Hardware

HDHomeRun Connect Quatro and Plex Server Integration

nigel — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 11:54:20 +0000

HDHomeRun Connect Quatro and Plex Server Integration nigel Mon, 28/12/2020 - 11:54

The SiliconDust HDHomeRun Connect Quatro (sic) product provides play, record and schedule live HD TV on smart devices across your home network. It gets its TV signal from a standard aerial socket and comes with four tuners (hence the incorrectly spelt Quatro designation) for watching four different TV channels concurrently. It is a boon for those wishing to stream live TV over their WiFi to reach rooms not serviced by aerial sockets. Furthermore it integrates with the Plex Media Server product to provide DVR capabilities. This precipitated the purchase for me - I have way too many recordings on my Sky HD box and getting them off is tortuous - either remove the hard drive and rip them directly (tutorials on how to do this on the Internet) or play the recordings back at regular speed and capture the output. Dire options.

So this is the tutorial for setting up the HDHomeRun box, integrating into Plex to record shows, and playback on my MacBook, iPad and Android Samsung S20 phone.

SilconDust HDHomeRun Connect Quatro

Big box, small product. The box contains the Quatro, power supply with a fairly short cable, and an RJ45 LAN cable which was way too short to stretch to my switch. A glaring omission for me is the Quatro should have a coax cable passthrough socket, but since it doesn't....

Y Splitter

..you will need a Y splitter if you, like me, are already using your aerial wall socket for your TV. In addition you will need...

Coax Cable

..coax cable to route from the Y splitter to the Quatro. It really does surprise me this wasn't bundled.

Setup

The box doesn't come with instructions beyond the somewhat obvious connecting to the aerial socket and the home network. Instead there is a glossy flyer pointing the reader to the website at https://my.hdhomerun.com

The webpage rather craftily detected the device on my network (which my home router failed to do) and the x against the firmware version suggested to me the firmware was at least two years old (see top screenshot). I clicked through and installed the update (second screenshot).

By navigating back to the hdhomerun page I clicked on the 159 channels and got the 3rd screenshot above (snipped for brevity).

On the front page you will note that there is an option for a yearly fee of $35 for the SiliconDust DVR. Since I intent to integrate the Quatro with Plex I am going to use Plex's DVR instead. However that isn't free - I will buy a lifetime Plex pass to enable recording.

Device Setup

By scrolling down from the Quatro instructions page you are confronted with the device setup page. Thankfully the options I needed are available - MacBook, iPad and Android. There's also a Television DLNA option which I don't need since I'm using the aerial cable also on my TV. However the Firestick option could be useful at a later date - I have a first generation 50" plasma TV with no smarts, no longer in use which I intend to mount on my bedroom wall.

Ok let's go through the device installations.

MacOS Installation

By clicking on the Mac installation you see the three button view as per the first screenshot above. Annoyingly despite my setup being ready to go (i.e. connected to my aerial and LAN) I had to click through to the third circle which then provided me a download link. I downloaded and installed the app which left an orphaned terminal session I had to close down manually (2nd screenshot). I started the app (simple on the Mac - press Cmd-Space and start typing HD and it autocompletes to the HD app. I believe you can get remote controls for playback but I instantly figured out how to change channel on the keyboard by tapping arrow down. I was very pleased with the results. See the 3rd screenshot.

Android Installation

To install on Android, point a browser on the Android device to the HDHomeRun Connect Quatro link previous provided, and tap through Android Install and then the three roundels will be displayed as per the MacOS installation. Tap the third roundel and then tap the link to the Google Play store. Install the app like any other, and then open the app. It starts on BBC1 as per the MacBook installation. I've only included a sample screenshot of the playback and not the installation to avoid repetition.

IOS Installation

You won't be surprised to know the installation for IOS was as straightforward as for MacOS and Android. I jumped on my iPad and again pointed a browser to the Connect Quatro webpage. This time I was directed to the Apple Appstore and the app was installed. Screenshot above.

Plex Integration

The first step in Plex integration is to upgrade your Plex account to unlock DVR functionality. I opted for the lifetime pass. Once that is done you must update your Ubuntu Plex server to the latest version - failure to do so can lead to problems in the DVR installation. I got to a postcode validation screen and it wouldn't accept any version of my postcode I supplied. To update the Debian package, the easiest way is to click on the Please Install Manually link (see first screenshot above) which will save a deb package locally, in my case onto my Macbook. I then used scp to upload it to my Plex Ubuntu server and followed the simple instructions here

After a reboot it can be seen in the 2nd screenshot above that I have the latest version.

Next go to Live TV & DVR in the settings and you should see that Plex has already picked up the Connect Quatro. See the 3rd screenshot.

Clicking continue brings up the channel list. I had to populate the country field at this point. See screenshot 4.

The next step is the one which caused problems - postcode validation. I neglected taking a screenshot but basically you need the first three characters of the postcode only (UK) and as previously noted the latest version of Ubuntu Plex server.

Once past the postcode, the installation is complete apart from the download of guide data - see screenshot 5. This takes a lot of time to accomplish so go for a cup of tea or three.

Plex Playback

Plex playback is achieved through a browser. I navigated to Live TV and DVR and then Guide - see screenshot 1 above. The second screenshot shows live playback. However it became immediately apparent that Plex playback isn't really a good choice - there was lag with the spinner constantly pausing the playing out of the TV show.

Plex Playback - BBC1 Issue

There is a problem with playback of BBC1 through Plex. Many have reported audio missing, but in my case I couldn't even get video. The solution is to go to Settings -> Account -> Audio and Subtitles and then edit. Check the box for automatically selecting audio and subtitle tracks and ensure the language is set to English as shown in the screenshot above. This fixes the audio / video issue.

DVR Use

The DVR feature is accessed through the Plex TV guide. It is the primary reason for my purchase of the Connect Quatro and the Plex Lifetime Pass - so everything is pinned on this working correctly! The first screenshot shows the guide and through this interface records are selected. You can see I have chosen to record Ten Little Indians in the first screenshot.

Note in the second screenshot Plex has identified the recording as a film and therefore will be placed in one of my two film-type collections. One is called simply films and the other Documentaries (Single). The films collection is chosen and therefore the recording should be saved on the file storage allocated to the films collection - in my case my FreeNAS server under a dedicated directory for films.

In the advanced settings it is possible to select an option to detect commercials and remove them during the recording. Since this is my first attempt at recording I've elected not to try this just yet. See screenshot 3.

My DVR Schedule now shows that Ten Little Indians is lined up to be recorded overnight. We'll see! Screenshot 4.

DVR Troubleshooting

Frustration! My first recording failed silently. Or rather, I woke up to discover Plex had actually rescheduled the recording for later in the week when it was being broadcast again - see the first screenshot above. Crazy! Nothing else for it but to troubleshoot. The Plex logs for around 23:50 (the time of the broadcast) provides the evidence:

Dec 28, 2020 23:50:00.492 [0x7f7e78ff9700] DEBUG - [Grabber/6c03fabdb0be2839bb5ebe0e2412563e991a9910] Grabber: checking for 15018 MB of available disk space in grab path and 100 MB in the transcode cache path
Dec 28, 2020 23:50:00.498 [0x7f7e817fa700] DEBUG - [Grabber/6c03fabdb0be2839bb5ebe0e2412563e991a9910] HTTP 200 response from GET http://192.168.0.14:80/lineup_status.json
Dec 28, 2020 23:50:00.518 [0x7f7e78ff9700] DEBUG - [Grabber/6c03fabdb0be2839bb5ebe0e2412563e991a9910] IsOnSameVolume: failed to stat "/mnt/freenas/Movies/Unfiled/.grab": No such file or directory
Dec 28, 2020 23:50:00.519 [0x7f7e78ff9700] ERROR - [Grabber/6c03fabdb0be2839bb5ebe0e2412563e991a9910] Failed to calculate available disk space for path '"/mnt/freenas/Movies/Unfiled/.grab"': 2 (No such file or directory)
Dec 28, 2020 23:50:00.520 [0x7f7e78ff9700] DEBUG - [Grabber/6c03fabdb0be2839bb5ebe0e2412563e991a9910] Grabber: Saving recording to "/mnt/freenas/Movies/Unfiled/.grab/6c03fabdb0be2839bb5ebe0e2412563e991a9910-83fff151e63f57b4526b75632ece7504e44f3183"
Dec 28, 2020 23:50:00.525 [0x7f7e78ff9700] ERROR - [Grabber/6c03fabdb0be2839bb5ebe0e2412563e991a9910] Grabber: No write permission.
Dec 28, 2020 23:50:00.525 [0x7f7e78ff9700] DEBUG - [Grabber/6c03fabdb0be2839bb5ebe0e2412563e991a9910] Grabber: Operation for 'Ten Little Indians (1966)' on channel 081 completed with status error (No write access to destination)

So clearly the issue is the Plex server doesn't have write permissions to my FreeNAS drive which contains all my media collections. Plex server by default has a user:group combination of plex:plex whilst I was connecting from the server to FreeNAS by credentials for my own account. I am mounting the FreeNAS point by CIFS. I changed the line in the /etc/fstab file to use the following mount instead:

# CIFS FreeNas mount
//192.168.0.200/personal	/mnt/freenas	cifs	credentials=/root/.cifs,uid=111,gid=117,vers=3.0	0	0

The uid was changed to that of the plex user, and the gid changed to the plex group. I then created an account called plex on my FreeNAS server and ensured it had write permissions to the media directories. That fixed it!

