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• Gstreamer AAC encoding no more supported ?

  22 juillet 2016, par Gianks

  i’d like to include AAC as one of the compatible formats in my app but i’m having troubles with its encoding.
  FAAC seems to be missing in GStreamer-1.0 Debian-derived packages (see Ubuntu) and the main reason for that (if i got it correctly) is the presence of avenc_aac (Lunchpad bugreport) as a replacement.

  I’ve tried the following :

  gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location="src.avi" ! tee name=t  t.! queue ! decodebin ! progressreport ! x264enc ! mux. t.! queue ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! avenc_aac compliance=-2 ! mux. avmux_mpegts name=mux ! filesink location=/tmp/test.avi

  It hangs prerolling with :

  ERROR libav :0:: AAC bitstream not in ADTS format and extradata missing

  Using mpegtsmux instead of avmux_mpegts seems to work since the file is created but it results with no working audio (with some players it’s completely unplayable).

  This is the trace of mplayer :

  Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]channel element 3.15 is not allocated
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]Sample rate index in program config element does not match the sample rate index configured by the container.
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]Inconsistent channel configuration.
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]get_buffer() failed
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]Assuming an incorrectly encoded 7.1 channel layout instead of a spec-compliant 7.1(wide) layout, use -strict 1 to decode according to the specification instead.
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]Reserved bit set.
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]Number of bands (20) exceeds limit (14).
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]invalid band type
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]More than one AAC RDB per ADTS frame is not implemented. Update your FFmpeg version to the newest one from Git. If the problem still occurs, it means that your file has a feature which has not been implemented.
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]Reserved bit set.
  
  [aac @ 0x7f2860d6c3c0]Number of bands (45) exceeds limit (28).
  
  Unknown/missing audio format -> no sound
  
  ADecoder init failed :(
  
  Opening audio decoder: [faad] AAC (MPEG2/4 Advanced Audio Coding)
  
  FAAD: compressed input bitrate missing, assuming 128kbit/s!
  
  AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, floatle, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
  
  Selected audio codec: [faad] afm: faad (FAAD AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio))
  
  ==========================================================================
  
  AO: [pulse] 44100Hz 2ch floatle (4 bytes per sample)
  
  Starting playback...
  
  FAAD: error: Bitstream value not allowed by specification, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Invalid number of channels, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Invalid number of channels, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Bitstream value not allowed by specification, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Invalid number of channels, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Bitstream value not allowed by specification, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Channel coupling not yet implemented, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Invalid number of channels, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Invalid number of channels, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Bitstream value not allowed by specification, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: Failed to decode frame: Bitstream value not allowed by specification 
  
  Movie-Aspect is 1.33:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
  
  VO: [vdpau] 640x480 => 640x480 Planar YV12 
  
  A:3602.2 V:3600.0 A-V:  2.143 ct:  0.000   3/  3 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0 
  
  FAAD: error: Array index out of range, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Bitstream value not allowed by specification, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Bitstream value not allowed by specification, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Unexpected fill element with SBR data, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Bitstream value not allowed by specification, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Bitstream value not allowed by specification, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Channel coupling not yet implemented, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Invalid number of channels, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: PCE shall be the first element in a frame, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: error: Invalid number of channels, trying to resync!
  
  FAAD: Failed to decode frame: Invalid number of channels 
  
  A:3602.2 V:3600.1 A-V:  2.063 ct:  0.000   4/  4 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0 

  These the messages produced by VLC (10 seconds of playback) :

  ts info: MPEG-4 descriptor not found for pid 0x42 type 0xf
  
  core error: option sub-original-fps does not exist
  
  subtitle warning: failed to recognize subtitle type
  
  core error: no suitable demux module for `file/subtitle:///tmp//test.avi.idx'
  
  avcodec info: Using NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library 361.42 Tue Mar 22 17:29:16 PDT 2016 for hardware decoding.
  
