NAS Talk...

[Scottmichaelj]

With all this talk about external devices running Polyglot, NodeLink, etc to extend the ISY capabilities I thought it might be fun to start a thread and talk about how people are using their NAS devices. Maybe posting what NAS you have, what your goals were, do you like your choice and if not what would you do over or differently, what cool things are you using it for and doing, maybe tips and tricks. This may give people ideas, help, and a resource for new users who want to move into this direction. I don't want to turn this into a "NAS is dumb use a Pi or another device" thread, or debates on VM vs Docker, so lets keep it cool.

[Scottmichaelj]

Ill start. Back in July 2017 I bought a QNAP TS-463U 1U 4-Bay NAS with an AMD Quad Core 2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, 2 x 1GbE, 1 x 10GbE (SFP+)

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-463u

I spent a few bucks on a higher level NAS because I wanted to use it for a bunch of things, some being Docker, Virtual Machines, File Server, Remote Backups (RRTR) to another remote NAS, and NVR for my IP cameras.

First thing I did was installed the QNAP QVR Surveillance software on it. I have (8) 4K Hikvision IP cameras for my home and was hoping this would be a great way to save on not buying an NVR. Lets just say, long story short, this device just didn't cut the mustard for me. The main things for me was, I started seeing gaps when looking at the recordings, dropped frames, email notifications with screenshots were not working right with missing screenshots most of the time and H265+ was not supported (H265 is). The QNAP has four hard drives (I put in 10TB each) and was using disks 1 & 2 in RAID and 3 & 4 in RAID for the IP cameras. Well even at a lower resolution the cameras were only giving me about 2 weeks of record time. For most residential homes thats probably enough, but the nice thing with the Hikvision is there is 8 SATA HDD bays, which should give me at least two months of recordings. So when QVR came out of beta I moved on to the Hikvision DS-9616NI-I8 and so far happy with it.

http://www.hikvision.com/us/Products_1_10655_i36456.html

EDIT: Just an FYI I did report all of this to QNAP Technical Support. After long back and forth I gave up trying to fix the issues I was having. QNAP tech support is great but I am not sure this NAS can handle what I was trying to do.

[Scottmichaelj]

This last weekend I finally got Polyglot v2 working as a VM on my QNAP NAS and with MANY THANKS, Einstein42.

This is a double post, but I am posting this here just for complete noobs like me who want to dip their toe in the water and for NAS guys.

My setup, I created a Virtual Machine (VM) on my QNAP NAS using 1 CPU, 8GB of HDD space, and 2GB of RAM using the "netinst" Debian x64 (which is important!) image found here:

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso

-I then walked through the Debian install, which wasn't hard.

-When it was done and before I did anything else I took a backup snapshot of the VM to make sure I always could go back to my "New/Fresh" install point without doing the installation all over.

-Once that was done I loaded up Debian for the first time. If you never used Debian (I never had) its ok its fairly easy. You want to go to the top left corner to "Activities" and just type in "Terminal". For those who don't know "terminal" is, that is where you will be entering all these commands. When you first login you will be as your logged in user. You will need to switch to "root" (ie super user) by typing in "su" followed by the password from your install.

-For whatever reason Debian didn't seem to have "SUDO" installed. This is the command to install apps. So I typed in "apt-get install sudo" and it installed fine.

-Once that was done I found out I needed to add my login user to the "sudoers file" (I kept getting an error) - all I needed to do was type in "visudo" (as root/super user) and add my username under "# User privilege specification" with "username ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL" (username=your login name) - then type control+x, "Y" to save and enter to save the file. (I was told afterwards I could have just issue the command: man sudo at the command prompt to read them manual entry for sudo. So you can try that instead.)

-So now that is done you have to type "exit" to get out of "root" and being a super user to get back to your login user account. You will know because the left turns green and shows your username when your in your login user and if your in super user/root mode it will be black and say root.

-When you are in your user account which is also important then I ran the following command:

wget -qO - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/UniversalDevicesInc/polyglot-v2/master/scripts/install.sh | bash -e

-Which installed everything needed and when it was done gave me my IP and info to login.

Thats it. I now have Polyglot v2 on my VM. I am going to take a "snapshot" of my VM before going further in case I make a mistake.

I am calling it a day and I will play with Nodes tomorrow where I am probably going to have more questions. Also to answer my question the Node Store is inside the Polyglot v2 install. I thought it was something else outside of it. Its not. Doh.

Please be gentle for anything I wrote that is not perfect. This is just one guy trying to help someone else out who may run into these same issues or is a new user to Debian. If anyone has any input if I did something wrong or could do better next time please let me know.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me.