DVR Recording Playback Issues

During my troubleshooting I attempted two other recordings which both failed. However once I got the permission model correct, I fired off a random recording and as you can see by the red dot in the Nature's Weirdest Events broadcast in the first screenshot, the recording ran correctly. You can see in the 2nd screenshot the video is ready for playback, and in the 3rd screenshot the video has automatically been added to my collection of TV Shows.

I inspected the filesystem and noted that the video has a ts file type which is standard for streamed videos. There aren't many options for playing back ts files apart from Plex itself and VLC Player. Having done some research it appears that Plex can record directly to mp4 but needs serious CPU to achieve this. I clearly don't have the horsepower just now - see below!!

I attempted to playback the recording and was appalled. The video stuttered alarmingly and was totally unwatchable. I switched to the dashboard view which give CPU and bandwidth insights and it was patently obvious why I was having problems. The CPU usage was over 200%!! See screenshot four above. So not only transcoding to mp4 is out of the question, merely playing anything back is too!

Moving Plex Server to Ubuntu 20.04LTS on Fast Laptop with 16GB RAM

I decided to move my Plex server to the super fast 16GB RAM Nitro gaming Laptop (first screenshot above) I discussed in this article and installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 20.04TS with the Gnome desktop. I decided that if running the GUI caused problems I would change the boot sequence to command line only. The migration was simplicity since I used an earlier blog as a basis, but since I wasn't having to move the underlying VM too, I merely copy and pasted the file copy commands from that article.

Once I'd brought up the Plex service on the Nitro laptop, I pointed a web browser to my IP address (I allocated it 192.168.0.205. All my servers are in the range 192.168.0.200 onwards so my ISP hub has been configured to only allocate IP addresses from 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.199 by DHCP.

I had to login in to the new Plex instance but once I had I was good to go. First task was of course to play back the ts video recording I'd made earlier (see third screnshot above). Playback was fine - and I had a top term output running on Gnome (screenshot 2 above) that showed all RAM had been grabbed (no surprise) and the CPU was at approximately 10%-15%, so had plenty of headroom left. Thank goodness the move to the gaming laptop had yielded positive results.

Transcoding Recordings

Instead of streamed files I really want H.264 format videos. To achieve this you need to configure Plex to transcode as it is recording. This is achieved by floating over Live TV and DVR and clicking the hamburger menu then clicking settings, then in the popup window device settings. Move the drop down to Transcode and click save as per the first screenshot.

Transcoding has a number of different options - and some experimentation is probably required here. Navigate to Settings->Transcoder and my settings are listed in the second screenshot, but your mileage may vary.

To test this I picked an imminent show that was only five minutes long. Good enough for a proof of concept test. This is the recording under the heading today in the third screenshot.

When the recording was underway I looked at the top output again on the server. It was again around 10%-15% CPU so plenty of headroom spare. Maybe I could be a bit more aggressive with my transcoder settings.

The recording finished in 5 minutes and played back with no problems - see screenshot five.

Inspecting the file was a little disappointing. It is still in the dreaded ts format - but importantly it is merely a ts container. You can use a Post Processing script to remux the container from ts to mp4 or mkv. The remux should only take a few seconds since it is not actually changing the internal video (H.264) format. So that is a wash up activity for another day. And perhaps another blog.

Bill of Materials

SiliconDust HDHomeRune Connect Quatro	Silicondust HDHomeRun CONNECT QUATRO Network DVB-T/T2 TV Tuner that works with our DVR software – (HDHR5-4DT)	£149.99
Y Splitter	Merriway BH02205 Co-Axial TV Aerial Y Splitter	£2.88
Aerial Cable	CDL Micro 3 m Gold Plated TV Aerial Cable (M-M) with Adapter (F-F) - Black	£2.99
Plex Lifetime Pass	N/a	£94.99
	TOTAL	£250.85

Conclusion

This was quite an adventure spread over two days. I now have industrial strength recording of TV shows direct to hard disk in my FreeNAS storage and can play back on any device in my property. I needed to upgrade my Plex server hardware in the process though and it was somewhat fortunate I had a spare 16GB Nitro ultra fast gaming laptop doing nothing. It's i7. i7-9750H. 2.60 GHz spec with 6 cores is awesome and has no problems running a Plex server. Without it I could've been looking at many hundreds of outlay.

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Hardware

RasPlex Installation using a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with Rii Mini i8+ Remote

nigel — Sat, 23 May 2020 09:49:25 +0000

RasPlex Installation using a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with Rii Mini i8+ Remote nigel Sat, 23/05/2020 - 10:49

Tutorial on how to install RasPlex on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a Rii Mini i8+ remote control.

Download the RasPlex Image

The Raspberry Pi 3B+ is a little problematic for RasPlex which is borderline abandonware. There is no official GitHub image release for a 3B+, and attempting to install the latest 1.8.0 will result in the Raspberry Pi rainbow screen upon power up.

There is a long thread here that explains the problems with the 3B+ - however be warned the conversation gets seriously derailed with a nonsense focus on power supplies half way through. There is huge intimation that the fact that RasPlex doesn't boot on a 3B+ is because of the power supply issues. Disregard this - it doesn't boot on an official Raspberry Pi power supply either so power is not the issue!

Thankfully, albeit partially obscured by background noise, there is a link to a commit that does work. This is RasPlex-1.8.0.0-573b6d73-RPi2.arm.img.gz and can be downloaded from here.

Flashing the Image to MicroSD Card

I used balenaEtcher to flash the image to my MicroSD card although other tools are available. A little care is required here - I could've easily incorrectly selected the wrong media since by default balenaEtcher selected my SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.1 Flash Drive. I reselected the MicroSD which was in the card reader.

Boot the Raspberry Pi

Inserting the MicroSD card into the Raspberry Pi slot and powering up will now bring up the configuration screens for RasPlex. I didn't have to change any of the defaults - and it found my Plex server automatically as well! I elected not to enable pre-caching of the assets since my network is quick enough for the images to load practically instantaneously.

Once the RasPlex 'configuration' is complete, the system loads openPHT which is the user interface for the media centre - i.e. the Plex client.

Configuring openPHT

As I mentioned earlier, there is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ working image, which is what Ive used to build my system. It is imperative to ensure the system is pinned at that version and not automatically updated upon a reboot to a newer patch level. To do that change the settings by navigating to:

Left button -> Preferences -> Left button -> Down button (twice) -> Right button -> Down button (four times) to Software Update then untick the first option.

I also changed the keyboard to be uk, but apart from that there was nothing more to do.

Rii Mini i8+ Remote

Simply put, this 'just works'. It was already paired to its USB receiver before I used it in a previous Android TV project I've now abandoned for this project. I turned on the remote, inserted the receiver in a spare USB slot, and instantly it was sending keystrokes to the Raspberry Pi. Couldn't have been simpler.

Bill of Materials

Raspberry Pi	3BPLUS-R 1.4 GHz 1 GB RAM 64-Bit	£37.67
SD Card	LXSINO 32GB Micro SD Class 10	£6.99
Power	Aukru Charger 5V 3000mA Power Supply 3A	£9.99
Remote	Rii i8+ 2.4Ghz LED Backlit Mini Wireless Keyboard	n/a
	TOTAL	£54.65

The remote isn't available anymore, but models practically the same are for around £8.

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Hardware Raspberry Pi Plex

FreeNAS upgrade to M.2 Solid State Drive Boot Disk

nigel — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 17:32:56 +0000

FreeNAS upgrade to M.2 Solid State Drive Boot Disk nigel Mon, 01/07/2019 - 18:32

This blog shows how to upgrade the boot disk on FreeNAS to an M.2 PCIe SSD with a 2280 form factor. I went for an XPG SX6000 256GB drive although other products from different suppliers are readily available. The motivation for the upgrade was born out of necessity. When I upgraded my motherboard in November 2018 and blogged about it here /building-home-freenas-server-hardware-upgrade I bought a board with 4 SATA connections. I elected to use an old 2.5" SATA SSD I got in 2012 as my boot drive, but that used the one spare precious SATA slot after I'd plugged in my three data drives.

I noticed I was getting occasional error diagnostics reported by FreeNAS as shown in the screenshot above and repeated here: One or more devices have been removed by the administrator. Sufficient replicas exist in the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state. The message wasn't omnipresent; a reboot tended to clear it for a while but it would return.

