HomeLab Headaches Ep.6

Meh, not really any head headaches today.  I got the MediaServer up and running since Tuesday night, with all my files available I took a few days to reap the fruits of my labor and watched a few of the videos and\or shows I haven't watched in a while, specially on a TV.

I have setup a WINXP SP2 and a WIN7 VMs.  Tried to setup a OSX 10.6 and it didn't happen.  I tried three times and once on my work pc and it still gave me the same error, which confirmed that my iso is BAD. : ( booooo So now I have to get my hands on a good OSX iso.

I attended Rapid7's "Using Metasploit on Kali Linux, the Evolution of BackTrack" webinar today.  It was pretty cool, from what I saw Kali Linux looks bad ass and I have downloaded the x32, x64 and the VM versions.  The x32 is going on my netbook that is collecting dust in my room, the x64 is just to have it and the VM may find it's way into my Virtualbox.  Also Rapid7 has a "metasploitable vulnerable machine" which I have downloaded as well to check out later.

One thing I liked about Kali Linux if I remember this correctly is that all of it's services are OFF by default so  its as the old slogan on Backtrack used to say "the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear...", so Kali is quiet by default lol.  Also the big change is from Ubuntu to Debian base linux, there was something about stream line updates, but I can't remember exactly what it was.

Next thing on the Home Lab is getting the network together.  Gotta bring out my Cisco bibles... i think they weight more then the router or the switch it self lol

Media Server Headaches Ep.2?

Now the Media Server is giving me more and more NTFS problems.  I need to change the permission on it to allow owner full access which I don't need to change it, but I need to change the group and others permission and regardless of how I mount it or change permission or ownership or group ownership it will NOT allow me access.  So, I'm done

Mounted my new external 3Tb drive.  

Copied a whole folder from old 1Tb drive into new 3Tb drive as an initial test and I have ownership and full permission.  

It's so refreshing and out of my permission claustrophobia sorta say lol

I'll leave it copying the 400Gbs of data from the 1Tb drive to the 3Tb drive.  Tomorrow or the next day I will move just the media files I want the Media Server to have back onto the 1Tb drive which I will make sure that I have full permission even if I must blow away the partition and setup new partition on it.  This is once all my precious and sentimental data is safely stored away in the new 3Tb drive.

 

Home test lab setup progress part 2

The other problem I ran into when setting up my Dell 2950 was mounting the other HDD's.  I have two 73Gb and three 146Gb HDDs, the two 73Gbs are set as RAID0 and used for OS.  The other three 146Gb drives, two are setup RAID1 where I will keep all of my VMs and the other 146Gb is where I'm going to keep my iso's.

I'm trying my hardest to not depend on the GUI.  So into the CLI I dive.  I finally figured out how to delete the partition on the drives, but still could not mount. Then I found the mkfs command.  Since I'm using the whole drive on both the RAID1 146's and the single 146, its easy to just make the whole disk a file system.  Made it ext4, but now I have to figure out how to make it mount everytime I reboot.  I'm currently having to mount it manually, but I know I have to edit the /etc/fstab.  That's what I'm going to try and figure out next is the /etc/fstab file.

Also have been setting up a Media Server on a older laptop.  Using LinuxMint as OS and Plex Media Server.  Plex is pretty cool and easy to setup, but again I'm running into NTFS speed bumps.  That's what I get for using Windows when I used to actually download movies and crap.  My problem with the Media Server is not that I can't mount the ntfs drives like in the CentOS.  The problem is that I can't edit the permissions.  For some reason in order for Plex to find the files, the files permissions for "Other" have to be set to read or read and write.  I figured out this was the problem because when I copied the movie files locally and changed the permission I was able to find and play them on the Plex server.  More NTFS speed bumps, but I just bought a 3TB external drives over the weekend.  I'm going to migrate everything to it from my current 1TB backup drive and format the 1TB to Ext4 and just put my music, movies in it for the Plex server and be done.  I was suggested to setup SAMBA, but I don't want to head down that road... yet.  We shall see what I come up with.