[Official] HP 290-p0043w Owner's Thread

Wanna reuse your WIndows 10 key from your Ubuntu Plex box but don’t want to have to reboot back into BIOS to find it? There’s a Linux command line utility for that!! Linux find Windows 10 OEM product key command - nixCraft

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New to the site but built a NAS/Plex server for the home thanks to the guides around here.

I want to throw a pfsense dedicated box at the beginning of my network just for peace of mind. Besides my PC I just have a BI box and the NAS/Plex. Is the 290 still the way to go if I can snag it for a decent price? Space isn’t a huge issue but I’d prefer to keep it smaller. I don’t access the Plex outside of my home but I wanted to add a VPN to remote in whenever needed (also want to open up BI to remote access). I see prices have crept up and are now closer to $200 so I wanted to double check before buying one of these.

Has anyone ever found a seller of the 290 that will ship internationally? Or does anyone know of any alternatives available within the EU? I might have to go the Otis route but even then, our hardware costs are no where near as cheap as the US :frowning: I’d pay gold for someone in the US to buy & ship me one over :smiley:

On mounting the drive, I recommend mounting by UUID: How To Use UUID To Mount Partitions / Volumes Under Ubuntu Linux - nixCraft

You probably need to set permissions for the “media” drive to something that all users can read in some way. This can be done by chmod o+rw -R /path/to/mount
The “o” = all users.

You could also create a unique group and give both the plex service user (generally called “plex”) and the qtorrent service user (check it with ps -aux | grep qtorrent) and chown -R user:FANCY /path/to/mount and then make sure that your group can read/write with another chmod -R g+rw /path/to/location.

Reference: https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/tools/modify-file-permissions-with-chmod/

Depending on how fancy you want to get and if you have systemd controlling everything you can edit the users to make everything run as the same service user and group and then everything will just default work as the users are all the same and the files/folders are all owned by the same (this is my solution). I just created a new user called “media” did a few systemctl edit plexmediaserver.service and setup my override.conf and then did that to sonarr/radarr too and everything is owned by media and run by media.

Anyone have PCI-E NIC compatibility issues? I got a Broadcom 5720 that works fine in my main machine that has an MSI mobo, but this little guy just doesn’t want to boot with it plugged in. Every time it starts with 3 long 2 short beeps. HP website said this is a memory issue but when I unplug the card everything boots normally. The pcie slots should be fine as I also put a pcie to m.2 WiFi adapter in it.

Any ideas on how to fix it?

SMBus taping, check here for some info.

Long time lurker - picked up one of these and just getting it set up now. Put in 16GB RAM and a 500GB nvme.

Quick question - do you guys keep a windows 10 install on a separate partition when installing Ubuntu, or do you just go full Ubuntu? How do you accomplish bios updates if you don’t keep a W10 partition?

Full Ubuntu. Personally, I never even updated the BIOS when I got mine. The latest release doesn’t fix any major issues. And BIOS updates are so rare that I wouldn’t worry about keeping a dedicated partition for them. Just throw a fresh Win10 install and the HP tool on a small SSD if you ever do need to update again. Shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes

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Good call, thanks

Initially installed 19.04 per the recommendation in this thread from quite awhile ago. Had all sorts of issues due to EOL repos when trying to apt install packages. Did some reading and realized I should probably be on 19.10 - reinstalling now. Is 19 still the recommended build for QS compatibility?

edit: only Linux experience is with Raspbian so a bit of a learning curve with Ubuntu

The guide now recommends 20.04, I’d use that. It’s the latest LTS.

HP 290 - $169.99 in checkout

Hmm…buy this or keep my E2176g 1u build for Plex? :thinking: :thinking:

Wow great guide, bit the bullet and bought one for a dedicated plex box. Just a few questions.

For those who bought from VIPOutlet on Ebay, does he package it well. The reason I ask is I just saw via my ring door bell the FedEx guy toss the box onto my front porch.

Second, does a 256gb NVMe drive sound large enough for plex?

Thanks in advance.

Yeah, they are packaged very well. Both of mine came in some heavy duty bubble wrap wrapped double thick around the computer, with additional bubble wrap to fill in the gaps. And 256GB should be plenty for Plex, as long as you aren’t doing video preview thumbnails for an extremely large library.

Is it normal for my HP290 to max out CPU at 100% for 3 transcoding streams?

I noticed a lot of lag when it was transcoding 3 streams simultaneously. It was impossible to watch any of the 3 streams.

My transcoding settings look like this: https://i.imgur.com/FREnjZE.png

Edit: Added noatime to my /etc/fstab from the software guide. Will report back if it fixed anything.

What are the files that you are transcoding? What does the Plex dashboard say when transcoding is taking place?

It was a 4k file to 1080p.

I don’t think it was a HP290 problem and more of a problem with the app I was using (Synclounge).

I am having no problems with transcoding now.

Thanks, glad to hear its package well. Yeah wont be doing any video thumbnails. Thanks again!

You can solve this problem by not transcoding 4K.

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What a treasure trove of a thread!! I’ve been looking for a NAS/Plex server for two weeks before the interwebs landed me here. Had a question about the specs of this HP, do we know if it supports 32GB RAM (2x16)? Was hoping to beef it up a bit and pair with a 256GB NMVe SSD 2280 for boot drive

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