I decided therefore that it was time to replace the pool disks, but that route was largely closed to me because I didn't have a spare SATA slot. By implementing an M.2 SSD I would free up the SATA slot and be able to replace my drives to 3x6 terabyte drives. The pool drive replacement will be covered in a separate blog.

Backup the configuration first

Before doing any work on a FreeNAS it makes eminent sense to take a configuration backup. The beauty of FreeNAS is a clean boot disk can be installed at any time and an old configuration can be restored easily. To take the backup, load up the console, and navigate to System -> General -> Save Config. Since FreeNAS uses a very neat React Bootstrap UI, there is no navigation away from the main url so I can't post a direct URL!

Also worth noting - don't save your configuration on pool data drives! I keep mine on my laptop with a copy also on a USB memory stick.

Remove existing boot drive, and create a new USB boot drive

Ok next step is to power off the FreeNAS, and remove the existing boot drive which is my ancient 2.5" SSD drive. This includes unplugging the SATA cable thus providing the sacred slot I will need for my disk capacity upgrade. Above shows my newly liberated slot. Next task is to download the boot image from FreeNAS download site, ensuring that you pick the same version of FreeNAS that is currently being used. If you aren't sure of the version, check out the config file you just saved - it's in the path name. Mine was named freenas-FreeNAS-11.1-U6 (caffd76fa)-20190630091041.tar.

Once you've downloaded the correct version (in my case 11.1-U6) to your laptop or desktop, you will need software to write the iso file to your USB stick. Since I am a Macbook user, I use Etcher, but you may have a personal favourite.

Installing the M.2 SSD card

Whilst the computer is turned off and with the covers off, install the M.2 SSD drive. Locate the slot on the motherboard; mine was situated between the full form PCIe connector and the CPU heatsink. The card slotted in easily, and the motherboard had the screw in place to hold it in position. I was pleased with this since I'd read on line that the screws are a special specification and difficult to come by.

Installation of FreeNAS

Now we've got the M.2 SSD in place, the chassis can be closed. My motherboard has smart booting so I needed no special boot order selection in my BIOS. I simply slotted in the USB stick in an external slot on the case, and powered up. The USB stick instantly became the boot drive and I then went through the following sequence as shown in the screenshots above.

1. Click Install/Upgrade

2. The possible boot locations are discovered and displayed. It came as a relief that not only my SX6000NP drive was found, it was selected by default!

3. FreeNAS is now installed and if everything has gone correctly you should see the completion message above!

At this point, reboot the machine and FreeNAS should boot correctly. It won't however contain your configuration since it doesn't know about it. Therefore in my case it'll was assigned an IP address by my DHCP server. I needed that address to point a web browser at it and load the configuration I saved earlier.

Bill of materials

M.2 Drive	ADATA ASX6000NP-128GT-C 128GB XPG SX6000 M.2 SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3x2 3D NAND R/W 730/660 MB/s - (Components > SSD Solid State Drive)	£42.98
	TOTAL	£42.98

I lucked out here - I only paid £30 since my drive had a slightly damaged box (as you can see in the first screenshot). So a nice £12 saving for zero inconvenience.

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Hardware Freenas

Raspberry Pi Music Box

nigel — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 10:45:32 +0000

Raspberry Pi Music Box nigel Wed, 06/02/2019 - 10:45

Introduction

This bog provides a tutorial for building a Raspberry Pi music box which can be controlled using a hand held device through a web interface. Ideal for a bedroom where there is no desire to have a monitor / keyboard /mouse combination. The cornerstone of the build is the Rune Audio distro which supports FLAC, Vorbis and mp3 amongst other formats. I will be using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ along with an IQAudIO Pi-DAC+ daughter board.

There is fierce debate between the proponents of Rune Audio, MoOde Audio, and Volumio. I elected for Rune purely because there is a native Android app available, and my smartphone is a Samsung.

Bill of Materials

Raspberry Pi	3BPLUS-R 1.4 GHz 1 GB RAM 64-Bit	£34.56
DAC	IQAudIO PI-DAC+	£35.00
SD Card	LXSINO 32GB Micro SD Class 10	£7.99
Power	Official 5V 2.5A Power Adapter for the Raspberry Pi 3	£7.99
Case	IQAudIO PI-CASE+	£19.40
Speakers	Creative Gigaworks T40 Series II	£79.99
	TOTAL	£184.93

Of course I can't guarantee you'll get the same deals I got, but the pricing should at least be indicative. I already had the speakers I bought for a different project a few years ago that never saw the light of day, so that reduced my outlay to around £105 for this project.

Fit and test the DAC.

Fitting the DAC to the Raspberry Pi is quite easy although there are instructions on the IQaudIO site. The DAC comes with some spacers and screws which align with the Pi's own. Since this is a quick sound test and I will be building the components into a proper case at some point, I only tightened the screws finger tight.

Once this has been completed, it's time to test it works fine. IQaudIO provide downloadable bootable images that can be written to an SD disk and will automatically play mp3 files. The best file on their downloads page is IQ_0_quicktestDigi*.zip.

Unfortunately the zip file was corrupted when I tried this. I reported this to their webmaster.

Build the Pi-CASE+

I couldn't find any build instructions for the case, but it is fairly straightforward. The first point to note is there are some standoffs which should be screwed into the four Raspberry Pi screw holes on the corners of the PCB. The case comprises six perspex sides, and they are slotted to ensure there is only one way it can all fit together - so the second point is it is crucial to dry run this first before it is screwed together to ensure there is no attempt to situate any of the panels the wrong way around.

The panels fit together very snuggly without any slack and comes with some small plastic feet to prevent it rubbing and sliding on the chosen surface.

Flash the Rune Audio distro

Time to download our chosen repo. This is a small inconvenience because Rune Audio do not have an official Raspberry Pi 3B+ image. However there is a workaround - a community member has created a rar file download that can be fetched from the Rune Audio forums.

The file is in rar format so on a Mac you will need to install unrar

$ brew install unrar
==> Pouring unrar-5.7.1.mojave.bottle.tar.gz
/usr/local/Cellar/unrar/5.7.1: 7 files, 520.7KB

Then we can run the unrar command

$ unrar e RuneAudio_0.4_20180629_SC_Pi3B_Plus_v3_tml3nr.rar 
 
UNRAR 5.70 beta 1 freeware      Copyright (c) 1993-2019 Alexander Roshal
 
 
Extracting from RuneAudio_0.4_20180629_SC_Pi3B_Plus_v3_tml3nr.rar
 
Extracting  RuneAudio_0.4_20180629_SC_Pi3B+_v3_tml3nr.img             OK 
All OK

To write the image to the SD card I use Etcher. This is a simple utility app although the command line can be used too with dd - not recommended for those with low experience. Once Etcher has completed it will provide a useful desktop notification. At that point the SD card is ready to be inserted into the Raspberry Pi.

Booting Rune Audio

The Pi can be booted once a network cable has been attached. If all goes well, it should be possible to point a web browser at http://runeaudio.local (see screenshot above). We now have the genesis of a music box but it still needs configuring.

MPD Configuration

There are a number of config screens to work through to get the system functioning correctly. Some of the changes will be specific to my circumstances so your mileage may vary. The MPD (Music Player Daemon) configuration needed one change - the need to select the IQaudIO audio output interface.

Settings configuration

This one in particular may not suit all my readers, but I want to use the Europe/London timezone.

Network settings

It makes sense to use a static IP address on your home network - so we can use a proxy in order for all devices to find their way to Rune. More of this later, but for now navigate to Network and you should see a sight similar to the first screenshot above. Click on eth0 and you will see the second screenshot. I have populated this form to use 192.168.0.204. My router has already been configured to assign DHCP addresses between 192.168.0.2->199. Anything 200 and above is reserved for my static IP address home servers.

Sources configuration

The final configuration activity is to make Rune Audio aware of where the audio files are stored, and in my case they are on an NFS drive on my NAS server. Go to the Sources page as per the first screenshot above and click on Add New Mount. The form to complete for NFS mounts just wouldn't play ball at all, so in desperation I tried SMB/CIFS(OS X Share) and that worked - see the second screenshot. I called my source flac since this share contains all my high fidelity rips. I then repeated the process by creating a mount for mp3 for my low definition audio. The third screenshot shows the two mounts listed, and I have instigated a rebuild of the library, and this is shown by the updating spinner bottom left.

Playback

As soon as the library has been underway for a short period of time and has added a few artists / albums, playback can be tested. I picked an album at random for my end to end test, and it played seamlessly.

Native Android App - Runeaudio Remote Control

The native app scans the local network and automatically shows all the connected RuneAudio players, allowing you to control them from the same place. It also displays the RuneUI in a true full screen, with no browsers bars and weird scroll behaviours.The app uses the avahi protocol to scan the local network. It detects the connected RuneAudio players which expose the avahi service and lists them, showing also their IP and MAC addresses.

