IPMI and time machine question

[yannickhk]

Hi Guys,

Few details about me:
- English isn't my native language so there might be some grammar mistakes
- My knowledge in networking is very limited.
- please, if possible, try to avoid acronyms specific to networking, I have trouble understanding them. Of course, i do know the most common ones.

Thank you

I am new here and to apple for that matter. I used to build my own rigs but, with age, I decided to switch the the Apple ecosystem which is way easier for me and my family than Ubuntu and android. Especially my wife who moonlights as a wannabe IT expert and loves to brick android phones

I started with a macbook pro and am expending my home network with iOS devices, apple TVs, and an iMAC.

I have done some research regarding a NAS and after i realized that Kodi couldn't be installed on the apple TV, I started looking at plex, which seems to suit my needs. But, to my surprise, it seems that most of my video files will need to be transcoded by the NAS, which obviously requires a lot of CPU power. Seems like the complaints about Apple proprietary stuff over at OCN are well founded, what a PITA. Anyway, too late now, I am already way too invested in the switch to apple to turn back.

So, instead of wasting time with an underpowered NAS from synology or QNAP, I started looking at building a home server with freenas as the OS, with a much more powerful CPU.

I basically chose the parts, some of which I already received (supermicro board with a D-1541 Xeon,36GB ECC RAM, HDD, PSU. Still waiting on the case). And I ran into a few issues.

Regarding IPMI. My motherboard does have it. But how do I find the IP address of the IPMI port for the first boot up? Is IPMI even enabled by default? I have researched for days for that information to no avail. I know that there is a Java based app floating around, called IPMIview, but well, it's java .... no thanks. So the only way is to use the browser. But if you don't know the IP to connect to the IPMI port, it makes it difficult I have only my shiny new iMac and my macbook pro, no spare monitor or keyboard. Hence the board with IPMI.

Regarding time machine: Do I have to create two volumes with two different filing protocols for time machine to work? AFP and CIFS, or should i create a single volume NFS? Better yet, a single AFP volume?

So that's about it, I think that i can handle the rest on my own, by doing some serious googling lol But those two points, I am unsure of.

Thanks for reading

PS: I know that I could have asked over at the FreeNAS forums, but members here are much nicer

 

[HDFan]

So, instead of wasting time with an underpowered NAS from synology or QNAP,

I have a PR4100 and it is definitely NOT underpowered. I am running 3 Blu-Ray Streams and cpu usage right now is <20%. [Re-reading your post looks as if you're already committed though].

If you want to run Plex there are now several NAS drives that handle transcoding:

QNAP TVS-471-i3 NAS
Western Digital pr2100 and pr4100

I think that Synology may have a new unit that can do it as well but couldn't find it. Here's their chart:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/know...y_Synology_NAS_transcode_videos_for_my_device

And the Plex chart:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...-Ac4oOLPRtCkgUxU0jdj3tmMPc/edit#gid=314388488

There is a 20% discount offered to Plex Pass members on the Plex website for the PR4100:

https://www.plex.tv/plex-pass-perks/

However there is a buffering issue on the PR4100 if you have subtitles when using some players, such as Apple TV and Safari. It's not a cpu issue, but a Plex software issue.

You can also solve transcoding problems by using a client that doesn't need transcoding ("direct play") so underpowered clients aren't as much of an issue.

My Oppo Blu-Ray player decodes virtually everything I've thrown at it. You use their DNLA client with Plex as the server. It is just a file system browser so isn't as easy to use as Plex on the Apple TV but you get the same functionality (subtitles, audio tracks) that you would get if you were playing the original Blu-Ray.

The Plex Player App works similarly on MacOS with no problems.

As for the Time Machine question, not enough information. Where is the Time Machine volume - on the internal hard drive, on a NAS, a directly connected disk (if so, how connected - USB 3, lightning, ...)

Sorry, no idea about how to get that IP address.

 

[yannickhk]

As for the Time Machine question, not enough information. Where is the Time Machine volume - on the internal hard drive, on a NAS, a directly connected disk (if so, how connected - USB 3, lightning, ...)

Sorry, should have added more information.
I have an iMac, 2 MacBook Pro, 2 apple TV and the usual iOS devices connected to the same network.
The iMac is connected via ethernet as is one of the macbook pro, the rest via Wifi.
The NAS is connected to a 10 GbE switch (LAN)
My question was about the filing protocol that I should use to create the main volume on the NAS. First configuration if you like. I read that to be able to save time machine to a drive, you need the AFP filing protocol. But that would be a PITA share wise. So, should i create two main volumes on the RAID array, one AFP and one CIFS, or can I just create a single big volume NFS and still save time machine on that volume?

As for the commercial NAS, let's agree do disagree on this one, that i3 in the Qnap is a joke IMO. I know that it's a client problem. If the necessary codecs were embedded in the client, no transcoding would be necessary, such as Kodi (should have gone with nvidia shield ... too late now). But with the Plex apple tv client, almost very single one of my files will need to be transcoded by the home server (mkv and avi at 99%) and with multiple streams going on, that Xeon on my board is going to get hammered.

That's not to say that your client is not worthwhile, to be honest, I've never heard of it. But I want a client that grabs metadata from the web, movies and TV shows get classified automatically, etc.... To my knowledge, besides plex and kodi, there just isn't anything good out there. Then again, I don't know everything.

Regarding IPMI, maybe someone else will know.

 

[HDFan]

As for the commercial NAS, let's agree do disagree on this one,

My response was based upon your statement that they don't have enough horsepower. My CPU usage numbers don't support the statement.

We agree that Plex on a NAS doesn't work very well for Blu-Ray. Plex just needs to work on their software so it better works on a NAS. When we have problems and the NAS cpu use is at 100% then we may have a horsepower issue.

But that would be a PITA share wise.

Sorry, don't know that this means. [I had to laugh as your original post asked to avoid acronyms, and you have a ton of them!]

Time machine over the network has always been a problem for me. I have a lot of drives connected (7 at the moment, not including optical drives) and if the finder hiccups, say with a read error on an optical drive, I tend to get corrupted images.

There are two issues: the file system on the NAS and the protocol that you use to access the filesystem over the network.

As for the file system, the PR4100 has a Time Machine option. When I create the folder via the PR4100 software I have to specify the size, implying that it is creating a sparse image. Both my Time Capsules use sparse images. But when I'm doing a Carbon Copy Cloner folder duplicate to the same device I receive a warning message that the underlying file system doesn't support all of the extra metadata that HFS+ does. So I'm guessing when they create the Time Machine folder that they are performing some tricks in order to preserve that extra data on a filesystem that doesn't support it.

Maybe you'll eliminate some problems if you format a specific partition as HFS+ to be used for Time Machine. The best protocol for accessing an NFS volume from a mac is a whole topic in itself.

So this doesn't definitively answer your question. I'd guess that you'd be better off formatting it as an HFS+. There are a lot of people backing up to TM on NAS devices. I'm sure they could give you better guidance.