  core warning: VoutDisplayEvent 'pictures invalid'
  
  core warning: VoutDisplayEvent 'pictures invalid'
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: ADTS CRC not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: ADTS CRC not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio warning: Invalid ADTS header
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported
  
  packetizer_mpeg4audio error: Multiple blocks per frame in ADTS not supported

  Using the error of the hanging pipeline I’ve finally discovered that avenc_aac should be told in such way to output the data NOT in RAW AAC but in ADTS AAC, the point is that i’ve no idea how to do that with Gstreamer. See here, bottom of the page : FFMPEG Ticket

  At this point since i’ve found no documentation seems right to say we have no support for AAC encoding in GStreamer... which isn’t true, i guess ! (IMHO anyway seems strange the missing of FAAC if AVENC_AAC requires all the time to be set in experimental mode)

  Can someone propose a working pipeline for this ?

  UPDATE

  After some more research i’ve found (via gst-inspect on avenc_aac) what i’m probably looking for but i don’t know how to setup it as needed.
  Have a look at stream-format :

  Pad Templates:
  
    SRC template: 'src'
  
      Availability: Always
  
      Capabilities:
  
        audio/mpeg
  
                 channels: [ 1, 6 ]
  
                     rate: [ 4000, 96000 ]
  
              mpegversion: 4
  
            stream-format: raw
  
          base-profile: lc

  Thanks

• Please help me figure out why ffmpeg can't convert this .ts to .mp4

  10 janvier 2023, par cpo

  I have ffmpeg running on my Sinology NAS, and would like to use it to convert DVR-recorded .ts videos into .mp4 format. I don't fully understand this stuff, and have researched to no avail. Perhaps someone who has some expertise in this area can quickly help me get up and running. Thanks !

  


  Here is the command I am running with result :

  


  $ ffmpeg -analyzeduration 2147483647 -probesize 2147483647 -i 'video.ts' -acodec -vcodec copy 'video.mp4'

ffmpeg version 4.1.8 Copyright (c) 2000-2021 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 8.5.0 (GCC)
  configuration: --prefix=/usr --incdir='${prefix}/include/ffmpeg' --arch=i686 --target-os=linux --cross-prefix=/usr/local/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu- --enable-cross-compile --enable-optimizations --enable-pic --enable-gpl --enable-shared --disable-static --disable-stripping --enable-version3 --enable-encoders --enable-pthreads --disable-protocols --disable-protocol=rtp --enable-protocol=file --enable-protocol=pipe --disable-muxer=image2 --disable-muxer=image2pipe --disable-swscale-alpha --disable-ffplay --disable-ffprobe --disable-doc --disable-devices --disable-bzlib --disable-altivec --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libmp3lame --disable-vaapi --disable-cuvid --disable-nvenc --disable-decoder=aac --disable-decoder=aac_fixed --disable-encoder=aac --disable-decoder=amrnb --disable-decoder=ac3 --disable-decoder=ac3_fixed --disable-encoder=zmbv --disable-encoder=dca --disable-decoder=dca --disable-encoder=ac3 --disable-encoder=ac3_fixed --disable-encoder=eac3 --disable-decoder=eac3 --disable-encoder=truehd --disable-decoder=truehd --disable-encoder=hevc_vaapi --disable-decoder=hevc --disable-muxer=hevc --disable-demuxer=hevc --disable-parser=hevc --disable-bsf=hevc_mp4toannexb --x86asmexe=yasm --cc=/usr/local/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-wrap-gcc --enable-yasm --enable-libx264 --enable-encoder=libx264
  libavutil      56. 22.100 / 56. 22.100
  libavcodec     58. 35.100 / 58. 35.100
  libavformat    58. 20.100 / 58. 20.100
  libavdevice    58.  5.100 / 58.  5.100
  libavfilter     7. 40.101 /  7. 40.101
  libswscale      5.  3.100 /  5.  3.100
  libswresample   3.  3.100 /  3.  3.100
  libpostproc    55.  3.100 / 55.  3.100
[mpegts @ 0x5591c4feb4c0] Could not find codec parameters for stream 1 (Audio: aac ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 0 channels, 199 kb/s): unspecified sample rate
Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options
Input #0, mpegts, from 'video.ts':
  Duration: 02:01:58.77, start: 1.405122, bitrate: 4094 kb/s
  Program 1 
    Metadata:
      service_name    : Service01
      service_provider: FFmpeg
    Stream #0:0[0x100]: Video: h264 (High) ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), yuv420p(progressive), 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], Closed Captions, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc
    Stream #0:1[0x101]: Audio: aac ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 0 channels, 199 kb/s
[NULL @ 0x5591c6034980] Unable to find a suitable output format for 'copy'
copy: Invalid argument