The resulting UI is actually the same as a web browser but I found it immensely frustrating. My habit is to tap the built-in Samsung back key to navigate and that immediately drops me out of the app. Restarting the app requires the initial network discovery to be run again, and mine steadfastly refused to connect initially, but then suddenly appeared to figure out my network and was rock steady afterwards.

Resolving runeaudio.local - Desktop

Rune Audio uses the Avahi protocol which theoretically means when added to a local network, pointing a browser to http://runeaudio.local should 'just work'. Whilst setting up Rune Audio I noticed this capability was very hit and miss. There are ways of getting a rock solid configuration - for a desktop the simple solution would be to add runeadio.local to the /etc/hosts file.

/etc/hosts

192.168.0.204 runeaudio.local

Obviously the IP address should be swapped with whichever you have used.

Resolving runeaudio.local - Handheld Device

Since /etc/hosts can't be edited on a handheld device such as a tablet or a smartphone, we need another solution. The workaround for this is to use a proxy server as per my blog where I utilised another Raspberry Pi as a proxy. Firstly log into the proxy server and edit its /etc/hosts like the desktop so you will have an entry

192.168.0.204 runeaudio.local

The Squid proxy will then need a reboot.

$ sudo service squid3 restart

You will then have to ensure your handheld device is using the proxy for internet access. Screenshots for achieving this on an iPad and an Android phone are in my other blog just mentioned and are not duplicated here for brevity. Just click though if you need guidance.

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Hardware Raspberry Pi

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Hardware Upgrade

nigel — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 12:43:04 +0000

Building a Home FreeNAS Server - Hardware Upgrade nigel Wed, 07/11/2018 - 12:43

A Late 2018 Upgrade

Since I built my FreeNAS server six years ago I have come to utterly depend up it. All the media I have resides on it (I won't use the cloud!!). I can access the server from everywhere in my apartment. My Plex server uses it. My Android TV device uses it. I have a dedicated HiFi laptop that streams FLAC files to my TEAC DAC. It is absolutely crucial to my life.

My hardware was initially from 2007 although in the intervening years I did upgrade it to a new motherboard albeit that too was secondhand. The chassis was the same and the power supply was the same. It has become unreliable over the years and needs a reboot about once a week. The console messages are suggesting that power is the issue. Hardly surprising considering it is in a tower case from 2007 with minimal power.

So the decision was made to upgrade the hardware to new products. Radical! But since I depend upon it so much, it must have good hardware. My disks are still on 30% capacity so there is no urgency to upgrade those - thankfully - since a weakness of FreeNAS is it is seriously difficult to add new drives.

So let's have a look at my (sometimes strange) hardware decisions!

Motherboard

I decided upon using an 8th generation Intel chip, and wanted a socket LGA 1151 as a consequence. Ideally I was going to go for a Supermicro dedicated server motherboard. However my enthusiasm was somewhat tempered when I couldn't find a new board under £200. That quite frankly was too much for my budget. If this was a commercial machine, I would have spent the money, but since this is a hobby machine I can't really justify the expense. So I decided upon a gaming motherboard instead that was a fraction of the price. It had the prerequisite 4 SATA connections and a capacity of 32GB RAM - just what I wanted.

RAM

Whilst I wanted my motherboard to have a capacity of 32GB, I was only ready to buy 16GB this time around. I was looking for one stick, DDR4 2400MHz. The Corsair chip above came in marginally cheaper than its competitors so got the nod.

CPU

I wanted an 8th generation Coffee Lake Intel chip, and the i3 8100 is a tremendous compromise between performance and cost. It offers 3.6 GHz yet costs only just above a £100 which is fantastic value.

Chassis

Ok so mea culpa. I decided to have some fun with the chassis and I got a gaming chassis complete with multiple fans and neon lighting. It can even be used as the base of a water cooled rig! The capacity for 3.5" drives is a stupendous 10 drives however so this case should stand me in great stead for the next decade regardless of how many additional drives I need to purchase. The model is the Cooler Master Mastercase MC500M and is considered a mini tower yet weighs a ton and has an enormous footprint.

I lucked out with this case. I got it 30% cheaper than list price because it had been returned by a previous purchaser to Amazon with all the original packaging intact and totally unopened. Bargain.

Of course both this chassis and the motherboard could be repurposed as the backbone of a gaming machine at a later date if I want to go for a more orthodox server architecture.

PSU

I used an online power requirement calculator which suggested I was going to need 300-350 watts. I elected to give myself a little more headroom and went for the Corsair VS450 450W. It was a good price and quiet too.

Fans

Yes so I wanted my FreeNAS server to be the most fun serious server, and I bought three Corsair CO-9050024-WW Air Series SP140 LED 140mm fans. I am not going to add this frippery to the bill of materials below.

Boot Drive

Since I built the FreeNAS back in 2012, I've been booting it with a USB stick. This is in fact the orthodox way - the loader contains the FreeNAS system which is hosted on a bootable freebsd image. However in latter times it has become more normal to use a small SSD drive instead. The only corruptions I've had on my system have been in the loader rather than the data volumes, and of course a sticking out USB drive can easily be knocked and broken. SSDs on the other hand are considerably more durable, and of course quicker although since the drives are only used in the boot process, that isn't significant.

Thankfully I had a 64GB SSD which I bought in 2011 and had never used. It was in its original box waiting for a home theatre project to come along. Home theatre PCs are now obsolete since the advent of systems such as Kodi and Plex. Time to use my SSD!

Bill of Materials

Motherboard	GIGABYTE H310M S2H	£53.48
Chassis	Cooler Master Mastercase MC500M	£103.83
RAM	Corsair CMK16GX4M1A2400C16 DDR4 16GB 2400MHz	£118.97
CPU	Intel i3 8100 Coffee Lake	£129.95
PSU	Corsair VS450 450 W Active PFC 80 PLUS	£40.50
Fans	Corsair CO-9050024-WW Air Series SP140 LED 140mm fans x 3	n/a
Boot Drive	SanDisk SSD 64GB	£0
	TOTAL	£446.63

Of course I can't guarantee you'll get the same deals I got, but the pricing should at least be indicative.

The Build

Ok so 3 out of 10 for cable management. This was a large case and a small micro ATX motherboard, and as a consequence practically all of the cables were too short to use the correct cable management channels and features built into the case. I could have bought a bunch of extension cables - but that would have taken more time and probably extended the costs substantially.

BIOS

Once the build was complete the machine can be spun up. The first image shows rather skewed representation of the CPU temperature - the case is open, the fans are spinning and the CPU is doing nothing!

The second image shows the boot order and we can see that the first choice will be the SSD drive (actually manufactured by Hitachi and not SanDisk). The second option is actually a spare USB memory stick I used to store the screenshot. The third is the first volume in the FreeNAS RAID - but that can't be booted.

Software upgrade too!

I used the opportunity to upgrade FreeNAS from 9.10-STABLE to 11.2-STABLE during the process. This is one of the major attractions of FreeNAS - the software upgrade process is simplicity. Providing your config has been saved somewhere, you can trash your old USB FreeNAS knowing full well you just have to download the latest version of FreeNAS, install it, then import the saved config and you are good to go! Furthermore when I was moving my old drives to my new machine I didn't have to make a note of which disk goes in which SATA drive. FreeNAS sorts all this out for you.

If you are still using the cloud to save all your personal media - think again. There are so many compelling reasons the cloud is a BAD PLACE. Either buy a NAS or build a FreeNAS!

blog terms

Freenas Hardware

Grow Mounted Partition of Headless VirtualBox

nigel — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 07:55:57 +0000

Grow Mounted Partition of Headless VirtualBox nigel Sat, 29/09/2018 - 08:55

This blog provides a tutorial for resizing (upwards) a partition on a headless VirtualBox Ubuntu Linux box. The task is accomplished in a few steps.

Clone the disk drive into VHD format
Increase the disk size of the clone
Attached the newly cloned drive into the VM
Increase the partition inside the VM

Ok so let's get started and see what we've got and where we need to get to.

$ VBoxManage list runningvms
"badzilla-d8" {86af2c61-3b68-47c5-a71e-8f45ac196cbe}
"Plex Media Server" {5efa7e7b-ae92-45a9-8244-bae451b53c0a}

It's my Plex server that has run out of disk space. I totally underestimated how much room Plex actually needs for its metadata. I'm going to extend the disk from 10GB to 30GB which should keep me going for a few years.

Clone the disk drive into VHD format

We have to clone for two reasons. Firstly when I created the disk in the first place, I created it as a fixed 10GB and it needs to be dynamic, and secondly only .VDI or .VHD format drives can be grown. Let's get our disk details.

