as EXT4.
Windows can still access an EXT4 disk over SMB, but it's tricky to directly connect the disk to a windows machine (you can installed EXT4 drivers on windows, but I'm not sure how well they work).

wrxtasy · 2014-12-04, 20:38

If you have Mac its pretty easy to mount the EXT4 Linux file system, I'm using OSX Fuse:

http://osxdaily.com/2014/03/20/mount-ext...ystem-mac/

pettergulbra · 2014-12-04, 21:37

Can it be that big a difference, between EXT4 and NTFS?

It`s not an good solution to do every disc work over network (SMB). It is slower than just move the USB disc to another computer. IMHO.

Sorry, don`t uses any apple products at all. :-)

Bosse_B · 2014-12-05, 13:43

I found that the file formats supported by the different operating systems differ widely!
As far as I have seen the only formats that all of them can use when a disk is just inserted is FAT (or rather FAT32), but that limits file sizes to max 4 GB.
EXT4 cannot be read by Windows and NTFS on Linux needs a special driver plus it seems not too reliable or fast.
So I gave up my searching for such a solution and keep the disks attached to the respective computer permanently.

Access over the network is simple enough because samba acts as an intermediary on each platform.

**popcornmix** · 2014-12-05, 13:53

(2014-12-04, 21:37)pettergulbra Wrote: Can it be that big a difference, between EXT4 and NTFS?

From here you get 2.5MB/s copying to Pi on NTFS formatted disk over SMB compared to 5.9MB/s copying to EXT4 formatted disk, so more then twice as fast with EXT4. Using NFS rather than SMB will improve those numbers a little.

pettergulbra · 2014-12-06, 18:11

Speed, is not that big a problem as far as I can see. This because I`m not going to send many files to the PI over the network. And that`s where the problem is, as I see in that test.

That`s why I want it in NTFS. Internally in the PI I haven`t finding at test that says EXT4 is much better than NTFS.

FAT as you say, is not an good solution because of the limits.

**popcornmix** · 2014-12-06, 18:29

(2014-12-06, 18:11)pettergulbra Wrote: Speed, is not that big a problem as far as I can see. This because I`m not going to send many files to the PI over the network. And that`s where the problem is, as I see in that test.

If you are using the NTFS disk as the destination of the torrent then you will find cpu usage is higher than if it were formatted as EXT4.
You could always use a larger sdcard or usb stick (formatted as EXT4) for the torrents and then copy them to NTFS disk to avoid this.

If you are happy with this behaviour, then NTFS is viable, just less efficient that EXT4.