  


  Here is the information from video.ts as displayed in VLC :

  


  Media information

  


  It's possible I just don't have the right encoders included with my ffmpeg packaged (obtained from https://synocommunity.com/package/ffmpeg). Here are the audio encoders that it appears I have.

  


  A..... adpcm_adx            SEGA CRI ADX ADPCM
 A..... g722                 G.722 ADPCM (codec adpcm_g722)
 A..... g726                 G.726 ADPCM (codec adpcm_g726)
 A..... g726le               G.726 little endian ADPCM ("right-justified") (codec adpcm_g726le)
 A..... adpcm_ima_qt         ADPCM IMA QuickTime
 A..... adpcm_ima_wav        ADPCM IMA WAV
 A..... adpcm_ms             ADPCM Microsoft
 A..... adpcm_swf            ADPCM Shockwave Flash
 A..... adpcm_yamaha         ADPCM Yamaha
 A..... alac                 ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec)
 A..... libopencore_amrnb    OpenCORE AMR-NB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrow-Band) (codec amr_nb)
 A..... aptx                 aptX (Audio Processing Technology for Bluetooth)
 A..... aptx_hd              aptX HD (Audio Processing Technology for Bluetooth)
 A..... comfortnoise         RFC 3389 comfort noise generator
 A..... flac                 FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
 A..... g723_1               G.723.1
 A..X.. mlp                  MLP (Meridian Lossless Packing)
 A..... mp2                  MP2 (MPEG audio layer 2)
 A..... mp2fixed             MP2 fixed point (MPEG audio layer 2) (codec mp2)
 A..... libmp3lame           libmp3lame MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3) (codec mp3)
 A..... nellymoser           Nellymoser Asao
 A..X.. opus                 Opus
 A..... pcm_alaw             PCM A-law / G.711 A-law
 A..... pcm_f32be            PCM 32-bit floating point big-endian
 A..... pcm_f32le            PCM 32-bit floating point little-endian
 A..... pcm_f64be            PCM 64-bit floating point big-endian
 A..... pcm_f64le            PCM 64-bit floating point little-endian
 A..... pcm_mulaw            PCM mu-law / G.711 mu-law
 A..... pcm_s16be            PCM signed 16-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_s16be_planar     PCM signed 16-bit big-endian planar
 A..... pcm_s16le            PCM signed 16-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_s16le_planar     PCM signed 16-bit little-endian planar
 A..... pcm_s24be            PCM signed 24-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_s24daud          PCM D-Cinema audio signed 24-bit
 A..... pcm_s24le            PCM signed 24-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_s24le_planar     PCM signed 24-bit little-endian planar
 A..... pcm_s32be            PCM signed 32-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_s32le            PCM signed 32-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_s32le_planar     PCM signed 32-bit little-endian planar
 A..... pcm_s64be            PCM signed 64-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_s64le            PCM signed 64-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_s8               PCM signed 8-bit
 A..... pcm_s8_planar        PCM signed 8-bit planar
 A..... pcm_u16be            PCM unsigned 16-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_u16le            PCM unsigned 16-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_u24be            PCM unsigned 24-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_u24le            PCM unsigned 24-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_u32be            PCM unsigned 32-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_u32le            PCM unsigned 32-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_u8               PCM unsigned 8-bit
 A..... pcm_vidc             PCM Archimedes VIDC
 A..... real_144             RealAudio 1.0 (14.4K) (codec ra_144)
 A..... roq_dpcm             id RoQ DPCM
 A..X.. s302m                SMPTE 302M
 A..... sbc                  SBC (low-complexity subband codec)
 A..X.. sonic                Sonic
 A..X.. sonicls              Sonic lossless
 A..... tta                  TTA (True Audio)
 A..X.. vorbis               Vorbis
 A..... wavpack              WavPack
 A..... wmav1                Windows Media Audio 1
 A..... wmav2                Windows Media Audio 2