$ VBoxManage showvminfo "Plex Media Server" | grep -i disk
Boot Device (3): HardDisk
SATA (0, 0): /home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vmdk (UUID: 0956c89c-b496-4b2e-985f-2f2d484f6e3a)

Now we know the name of our disk we can clone

$ sudo VBoxManage clonehd --format vhd "/home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vmdk" "/home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vhd"
[sudo] password for nigel: 
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
Clone medium created in format 'vhd'. UUID: e4770417-731a-466c-9124-d1c97625cf7b

Now let's see what we have

$ ls -lash "/home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vmdk" "/home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vhd"
6.1G -rw------- 1 root  root  6.1G Sep 29 12:24 /home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vhd
6.0G -rw------- 1 nigel nigel 6.0G Sep 29 12:42 /home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vmdk

You can now see the two disk drives - the vmdk and the vhd format drives.

Increase the Disk Size of the VHD Clone

Now we can resize the disk to the required 30GB

$ sudo VBoxManage modifymedium '/home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vhd' --resize 30000
[sudo] password for nigel: 
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

Attached the newly cloned drive into the VM

Better power off the original VM. In fact I should have done this earlier. Oops.

$ VBoxManage controlvm "Plex Media Server" poweroff

Now we can switchero the disks around with the following command.

$ VBoxManage storageattach 'Plex Media Server' \
> --storagectl "SATA" \
> --device 0 \
> --port 0 \
> --type hdd \
> --medium  '/home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vhd'

Did it work?

$ VBoxManage showvminfo "Plex Media Server" | grep -i disk
Boot Device (3): HardDisk
SATA (0, 0): /home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vhd (UUID: e4770417-731a-466c-9124-d1c97625cf7b)

Looks encouraging so we'll start it up

$ nohup VBoxHeadless --startvm "Plex Media Server" &

and login in and check the running processes..

$ ssh nigel@192.168.0.203
nigel@192.168.0.203's password: 
$ ps -ef | grep -i plex
plex       976     1  0 15:18 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh -c LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver "/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Media Server"
plex       982   976  4 15:18 ?        00:00:03 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Media Server
plex      1116   982 13 15:18 ?        00:00:08 Plex Plug-in [com.plexapp.system] /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-c40bba82e/Framework.bundle/Contents/Resources/Versions/2/Python/bootstrap.py --server-version 1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-c40bba82e/System.bundle
plex      1164   982  1 15:18 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex DLNA Server
plex      1166   982  0 15:18 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Tuner Service /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Tuner/Private /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Tuner/Shared 1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e 32600 /waitmutex
plex      1213   982  8 15:18 ?        00:00:04 Plex Plug-in [com.plexapp.agents.imdb] /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-c40bba82e/Framework.bundle/Contents/Resources/Versions/2/Python/bootstrap.py --server-version 1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-c40bba82e/PlexMovie.bundle
nigel     1354  1325  0 15:19 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto -i plex

Increase the Partition Size Inside the VM

If we look at the file system storage space it is reporting our system drive is at 100% capacity. We'd expect that - we need to extend it to use our new space.

$ df -k | grep sda1
/dev/sda1                   6061632    5724660       6016 100% /

Now lets see what the situation is per partition

$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda
 
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.27.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
 
 
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 29.3 GiB, 31457280000 bytes, 61440000 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0660013b
 
Device     Boot    Start      End  Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *        2048 12584959 12582912   6G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2       12587006 20969471  8382466   4G  5 Extended
/dev/sda5       12587008 20969471  8382464   4G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Now let's see where our free space is

Command (m for help): F
Unpartitioned space /dev/sda: 19.3 GiB, 20720910336 bytes, 40470528 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 
   Start      End  Sectors  Size
20969472 61439999 40470528 19.3G

That makes life a little difficult because there is a swap partition of 4GB immediately after our Linux 6GB. We are going to have to delete the swap, recreate it between 26GB -> 30GB and then grow our 6GB Linux partition to 26GB. Whilst this would normally be extremely dangerous, the good news is if we make a fatal mistake, we can start the process over since we still have the original vmdk drive. So let's go for it!

Firstly we delete the swap space and the extended partition

Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1,2,5, default 5): 5
 
Partition 5 has been deleted.
 
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1,2, default 2): 2
 
Partition 2 has been deleted.

Now we are going to delete the Linux partition. What? Well deleting the partition won't delete the data providing we recreate our new partition from the very same sector on the disk.

Command (m for help): d
Selected partition 1
Partition 1 has been deleted.
 
Command (m for help): F
Unpartitioned space /dev/sda: 29.3 GiB, 31456231424 bytes, 61437952 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 
Start      End  Sectors  Size
 2048 61439999 61437952 29.3G

Now recreate the partition only bigger!

Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p): p
Partition number (1-4, default 1): 
First sector (2048-61439999, default 2048): 
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (2048-61439999, default 61439999): 53055486
 
Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux' and of size 25.3 GiB.

Next we recreate the extended partition with the remaining space and a new logical partition which will ultimately be the Linux Swap area

Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p): e
Partition number (2-4, default 2): 2
First sector (53055487-61439999, default 53055488): 
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (53055488-61439999, default 61439999): 
 
Created a new partition 2 of type 'Extended' and of size 4 GiB.
 
Command (m for help): n
All space for primary partitions is in use.
Adding logical partition 5
First sector (53057536-61439999, default 53057536): 
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (53057536-61439999, default 61439999): 
 
Created a new partition 5 of type 'Linux' and of size 4 GiB.

Now change the last partition type to Linux Swap

Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1,2,5, default 5): 
Partition type (type L to list all types): 82
 
Changed type of partition 'Linux' to 'Linux swap / Solaris'.

And finally write the partition table

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Re-reading the partition table failed.: Device or resource busy
 
The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used at the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8).

So we need to reboot for our changes to take effect

$ sudo su
[sudo] password for nigel: 
root@plex-media-server:/home/nigel# init 6

When we log in there is good and bad news: the filesystem isn't recognising the new size but fdisk does.

$ df -k | grep sda
/dev/sda1                   6061632    5667620      63056  99% /

and

$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda
 
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.27.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
 
 
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 29.3 GiB, 31457280000 bytes, 61440000 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0660013b
 
Device     Boot    Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1           2048 53055486 53053439 25.3G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2       53055488 61439999  8384512    4G  5 Extended
/dev/sda5       53057536 61439999  8382464    4G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Our final activity to make the additional space available for us is to use the resize2fs command:

$ sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1
resize2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
Filesystem at /dev/sda1 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 2
The filesystem on /dev/sda1 is now 6631679 (4k) blocks long.

And now we have it:

$ df -k | grep sda
/dev/sda1                  25978144    5672208   19165592  23% /

Cleaning-up Activities

Since we deleted the swap partition, and moved it, we need to create the actual swap with the following command

$ sudo mkswap /dev/sda5

In addition, we could either delete the original vmdk disk or archive it somewhere to get 6GB space back on the parent machine.

blog terms

Hardware Linux VirtualBox

Move Plex Media Server to Linux VM

nigel — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 13:45:09 +0000

Move Plex Media Server to Linux VM nigel Sun, 18/02/2018 - 13:45

I've been playing with Plex Media Server for the last few weeks on my Linux laptop, and much to my surprise it seems to play back any video format I throw at it including DivX and XviD which is the format of a great many of my collection of movies. So buoyed by this I have decided to move the entire Plex configuration to a dedicated Ubuntu virtual machine which will reside on my Intel NUC I reviewed earlier.

My Intel NUC is headless, and whilst it is possible to create a VM image on the command line, it is much more convenient to create it on a GUI elsewhere and move it over to the NUC. To that end, I created the VM on my Mac knowing the network configuration would ultimately have to change when the VM is in situ on the NUC.

VM Installation

The steps are quite straightforward so there isn't much need for narrative. I had previously downloaded the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server iso image (more of that in a minute).

I decided to go for 4GB RAM and 10GB fixed disk size which should be more than adequate.

Initial Network Connection

The initial network connection is set as above. We need a bridged network so I can use my pre-existing 192.168 network in my property. Obviously when the VM is moved to the Intel NIC the AirPort won't be a valid setting at that point - so we'll have to change it then.

Ubuntu 16.04 Installation

As mentioned previously, I had already downloaded the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS iso image which is selected for the installation above. Most of the installation screens haven't been captured for brevity because they are straightforward, but note I have selected openSSH server in the software packages to install - this is important since we will need to ssh into our headless Plex server.

We now need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces file to change the default DHCP IP assignment to static. Your configuration will obviously be different from mine here. I've elected to go for the address of 192.168.0.203 for my server.

nigel@plex-media-server:~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
 
source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*
 
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
 
# The primary network interface
auto enp0s3
# iface enp0s3 inet dhcp
iface enp0s3 inet static
 address 192.168.0.203
 netmask 255.255.255.0
 network 192.168.0.1
 broadcast 192.168.1.255
 gateway 192.168.0.1
 dns-nameservers 90.207.238.97

Export the VM

I have already covered how to export a VM image in a previous blog here, so I don't need to go into too much detail in this blog. My VM has been exported and now needs to be copied to the NUC host machine using scp.

