Current Server Setup 2/18/2018

Man its changing quickly figured it deserved another post since I’ve added another server into the mix to handle the video camera recording. Reason being using Intel Quicksink on the newer Intel cpu’s takes a huge load off of the cpu and saves a ton in power consumption, also I wanted to learn how Active Directory and Domain Controllers worked.

Server 1:

The OG server is running server 2012 r2 Datacenter with hyper-v for the virtual machines.
For main storage there is an array of 5x 2TB hitachi drives in Raid 5. contacam has its own 1tb blue. There is a 2tb WD green I use to offload raw footage from my cameras onto, finally the operating system with the rest of the vm disks are on a WD Blue 1TB SSD

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Setting up Transmission and OpenVPN on Debian using only CLI, with auto start and VPN up check script. Private Internet Access

To begin, lets start with installing Transmission and OpenVPN.
To install Transmission

sudo apt install transmission-daemon

Once it is installed you will want to access the web GUI from another machine so lets go into the settings.json and tweak a few things so you can access it. 

First we need to stop transmission 

sudo service transmission-daemon stop

Then with your favorite editor go ahead and open the settings file, I prefer nano so 

nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

We need to just change a couple lines, where I have 192.168.10.* type your lan range be it 192.161.* or 192.168.0.* the * is a wildcard that will let anyone on your lan access the transmission web-GUI.

“rpc-authentication-required”: false,
“rpc-bind-address”: “0.0.0.0”,
“rpc-enabled”: true,
“rpc-whitelist”: “192.168.10.*”,

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Current Server Setup 11/1/2018

The server has changed in many ways since its first build with an old 775 socket celeron and 2gb of ram, to a dual xeon 771 setup, to a dual 6 coreopteron with 32gb of ram, back to a xeon 771 with 32gb of ram, and now its an i3-2120 i5-2400 with 16gb of ddr3 ram.

The server is running server 2012 r2 Datacenter with hyper-v for the virtual machines. here is a quick rundown of the virtual machines.

For main storage there is an array of 5x 2TB hitachi drives in Raid 5. contacam has its own 1tb blue, lancache has its own 300GB 10k velociraptor, there is a 500GB seagate I keep images of most of the vm’s on. finally the operating system with the rest of the vm disks are on a samsung 250GB samsung SSD.

Contacam: Running windows 10 ltsb and contacam software to manage my home security cameras. [4 cores 1GB-4GB dynamic meory]  
switched from contacam to motioneye in a docker, much less resources pretty cool webgui overall better imo.

switched from contacam to motioneye in a docker, much less resources pretty cool webgui overall better imo.

Continue reading “Current Server Setup 11/1/2018”

Current Server Setup

The server has changed in many ways since its first build with an old 775 socket celeron and 2gb of ram, to a dual xeon 771 setup, to a dual 6 coreopteron with 32gb of ram, back to a xeon 771 with 32gb of ram, and now its an i3-2120 i5-2400 with 16gb of ddr3 ram.

The server is running server 2012 r2 Datacenter with hyper-v for the virtual machines. here is a quick rundown of the virtual machines.

For main storage there is an array of 5x 2TB hitachi drives in Raid 5. contacam has its own 1tb blue, lancache has its own 300GB 10k velociraptor, there is a 500GB seagate i keep images of most of the vm’s on. finally the operating system with the rest of the vm disks are on a samsung 250GB samsung SSD.

Contacam: Running windows 10 ltsb and contacam software to manage my home security cameras. [4 cores 1GB-4GB dynamic meory]

Docker host debian: running docker + cockpit for docker management. Below is a list of currently running dockers. [4 cores 4GB static memory]

  • Keepass: to hold my passwords for everything im getting old and have a hard time remembering everything
  • Plex Server: basically only use this to stream music to work, and to give my dad access to my movie / tv show libraries at his house.
  • Teamspeak 3 server: i was running a vm just for this moving it to a docker was kind of a learning experience but it works great even was able to transfer all my stuff from my windows install into it with a little tweaking. That server had been running since 2013 so i have alot of config into it didnt wanna lose that.
  • ubooquity: I recently tookup an interest in reading comics this utility is nice for both remote and local viewing of comics, really cool to browse it on the tv using fire tv 
  • Jackett: gives extra indexers for radarr, sonarr, and lidarr on my download server.. i ran it in there but jackett and windows didnt seem to get along well at all and constantly crashed.

Download Server: Running utorrent pro, radarr, sonarr, and lidarr to manage my movie, music, and tv show libraries does its job.. most of the time lol. [4 cores 1GB-4GBdynamic memory]

Lamp Stack: Running Turnkey’s Lamp stack iso, most amazing people saves so much repetitive work. runs my word press site, my invoicing software (simple invoices), and a few misc web utilities. [2 cores 768MB ram]

lancache: Running NGINX in CENTOS 7 based off of multiplays lancache it caches steam and origin downloads so when its accessed a second time (i have two gaming pc’s) the second download is as fast as it can push over gigabit (or read from disk in my case hope to get this on an SSD eventually). [4 cores 1GB-2GB dynamic memory]

Pi-hole: Running Debian and pi-hole dns server this gives network wide ad blocking, works like a charm. I did try this in a docker and it seemed unstable so i reverted back to its own vm. [512MB ram 1 core]

moving a centos virtual machine in hyper-v and fixing network issues afterwards

i have been testing an NGINX cache i have setup for caching steam games and i have been testing download speeds having the cache on different types of disks so i could find what has the best performance, but every time ive moved it my network config gets messed up in centos 7.  ive had to figure out how to fix it 3 times now because i forgot how i did it, now i dont have the normal network configuration i have the network configuration tool disabled and manually set the nic settings in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/. when you delete the virtual machine and re-create it on another disk using the old disk image the new vm will generate a new MAC address for said machine which throws the manual config off because its looking for another networking device. heres the steps to fix this.

First open /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ in your favorite editor and look at the mac address. this will be usually in a vm “ifcfg-eth0” or whatever your adapter name is. simply open that file and look under “HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx” that is the mac address your machine is going to be looking for to reconnect the nic.

now that we have the hardware address (MAC address) that we are looking for lets go into hyper-v settings for that VM and look at the options we have. first shut down the virtual machine, then right click the VM in hyper-v manager and click “settings” in the left panel click the  “+” sign next to “network adapter” go down to “advanced features” and in the right column you will see the “advanced features” options where it says “MAC address” change it from dynamic to static and check the box next to “enable MAC address spoofing”
then type the HWADDR under static.

Once you get that typed in there go ahead and click apply then power the virtual machine back up, it should fix the network configuration settings and it should boot normally with a working network config. To verify the network config is working correctly type in

sudo systemctl status network.service

if it succeeds and all is green you are ready to go, if not you might have something else wrong.

thanks for reading!

speed issue with private internet access in a hyper-v virtual machine

i was having an issue with stuff loading crazy slow in a hyper-v virtual machine after many searches online with people with the same issues and never an issue i kept looking and eventually i stumbled on this, its for “some versions of windows” which happens to fix the issues in a hyper-v vm. atleast it seems to be the case so far immediately after doing the driver install my speeds in utorrent were great and i could still access the internet where as if i had one torrent running it wouldnt even resolve a web address. hope this helps.

here’s the directions with source linked below, i will also mirror their download here incase their link is broken in the future.

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