Hard drives are in a windows PC, services that use the files on that hard drive are on a linux PC. What's the most elegant solution? - eviltoast

I have an old Antec 1200 beast of a tower with a bunch of hard drives in it right now and it’s running Windows 10 with Plex and the Arr suite of stuff and it’s been great. Use it to watch stuff with Kodi, game with Steam, and friends/family can still stream.

However, we turn off the main PC, game on it, watch stuff on it and it can cause plex users to stutter or buffer if we’re using it while they’re streaming from it sometimes…just not stable.

Also, it’s on my internal network which I don’t like so I’m working out solutions here.

I’m getting into learning Linux/Docker and Home Assistant and I have a Linux machine set up now that I’m loving playing with.

However this Linux machine, while it’s got decent hardware, is tiny form factor with an m.2 SSD and I can’t install an internal HD on it much less use the three 3TB drives I have going now or the new 18TB drive in my stocking.

I realize I have quite the patchwork equipment set up but I’m trying to conceptualize the best way to get this going.

In an ideal world, I would run everything off this Linux machine I think. Just because I can keep it on, not even bother with a monitor since I can do things SSH, even plug it in on the rack downstairs if need be. Then use my windows PC to just stream from that server and game with, etc.

That doesn’t seem entirely practical however as things like my Unifi Controller are on the Windows PC and if I put it on a different vlan it just won’t work. So I’m thinking I will likely need to just run Docker on the Windows PC as well to handle a few secure things for the internal vlan like Unifi.

I’d like to still run Plex and all the Arr stuff off the linux box, but how do I run those services on one machine while using the hard drives in another? Especially with one being windows and one being linux?

Is there maybe a Docker container I can get going on the windows PC where I can specify the windows volume on one side and linux volume on the other, and then point a container from the linux PC to the container on the docker PC perhaps and make just one little explicit firewall rule for that hole to be open?

Anyone have better ideas or easier ideas? Should I just buy an enclosure and plug the new HD into the linux box? Would love a NAS just can’t afford right now.

Any brainstorming you can do or thoughts on how you would handle it would be much appreciated. Doubly so if I don’t have to wipe or rename every file and folder on my Windows hard drives to let Linux read/write to them :P

  • thomasbuchinger@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Samba/CIFS/SMB/Windows File Sharing (All the same thing, more or less) is the easiest solution an should work fine.

    However if the Plex buffering is caused by the network connection (and not plex doing transcoding/whatever) it won’t help much. In that case, I’d go for a external HDD enclosure.

    (Msybe a second NIC could help for SMB multipathing, but I doubt that. And I’d first confirm that that is actually the problem here)

    If you know what you want to watch next, you could setup SyncThing (similar to dropbox) and just have a couple of Films on the linux box at a time