Nigels-MacBook-Pro:Documents nigel$ scp Plex\ Media\ Server.ova nigel@192.168.0.202:/home/nigel/VM/.
nigel@192.168.0.202's password: 
Plex Media Server.ova                                                                        100%  604MB   4.1MB/s   02:27    
Nigels-MacBook-Pro:Documents nigel$

Now log into the host machine and cd into the correct directory and import the VM.

nigel@devbox:~/VM$ VBoxManage import Plex\ Media\ Server.ova 
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
Interpreting /home/nigel/VM/Plex Media Server.ova...
OK.
Disks:
  vmdisk1       10737418240     -1      http://www.vmware.com/interfaces/specifications/vmdk.html#streamOptimized       Plex Media Server-disk001.vmdk  -1      -1
 
Virtual system 0:
 0: Suggested OS type: "Ubuntu_64"
    (change with "--vsys 0 --ostype "; use "list ostypes" to list all possible values)
 1: Suggested VM name "Plex Media Server"
    (change with "--vsys 0 --vmname ")
 2: Number of CPUs: 1
    (change with "--vsys 0 --cpus ")
 3: Guest memory: 4096 MB
    (change with "--vsys 0 --memory ")
 4: Sound card (appliance expects "", can change on import)
    (disable with "--vsys 0 --unit 4 --ignore")
 5: USB controller
    (disable with "--vsys 0 --unit 5 --ignore")
 6: Network adapter: orig Bridged, config 3, extra slot=0;type=Bridged
 7: CD-ROM
    (disable with "--vsys 0 --unit 7 --ignore")
 8: IDE controller, type PIIX4
    (disable with "--vsys 0 --unit 8 --ignore")
 9: IDE controller, type PIIX4
    (disable with "--vsys 0 --unit 9 --ignore")
10: SATA controller, type AHCI
    (disable with "--vsys 0 --unit 10 --ignore")
11: Hard disk image: source image=Plex Media Server-disk001.vmdk, target path=/home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs/Plex Media Server/Plex Media Server-disk001.vmdk, controller=10;channel=0
    (change target path with "--vsys 0 --unit 11 --disk path";
    disable with "--vsys 0 --unit 11 --ignore")
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
Successfully imported the appliance.

Now we need to modify the ethernet card settings and the audio as per my previous blog

$ VBoxManage modifyvm "Plex Media Server" --nic1 bridged --bridgeadapter1 enp3s0
$ VBoxManage modifyvm "Plex Media Server" --audio none

Ok now we need to be sure we are in the correct directory and start up our machine. Once this has been done, it will be possible to ssh into it.

$ pwd
/home/nigel/VirtualBox VMs
$ VBoxHeadless --startvm "Plex Media Server" &

Let's try to log into 192.168.0.203

nigel@nigel-Aspire-VN7-793G:/etc$ ssh nigel@192.168.0.203
The authenticity of host '192.168.0.203 (192.168.0.203)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:BLRRmyijEFgtS+KnkXQUudkdsMskpLrzR19zBugQ2ww.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.0.203' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
nigel@192.168.0.203's password: 
Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-87-generic x86_64)
 
 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage
 
127 packages can be updated.
64 updates are security updates.
 
 
Last login: Sun Feb 18 19:58:43 2018 from 192.168.0.12
nigel@plex-media-server:~$

Success!

fstab entry to connect to CIFS partition

My FreeNAS server has a CIFS mount point which contains my media collection. It would therefore be useful for the drive to be automatically loaded on boot. A prerequisite for this is the cifs-utils package which will need to be installed.

$ sudo apt-get install cifs.utils

Next we need to create the mount point directory which will be /mnt/freenas

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/freenas

It would useful to check we can connect first on the command line. So lets type out the required mount command, but first we need to create a credentials file for FreeNAS. This will be owned by the root user and should be placed in the root user's directory and made read only for root.

# cat .cifs 
username=xxxxxx
password=xxxxxx
# ls -las .cifs
4 -r-------- 1 root root 39 Feb 18 21:37 .cifs

Now the actual mount command and a follow up directory listing to make sure it has been mounted correctly.

$ sudo mount.cifs //192.168.0.200/personal  /mnt/freenas    -o vers=3.0,credentials=/root/.cifs,uid=1000
$ ls -las /mnt/freenas | grep Documents
     0 drwxr-xr-x 2 nigel root         0 Aug 14  2017 Documents

Now we need to unmount this and add the entry to the /etc/fstab file.

$ sudo umount /mnt/freenas
$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
#                
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=600eb961-4caa-4a24-b8cf-c35efdd71ca4 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=523ed080-41af-4dab-839f-070f40c26ada none            swap    sw              0       0
 
# CIFS FreeNas mount
//192.168.0.200/personal        /mnt/freenas    cifs    credentials=/root/.cifs,uid=1000,vers=3.0       0      0
$ sudo mount -a
$ ls -las /mnt/freenas | grep Documents
     0 drwxr-xr-x 2 nigel root         0 Aug 14  2017 Documents

That's another job done! Finally we can think about moving the Plex configuration over to our new VM.

Commence the Plex Move from Source to Destination

Firstly navigate to Settings->Server->library and disable the setting Empty trash automatically after every scan as shown above. Save this setting change.

Stop the Plex Media Server running on the source machine. This is achieved on the command line with

$ sudo service plexmediaserver stop
[sudo] password for nigel: 
$ ps -ef | grep plex
nigel     6274  1647  0 09:51 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto plex
$

Note I double checked that there were no Plex services running just in case.

install Plex on Destination Machine

In my case my destination machine is a VM on my Intel NUC so let's see if the VM is currently running.

nigel@devbox:~$ VBoxManage list vms
"badzilla-d8" {86af2c61-3b68-47c5-a71e-8f45ac196cbe}
"Plex Media Server" {5efa7e7b-ae92-45a9-8244-bae451b53c0a}
nigel@devbox:~$ VBoxManage list runningvms
nigel@devbox:~$

So the good news is it is there. The bad news is it isn't currently running. Let's spark it up.

nigel@devbox:~$ VBoxHeadless --startvm "Plex Media Server" &

Ok let's ssh into the VM so we can install the new copy of Plex

nigel@devbox:~$ ssh nigel@192.168.0.203
The authenticity of host '192.168.0.203 (192.168.0.203)' can't be established.                                  
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:BLRRmyijEFgtS+KnkXQUudkdsMskpLrzR19zBugQ2ww.                                    
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes                                                      
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.0.203' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.                                  
nigel@192.168.0.203's password:                                                                                 
Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-87-generic x86_64)                                               
 
 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com                                                                      
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com                                                              
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage                                                                 
 
19 packages can be updated.
10 updates are security updates.
 
 
Last login: Sun Feb 18 22:11:59 2018 from 192.168.0.14
nigel@plex-media-server:~$

On a separate machine, download the latest Ubuntu 64 bit Plex Server, and scp it into the destination machine file system.

nigel@nigel-Aspire-VN7-793G:~/Downloads$ scp plexmediaserver_1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e_amd64.deb nigel@192.168.0.203:/tmp
nigel@192.168.0.203's password: 
plexmediaserver_1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e_amd64.deb                               100%  104MB 817.5KB/s   02:10    
nigel@nigel-Aspire-VN7-793G:~/Downloads$

Now switch back to the term window of the destination machine and install Plex.

nigel@plex-media-server:~$ sudo dpkg -i /tmp/plexmediaserver*.deb
[sudo] password for nigel: 
Selecting previously unselected package plexmediaserver.
(Reading database ... 93857 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../plexmediaserver_1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking plexmediaserver (1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e) ...
Setting up plexmediaserver (1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e) ...
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/plexmediaserver.service to /lib/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service.
Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-19) ...
Processing triggers for systemd (229-4ubuntu21.1) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.59ubuntu1) ...
nigel@plex-media-server:~

The installation process will invoke Plex so stop the service

nigel@plex-media-server:~$ sudo service plexmediaserver stop

Copy to Destination Machine

We now need to copy Plex from the source to the destination machine. The best method is to scp the entire Plex file structure from one machine to the other. The file structure is at /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/ and is owned by the user plex as you can see here:

nigel@nigel-Aspire-VN7-793G:/$ ls -las /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/
total 44                                                                                                        
4 drwxr-xr-x 10 plex plex 4096 Feb 24 09:51 .                                                                   
4 drwxr-xr-x  3 plex plex 4096 Jan 28 20:11 ..                                                                  
4 drwxr-xr-x  5 plex plex 4096 Feb 24 09:45 Cache                                                               
4 drwxr-xr-x  3 plex plex 4096 Jan 28 20:11 Codecs                                                              
4 drwxr-xr-x  3 plex plex 4096 Jan 28 20:11 Crash Reports                                                       
4 drwxr-xr-x  3 plex plex 4096 Feb 24 09:14 Logs                                                                
4 drwxr-xr-x  3 plex plex 4096 Jan 28 20:18 Media                                                               
4 drwxr-xr-x  6 plex plex 4096 Jan 30 21:44 Metadata                                                            
4 drwxr-xr-x  3 plex plex 4096 Feb 22 20:25 Plug-ins                                                            
4 drwxr-xr-x  7 plex plex 4096 Jan 28 20:11 Plug-in Support                                                     
4 -rw-------  1 plex plex 1002 Feb 24 09:45 Preferences.xml
nigel@nigel-Aspire-VN7-793G:/$

So to get all the permissions and ownerships correct during the copy we should assign a password to the user plex so when we scp we can provide the prompted for password.

root@plex-media-server:/home/nigel# passwd plex 
Enter new UNIX password: 
Retype new UNIX password: 
passwd: password updated successfully
root@plex-media-server:/home/nigel#

Ok - so if we switch back to the source machine we need to execute the scp command like this:

nigel@nigel-Aspire-VN7-793G:/$ sudo -H -u plex scp -rp  /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/* plex@192.168.0.203:"/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application\\ Support/Plex\\ Media\\ Server/."

