I was starting to wonder :D

It wasn't an impression of Max Headroom? :)

@Benjamin O'Neal I'd recommend an Optane drive, or enterprise flash of some kind. But yes, you'll need a quick, write-endurant SSD for DeDup. Also, I do have a PO! Craft Computing 1567 Edgewater St. NW, #51 Salem, OR 97304

steam deck is coming so show this in #ARCH with #KDE

@jeffgeerling has RED SHIRT JEFF, you have the demon Jeff hahahaha

My server sits in the media unit, it hosts pihole, file server, plex and gives output to the TV via a VM. My wife just thinks it's another pc ! Total wife approval factor.

Do you own a lot of home movies that you would like to save? Maybe some videos of your grandparents gone? A server may be an excellent use case for that. (One of the many I ended up investing into a used enterprise server) I'm also a DJ in an underground scene where songs are called plates, which, to make an explanation simple, they are unreleased tunes that are played with a limited time span, and sometimes get brought back for a throwback tune in a mix. It is VITAL to me to have a way to keep those songs saved and backed up so i have my favorite, (and also very unique and exclusive) setlist. Sorry for the really long rant, but those are my use cases for having a server at home, just wanted to give you some extra insight!

I have 4 ESXI virtual servers, and 1 server operating as the NAS, with 24 60GB 15k drives, and a external drive chassis with another 25 600 GB drives. The NAS server provides storage to the ESXI servers (they all boot of iscsi luns, so they have no physical drives in them), networking is provided by 2 Brocade/Rukus 24 port POE 1GB, 10 10Gb and 4 40Gb ports. All of my services, firewall, active directory, media server, virtual desktops, etc run as virtual machines. Using vlans, and VMwares features, I can move my firewall, AD, backup server, etc between the virtual machines without ever having any downtime. For me, as an IT security professional, it makes sense, and is fun to play with, and can setup environments where malicious traffic cannot escape.. Downside.. is around a $300 electricity bill every month..

Years ago people at work bought small HP home servers, as they were cheaper than buying a NAS enclosure. I never bothered, as I have all my rust onboard, I was planning to upgrade, but Covid pit paid to that. Ah well.

@@squeekymouse89 my wife learned the hard way not to unplug anything, as she unplugged the Pi-hole and "WiFi stopped working" :)

I'm disappointed that they still haven't adopted the native Steam cache domain name that only need a dns server to fetch the IP for it

"In a flash", for example if you play a 120GB game, its size is equal to 960Gb, a common LAN speed is 1Gbps, so it takes you 960s =16min to download game, and more to install it. That's super annoying having to wait almost 30 min to play your favorite game

@@bacphan7582 120GB games can be counted on one hand, and all of them are competitive so they are already latency focused, i.e. completely out of scope of this option

Yes SIR! This comment needs more likes!

​@@bacphan7582 If its your favourite game though.. You wouldn't be constantly deleting and reinstalling it. You'd keep it installed. :P I use lancache.. Yeah its not perfect but if you have multiple gaming pc's in your house then its pretty useful, especially for win updates too. For example: If all of us buy a new game and need to download it. Technically only one of us will have to download it which takes roughly twice as long or more than the other systems downloading it straight from lancache. (Also good for people who are limited on bandwidth but not really relevant to this) So it still cuts down download time and makes a big difference. I'd prefer this rather than having to download a 100GB game on 5+ computers. Yeah... This video would probably be more useful in some situations but due to also having a few gaming laptops in the house. I'd rather not expose my server publicly just because my games are hosted on my server. Secondly, if I go somewhere where the connection is not great, trying to play it from your server on a slow connection wouldn't be the best idea but if you had them locally installed, then you might just about get away with it. Both solutions have their own benefits. I'd definitely recommend this video if you don't game anywhere other than your home but if you do, I'd probably recommend lancache. I'd still recommend lancache for other benefits even if you don't use it for caching your game downloads.

i played destiny 2 over smb 2-3 years ago, so maybe not amm battleeye games. or did you meant activision's RICOCHET, bc cod uses their own, and not battleeye

*Connect to the iSCSI on each other computer and you should just be able to search for the game files in steam, verify, and play them. As f* or muti accounts it (in therory) would work the same process jsut with a different account. I can get a buddy of mine to test his account from my seocnd comptuer next time he is at my house. I will say it still could fail since scuzzywasn't really made for 2 connectsions. But since they are really only reading it may work fine.

