I’m having a lot of trouble with Ubuntu (l finally figured out how to enable wifi but now I’m stuck in a login loop I have no idea how to solve even after trying the first five things on google.) I’m incredibly frustrated with it.
Running this as a Plex Box, is it severely limited with Windows?
Log in to Ubuntu or to Plex?
Also hot tip but on install select “automatically log in” that way if it ever reboots unattended it will go straight in.
I’m not sure what you’ve tried…but I would start by dropping down to a terminal “Control, Alt, F3” as example. Type your user name and password in at the shell and see if it works that way. If it does…that’s all you really need to do unless you want to use the computer for other than plex. I know that’s a crappy example of “fixing it”…but it should work.
Did you try something like this?
Ubuntu. That is one of the things I tried, but with limited knowledge of the command line, it’s likely I mucked it up.
In the end, I just did a clean install of Ubuntu and hoped it would never happen again. Took your tip selected that option.
Thanks for the reply!
Anyone have a good link to a cheap dual or quad nic that will work with this box?
Thanks
What about this nic?
HP NC360T, $13-15 on eBay. Has been working great with PFSense.
Well said, virtualization of router is perfectly doable , except if you leaning then you are taking the internet off .
The PDF for the BIOS on HP’s site indicates the answer to my question is no, but in case it’s dated or I’m missing something…
Is it possible to enable on-board video and an external RX 550 (etc.) simultaneously?
It is not.
I wanted to give an update on my build. I picked up a 290 about a month ago.
I also grabbed:
WD Blue 500 Gb NVMe
8Gb Ram
I have my 290 up and running on Ubuntu as described in the guide. Getting the library drives mapped to my NAS was a PITA with not knowing anything about Linux. Also having 2 Plex servers running on the same network/same account both externally accessible took a minute. I have to admit I did accidentally down the original Plex server while trying to configure the external ports. Not sure why, but it did go down for a bit.
It has been running fine since I finished all these configurations and I have all my libraries setup on the new server. I haven’t yet moved any users over to it, I’ve just been testing with my local users right now. I also have to make a decision about about where I want to store my libraries going forward. I’ve outgrown the space on my current NAS (WD PR2100), but haven’t pulled the trigger on that yet. Looking for options that are cost effective, not too large, or loud. I keep going back and forth between just buying a simple 4/6 Bay NAS for storage only, or building an Unraid Server.
Can you take a look at this stream and make sure everything is working as it should? I assume that since I see the (hw) references next to each side of the video transcoding that it is running as it should.
Another question. Is there any advantage with upgrading the CPU to an i3-9100? I see that the version of the GPU goes from a 610 to a 630 and of course processing power would increase. Is there any benefit with transcodes to do this?
Thanks for all your help and information. These forums are awesome!
A big thankyou to everyone in this thread, and of course @JDM_WAAAT - Was running my Plex server on my main storage server (a dual X5660 machine), which worked fine but ran into limitations particularly with x265 content where single transcodes would get really close to 100% utilization of both CPU’s.
Grabbed a 290-p0043w, installed a 1tb NVMe drive, and simply moved my Plex library folder straight over. My NAS pool was mounted as /mnt/pool, so just doing the same on the new box as a samba share allowed a simple copy of the /var/lib/plexmediaserver to migrate from one machine to the next. Left the 500gb hard drive installed, and just have it working as a Plex library backup taking weekly snapshots.
End result, I can run half a dozen hw transcodes without even coming close to fully utilizing the 290’s CPU, and do it drawing vastly less power. Really, really happy with that. Now I just need to figure out a way to get ride of the old dual xeon box at low cost, as it’s purely storing media now and running sonarr/sabnzbd with roughly 25 drives. Just need something cheap with lots of PCIe X4 slots for my assorted controllers.
Bought an i340-t4, installed pfsense.
There may be an option in the bios to disable the network card, and maybe even the wifi. If you don’t want the wifi, you can just remove it from the slot next to the nvme drive assuming you put one in. Just unplug the antenna and take it out. If you were looking to use the stock wifi card with pfsense, you may have to compile a *bsd driver for it or replace it with one that has native support from pfsense.
Thanks for the reply. I had hoped to use it with wireless. Do you have a good recommendation for a wireless card that will work with pfsense?
The issue isn’t the wireless card, it’s pfSense. It’s not designed for that.
It’s better to simply get an external AP, it’ll be much faster and overall better.
Got it, thanks for clarifying that!
After lurking for too long and looking at a couple of weeks home, pulled the trigger on a 290. Moved Plex from a synology 2415 which continues to serve in a storage capacity. Only 2 remote family members and they’ve noticed nothing but aren’t very sophisticated. No crashes or buffering so they’re happy.
I’m not quite so happy, cpu is pretty taxed with a direct play. Scared to see what happens for a transcode.
Upgraded ram with a 8gb stick and os is Ubuntu 19.04 (server). Have plexpass, transcoding enabled, and using a ramdisk (thanks for the awesome writeups JDM) for temp transcoding location.
I haven’t seen anyone mention swapping the celeron for something more robust but I’m looking in that direction.
Are you doing other things on the box besides direct stream such as metadata tagging or library scanning? Direct play from mine looks nothing like that.
Negative. It’s plex only - no docker. Added media & updated libraries/tags 2 days ago to let things settle before checking performance.
Appreciate the reference point - good to know it shouldn’t look like that with direct play. I’ll keep digging & testing.