Note that I am running the scp as the plex user on my source machine through the superuser, and also note the double back-whacks and quotes on the destination directory structure.

Next we should start the Plex service on the destination machine and check it came up ok.

nigel@plex-media-server:~$ sudo service plexmediaserver start
nigel@plex-media-server:~$ ps -ef | grep plex
plex     17501     1  0 13:19 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh -c LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver "/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Media Server"
plex     17502 17501 22 13:19 ?        00:00:02 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Media Server
plex     17517 17502 89 13:19 ?        00:00:07 Plex Plug-in [com.plexapp.system] /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-c40bba82e/Framework.bundle/Contents/Resources/Versions/2/Python/bootstrap.py --server-version 1.11.3.4803-c40bba82e /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-c40bba82e/System.bundle
nigel    17541  1453  0 13:19 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto plex
nigel@plex-media-server:~$

Web Browser Destination Access

You should now be able to point your browser to Plex's new home. You need to change the URL to include your IP address, which in my case is 192.168.0.203 with a port of 32400. Yours should be similar but probably not identical. Check out the first image above for the entire URL although you won't need to include the index.html.

You may have to log in again but mine went straight to the 'Recently Added' view as you can see in the second image above. So my media and my libraries have been found ok. This shouldn't be a surprise - don't forget earlier in the tutorial I connected the VM to my FreeNAS where the media is held - and the canonical path is exactly the same to the media on the VM (destination) as it is on my source machine (my laptop).

Empty trash automatically

Now we know everything is working ok, we should re-enable the emptying of trash - see the screenshot above.

Tidying up

A little housekeeping is required. We now have two systems using the same BadzillaPlex name - so let's remove it from my laptop. To do that issue:

$ sudo dpkg --remove plexmediaserver
[sudo] password for nigel: 
(Reading database ... 334962 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing plexmediaserver (1.10.1.4602-f54242b6b) ...
Removed symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/plexmediaserver.service.
Processing triggers for systemd (229-4ubuntu21.1) ...
Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-19) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1ubuntu5.1) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.59ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.23-0ubuntu10) ...

blog terms

Hardware Linux VirtualBox Plex

Review of TP-LINK TL-SG1024D 24-Port Gigabit Desktop/Rackmount Unmanaged Switch

nigel — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 16:53:21 +0000

Review of TP-LINK TL-SG1024D 24-Port Gigabit Desktop/Rackmount Unmanaged Switch nigel Sun, 11/02/2018 - 16:53

Rating

I was idly sat watching TV and I did a quick reckon up - I have eight devices on my TV stand capable of being Internet connected (i.e. possessing RJ45 ethernet sockets). Only three were ever connected at any one time, and frequently I would have to dive into the dusty area behind the stand, and risking accidentally pulling out other cables, to try to find the slot of a device I wanted to connect. The reason three was my limit was because I was using a Powerline internet extender which came with three ports. The Powerline uses my mains electricity to extend my Wireless from my router which is placed in the main bedroom since for historic reasons that's where the BT phone socket is.

I realised it was time to get a switch with adequate capacity for future devices, and I opted for the 24 port TP-Link TL-SG1024D Gigabit. My concern was the Powerline, which would be the input of an ethernet signal to the port, may not play ball with the TP-Link switch. My fears were totally unfounded and I was able to connect up all my devices but of course I needed CAT5e specification cables to utilise Gigabit speeds. This is of course unnecessary between WiFi and cabled devices since WiFi isn't that quick, but it's good for devices that are cabled.

The TP-Link box is a good compact size, and comes with tiny LED lights on the left that gives an indication of transfer per port although the LEDs are seriously small and not particularly bright. The box comes with brackets to enable it to be fitted to a 17" rack which means that it could have commercial as well as residential installations. So far I've had no problems at all with it, and it was the cheapest 24 port switch on Amazon when I did a price comparison.

Bill of Materials

TP-LINK TL-SG1024D	24-Port Gigabit Desktop/Rackmount Unmanaged Switch	Amazon.co.uk	£67.85
Cat5e Cable	RED Cat5e Ethernet RJ45 High Speed Network Cable Lead 5m	Amazon.co.uk	£2.99
	TOTAL		£70.84

Connections

The connections are denoted on the picture above. Most of it is self-explanatory. The Blu-ray connection is useful since it also has the ability to provide online services and movies on demand. I have an unusual combination of a Freesat and a Sky box - preparation for the day when I elect not to subscribe to Sky anymore. The Android TV and Raspberry Pi labels are mixed up on the diagram. Android TV provides Kodi along with a Plex media client which can connect to my Plex Media Server. The raspberry Pi is running a Squid Proxy server which is configured to block ads. The Intel NUC was subject to an earlier blog here.

blog terms

Hardware Plex

Installation of Kubuntu for Dual Windows Boot on Acer Aspire V 17 Nitro Notebook VN7-793G Black Edition

nigel — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 10:53:57 +0000

Installation of Kubuntu for Dual Windows Boot on Acer Aspire V 17 Nitro Notebook VN7-793G Black Edition nigel Sat, 06/01/2018 - 10:53

Introduction

This is a tutorial on how to install Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE desktop) on an Acer Aspire V 17 Nitro Notebook VN7-793G Black Edition laptop. The laptop is a top of the range gaming laptop, but dressed with decorum in a very stylish businesslike black case so could feasibly used at client sites without raising any eyebrows. The laptop comes pre-installed with Windows 10 - hardly my favourite operating system, but I do on occasion have a need to use it when using some legacy apps. So Kubuntu will need to co-exist with Windows 10.

Download Kubuntu

I have opted for the LTS (Long Term Support) version of Kubuntu which can be downloaded in iso format from here. I chose the 64bit 16.04 version of Ubuntu which weighed in at 1.5GB. The downloaded iso file needs to be copied over to a USB stick. I've tried the dd command method in the past in the Mac OS terminal and I've never had any joy with it. So my preferred method of creating a bootable USB stick is to use the Rufus Windows utility. We are ready for the installation but before we do that, we need to consider the composition of our dual operating system hard drives.

Disk Management Overview

The Aspire V17 Nirto comes with two hard disk drives: a 256GB SSD drive for the Operating System and a 1TB SATA drive for user data. This is configured as shown above. Since I want to retain Windows and have a dual boot laptop, I need a solution where both Windows and Kubuntu can coexist on the ultra fast SSD and the user data can be shared on the SATA drive.

Disk Management

Navigate on the Windows 10 settings screen to the Disk Management utility. You will see the disk drive information as shown above.

Disk Shrinking

The disk utility in Windows allows us the opportunity to shrink existing utilities. So I elected to half the partition space between both the OS and the Data drives. The suggested shrink size which the utility provided was spot on 50% for the C: drive (see first picture above). The data drive wasn't so I rounded the size of the shrink to 48000 bytes (see second picture). Once both partitions were shrunk the net result can be seen in picture three.

BIOS Boot Order

Put the bootable USB Stick with the Kubuntu image into the laptop and reboot. When the reboot sequence reloads the machine, tap F2 to enter the BIOS. Navigate to the Boot Sequence and you'll see the USB somewhere in the priority list. Select it and repeatedly press F6 to move it to the top, then tap F10 and save.

Kubuntu Installation

When the laptop boots, hit enter to load Kubuntu. You will be presented with the screen above after a few moments. Click on Install Kubuntu.

Installation Welcome

The installation wizard will launch and the Welcome screen will load. Click on Continue.

Installation WiFi

Set the language then click Continue and select your WiFi and add the password. Click Connect then click Continue.

Installation Prepare

The Prepare screen provides the opportunity to install 3rd party graphics and MP3 tools etc. I've ticked those since I want to use Kubuntu to play back media.

Installation Partitioning

The next screen in the installation wizard is where the fun starts - setting up the partitions. Any false move here could mean curtains for the Windows bundled installation and therefore my desired dual boot. So tread carefully here! The wizard offers a guided partition scheme or it can be set up manually. The guided mechanism is actually quite dumb - it only wants to trash entire disk drives (and therefore Windows) - so don't use it! click the Manual radio button and then Continue.