Okay I ran a test using famly sharing with an old steam accout we call that PC2. PC1 is my main rig with my main steam profile that I installed all the games with and orignally moved the to the scuzzy with. I was able to start up a game by borrowing using famly share on PC2 connected to the same scuzzy. I was able to play it for a few min on its own then started the same game on PC1 from the the scuzzy and it ran fine on both for the 5 min until steam kicked me out because once the owner starts the game while family sharing they kick you after that time.

@@teetertech FOr anyone who decides to try this, be aware that the drive is showing up as local, so things like "last access" times and permissions (user/owner) information are going to be edited by the system even if you are 'only reading'. In a lot of cases that won't cause issues, but if you have a game with a large data file being read from multiple machines you *will* eventually run into file corruption from conflicting file updates. Again, it's just a steam library, so it might not cause you a ton of headaches to have to reinstall things or verify files on a regular basis, but it's still a problem to be aware of.

@@PoignantPirate yeah I had a game update and it disappeared on the other. So it definitly is a big no no but it was cool to see it work but long term it will just ruin things.

My entire Steam library has worked perfectly for over two years on my NAS as a normal network share.

@@jsncrso Yep. just create shared folder on NAS, map shared folder in Windows, install and done.

Most of my games work fine but there are certainly exceptions; a lot of MSFT games for example seem to take offense, Halo and Forza in particular seem to not much like being on the network. Sometimes it works, sometimes it just doesn’t at all.

@@1armbiker Ahh. ok. thanks for the warning. I've been using Steam and Epic Games stores. Anything M$FT I'll keep local (or buy through the other stores).

This!

Yeah true, but ZFS deduplication cannot be recommended!!! It only sort of works if you a don't reboot and can store the deduptable in RAM or b you have a really fast persistent L2Arc like an Optane drive. Tbh it's not worth the drawbacks right now. The only dedup that works alright without those drawbacks is vdo. Also deduplication isnt really required for the space saving in this instance as you can just install all the games and then just snapshot that drive and make another share of off that

Modzilla how would you go about that? Install games, create snapshot of Steam dataset for each user/computer, have each user’s iSCSI point to their respective snapshot? What happens for game updates?

@@ReturnJJ yeah that's where it falls apart a little. You'd need to a another clone/snapshot. But I think that would be a fair trade since all the save states are stored somewhere else and this way you don't need to download updates more than once.

@@LampJustin I just had an idea, what if the Steam Library has its games installed and updated using a VM but there is no actual gaming down on there, and then have snapshots for each user and a snapshot for the Steam Library VM so that the VM can commit game updates and installs? I don’t know why I randomly thought of that while I was bored, but there’s that.

Some used Intel NIC and a Microtik 5pt 10Gb switch and DAC cables is a cheap easy way to get 10GB

Yes, the difference with smaller files is immense. Even a 10gbit connection can feel totally wonky over SMB when you transfer f.e. a games folder. with iscsi it just chucks along at whatever the NIC can transfer.

🤔 I think I watch your other channel, Redneck computer geek?

Which diskstation do you have?

@@MrMackster01 an old 916+ with 2x 4TB WD RED -- nothing fancy. Just tried running Flight Sim 2020 from it and loading time were just fine

Well aware....

The first couple 49th State I had were wonderful. And there's always ANYTHING from Anchorage....

@@CraftComputing I'm not a stout drinker so I'll take your word on them :)

But those speeds are irrelevant if your storage can't transfer that fast

@@mrmotofy I have 2 25 arrays, most of the disks are mirrored stripes.. the storage can easily keep up.

Wow! You're right! I'm still new to iSCSI, so I tried connecting a Windows VM to the same iSCSI LUN volume I made for my laptop...and it worked right away! Awesome! For those that have an Asustor NAS, this works! It seems we can't share Btrfs snapshots, but this LUN alternative seems way better anyway.

This was my method till the vhd crashed.. 8tb of my games lost. Inc 3tb of mods and configs.. it HURT! Def go the iscsi method

If you use Steam, you should be getting the appropriate save files through the steam cloud. With the de-duplication, you can just set up two iSCSI drives and fill them with the same games, and the NAS will take care of de-wasting the space.

It's difficult when everybody is switching to 10 gig. I switched and started getting about 75% more throughput on a plain old HDD. Now I get about 380MB transfers on all HDD's, more drives will just add. Ore capacity and more speed.

How and where do you do the tweaking for your network speeds? That's my next task for my TrueNAS lol. I'd like to be able to utilize the speeds I'm paying for.

playnite is way better

E:\ Volume was crated "inside" the Z:\ Volume, so basically it is the same test E or Z as it's going to use the same path to the HDDs