Installation Manually setting partitions

Once the manual screen is loaded, extend the modal so you can see all the partitions on the hard drives. We are going to need to set up four:

EFI Partition on the SSD to hold the Grub Loader. This needs to be around 600MB or so; I rounded it up to 1GB
Root Partition on the SSD for Ubuntu / KDE. I used the rest of the space remaining less 4GB for swap space (see below)
Swap Partition of 4GB on the SSD
User data partition on the SATA drive mounted at /home - half a terabyte.

Installation Partitions Confirmation

Once the partitions have been set up, you will see the list of partitions and that should match what you had visualised before you started this process. I have highlighted the new partitions. Note I have also set the boot location to the EFI partition I created - DON'T FORGET THIS! It isn't too late - YET - to change your mind or fix any problems. So inspect this list carefully and be sure you've got what you want. Click Install Now and the final confirmation screen appears listing the proposed changes. Double check this then click Continue if you are confident.

Installation Timezone and Keyboard

The next two screens in the wizard are self-explanatory - select the timezones and the keyboard settings.

Installation User

The final installation step is to create the user you will be logging in as. In addition set a suitable for the laptop.

Installation Boot Loader Failed to Write

The installation should run to completion after the user information has been input. Unfortunately my installation failed in the final step - the point it writes the grub loader to the SSD drive. I'm unsure why this happened - perhaps it was because my BIOS was in Secure Boot mode - but if I'd rebooted my machine at this point I would've had a Kubuntu installation that couldn't be booted. So time to find a fix...

Boot Repair Tool

I needed to install the boot repair tool to get past my boot loader issue. Bring up a terminal session - Kubuntu provides konsole

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair
$ boot-repair

This will run the graphical Boot Repair tool

I elected (I like to think wisely) to tick the box to backup and rename the Windows EFI files, and then I clicked Apply. At the end of the repair process there is a link provided which gives a report. Don't lose this URL! Point your web browser at it which will be of the format https://paste.ubuntu.com/xxxxxxx. At the end of the report you will find the following

Boot successfully repaired.
 
You can now reboot your computer.
Please do not forget to make your BIOS boot on nvme0n1p5/EFI/ubuntu/shimx64.efi file!
 
You may want to retry after deactivating the [Backup and rename Windows EFI files] option.

Make a note of that file that your laptop should boot to!

Set BIOS Supervisor Password

We now need to tell our system where it can find the Grub loader shim to boot Kubuntu. That menu option is under Security but is greyed out - to enable it you will have to set a Supervisor password.

Set Grub Loader Location

Now the option we want - Select an UEFI file as trusted for executing (1) is available in the menu options. Press enter and it's time now to traverse the filesystem until you find the correct file. At the top level you'll see UEFI (2). Then ubuntu (3). Then shimx64.efi (4). When you press enter you will be prompted to provide a name which will appear in the boot menu. I chose Kubuntu.

Re-order the Boot Priorities

Now navigate to the Boot menu. At the bottom of the list you will see the entry you just added. Select it and hit F6 repeatedly to move it to the top of the list. Press F10 to save and exit. You may also want to remove the Supervisor password now your work is almost done. I didn't screenshot this - merely go back to the Security menu and change the password to nothing.

Grub Menu

The laptop boots and we have the Grub shim menu system. Topmost and default is Kubuntu (although Grub can't distinguish it from Ubuntu of course) but I can also select Windows should I wish.

Finally...

Once logged in, a screenshot of a very bare Kubuntu. Next of course I'll be adding the essential apps such as Chrome, a dock, PHPStorm, Sublime Text, Gimp etc etc. Just in case you need further proof, here's proof the /home directory mounted correctly on the SATA drive

nigel@nigel-Aspire-VN7-793G:~$ df -kh | grep -v run
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev
/dev/nvme0n1p6  103G  5.2G   93G   6% /
tmpfs           7.8G  140K  7.8G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/nvme0n1p5  9.4G  6.8M  9.3G   1% /boot/efi
/dev/sda2       462G  277M  438G   1% /home
nigel@nigel-Aspire-VN7-793G:~$

There's no denying it - it was quite a lengthy project but fun at the same time and now I have a fantastic laptop that can dual boot Kubuntu and Windows.

blog terms

Linux Hardware

Review of Intel NUC5CPYH with Ubuntu 17.04 Installation

nigel — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 12:41:18 +0000

Review of Intel NUC5CPYH with Ubuntu 17.04 Installation nigel Sat, 09/12/2017 - 12:41

Rating

The Intel NUC5CPYH is one of a series of Next Unit of Computing small form-factor computers designed by Intel. The barebone kits consist of the motherboard, in a plastic case with a fan, an external power supply and VESA mounting plate. I opted for the NUC5CPYH model from 2015 which is now end of life, but still for sale with considerable discount at Amazon (see Bill of Materials below). The machine comes with zero RAM and no hard disk drive so they have to be sourced separately - I went for the maximum 8GM RAM (only one slot available by the way) and a 120GB SSD hard disk.

The machine has 4 USB3 ports, support for two videos (VGA and HDMI), optical output, 7.1 sound, a Celeron N3050 1.6GB CPU, SD card reader, WiFi and a gigabyte LAN connector.

Both Windows and Linux can be supported, and I decided to install Ubuntu 17.04 Server. My use case is I wanted to move my development architecture to a containerised setup using Docker, and therefore it also made sense to move my proxy Squid server from my Raspberry Pi discussed here, over to Docker at the same time thus freeing up the Raspberry Pi for other jobs as and when they come along.

Bill of Materials

Intel NUC	Intel NUC5CPYH NUC Kit	Amazon.co.uk	£115.00
RAM	Crucial 8GB DDR3L 1600 MT/s (PC3L-12800) SODIMM 204-Pin -CT102464BF160B	Amazon.co.uk	£58.44
SSD	SanDisk SSD PLUS 120 GB up to 530 MB/s Sata III 2.5 inch Internal SSD	Amazon.co.uk	£48.99
	TOTAL		£222.43

Installation

To install the RAM and the SSD the base needs to be removed by backing off the screws in the device's feet. Note the screws won't come all the way out - doing so will compromise the cables linked between the base and the motherboard.

Once the screws have been backed off, the base can be carefully pulled away from the case. Be careful not to pull out the cables accidentally. The slot for the RAM is at the front of the pic.

The RAM can now be slotted in. This is achieved by carefully sliding the connectors into the slots with the memory stick resting against the supporting clips then gently pressing it down until a satisfying click is heard.

The SSD slot is actually a caddy which is built into the base and the SSD can be easily slid in although it is a fairly tight fit. Push it gently to ensure the connectors marry up. The base can now be screwed close and the peripherals connected (screen, keyboard, mouse) before powering up using the multi-country power connector.

Configuration

The machine comes with a lovely BIOS dashboard. When it starts to boot up, press the F2 key to access it.

If you click on advanced you can get to the main dashboard. Here you will see your configuration - living proof it can find its 8GB memory!

Installation of Ubuntu 17.04

I downloaded an ISO image of Ubuntu 17.04 AMD 64 bit from here and using the Rufus ISO writer, wrote this to a Cruzer USB memory stick. Note that the SD drive is not bootable so USB has to be used. I placed the USB stick in a spare USB slot and navigated to the boot menu on the BIOS screens.

The order required (under Legacy) is the SSD drive first, then the Sandisk USB stick second. That way once the OS has been installed on the SSD and the installation process has rebooted it won't start the installation again.

Ubuntu Software Installation

The software installation is straightforward. Since I am going to containerise all my development services I don't need to install too much. The standard utilities are always going to be useful, but also don't forget OpenSSH server - this will enable you to ssh into the box so you can consign the screen keyboard and mouse to the cupboard.

Ubuntu Static IP Address

By default as part of the installation process, the LAN will be configured to request an IP address from DHCP server. I would like mine to be static so to achieve that, edit /etc/network/interface

root@devbox:/etc/network# cat interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
 
source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*
 
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
 
# The primary network interface
auto enp3s0
#iface enp3s0 inet dhcp
iface enp3s0 inet static
 address 192.168.0.202
 netmask 255.255.255.0
 network 192.168.0.1
 broadcast 192.168.1.255
 gateway 192.168.0.1
 dns-nameservers 90.207.238.97
 
 
root@devbox:/etc/network#

Obviously you will need to change the settings to suit your own circumstances. I am using my ISP's nameserver and I have allocated this machine 192.168.0.202.

Conclusion

So far I have been very impressed with the Intel NUC. It is built with a great deal of quality - just packing up the packaging I was astonished by the sheer weight of this small 4" or so box. Yes I have bought was it is effectively the bottom of the range (i.e. cheapest) offering, and it is now two years since it was launched - a lifetime for hardware. But it performs extremely well for what I need - my own containerised development environment. It has the headroom (8GB RAM) to run all I will need it to and still have plenty of horsepower left should I need to expand.

blog terms

Linux Hardware