  


• Adventures In NAS

  1er janvier, par Multimedia Mike — General

  In my post last year about my out-of-control single-board computer (SBC) collection which included my meager network attached storage (NAS) solution, I noted that :

  I find that a lot of my fellow nerds massively overengineer their homelab NAS setups. I’ll explore this in a future post. For my part, people tend to find my homelab NAS solution slightly underengineered.

  So here I am, exploring this is a future post. I’ve been in the home NAS game a long time, but have never had very elaborate solutions for such. For my part, I tend to take an obsessively reductionist view of what constitutes a NAS : Any small computer with a pool of storage and a network connection, running the Linux operating system and the Samba file sharing service.

  
  
  

  Many home users prefer to buy turnkey boxes, usually that allow you to install hard drives yourself, and then configure the box and its services with a friendly UI. My fellow weird computer nerds often buy cast-off enterprise hardware and set up more resilient, over-engineered solutions, as long as they have strategies to mitigate the noise and dissipate the heat, and don’t mind the electricity bills.

  If it works, awesome ! As an old hand at this, I am rather stuck in my ways, however, preferring to do my own stunts, both with the hardware and software solutions.

  My History With Home NAS Setups
  In 1998, I bought myself a new computer — beige box tower PC, as was the style as the time. This was when normal people only had one computer at most. It ran Windows, but I was curious about this new thing called “Linux” and learned to dual boot that. Later that year, it dawned on me that nothing prevented me from buying a second ugly beige box PC and running Linux exclusively on it. Further, it could be a headless Linux box, connected by ethernet, and I could consolidate files into a single place using this file sharing software named Samba.
  

  I remember it being fairly onerous to get Samba working in those days. And the internet was not quite so helpful in those days. I recall that the thing that blocked me for awhile was needing to know that I had to specify an entry for the Samba server machine in the LMHOSTS (Lanman hosts) file on the Windows 95 machine.

  However, after I cracked that code, I have pretty much always had some kind of ad-hoc home NAS setup, often combined with a headless Linux development box.

  In the early 2000s, I built a new beige box PC for a file server, with a new hard disk, and a coworker tutored me on setting up a (P)ATA UDMA 133 (or was it 150 ? anyway, it was (P)ATA’s last hurrah before SATA conquered all) expansion card and I remember profiling that the attached hard drive worked at a full 21 MBytes/s reading. It was pretty slick. Except I hadn’t really thought things through. You see, I had a hand-me-down ethernet hub cast-off from my job at the time which I wanted to use. It was a 100 Mbps repeater hub, not a switch, so the catch was that all connected machines had to be capable of 100 Mbps. So, after getting all of my machines (3 at the time) upgraded to support 10/100 ethernet (the old off-brand PowerPC running Linux was the biggest challenge), I profiled transfers and realized that the best this repeater hub could achieve was about 3.6 MBytes/s. For a long time after that, I just assumed that was the upper limit of what a 100 Mbps network could achieve. Obviously, I now know that the upper limit ought to be around 11.2 MBytes/s and if I had gamed out that fact in advance, I would have realized it didn’t make sense to care about super-fast (for the time) disk performance.

  At this time, I was doing a lot for development for MPlayer/xine/FFmpeg. I stored all of my multimedia material on this NAS. I remember being confused when I was working with Y4M data, which is raw frames, which is lots of data. xine, which employed a pre-buffering strategy, would play fine for a few seconds and then stutter. Eventually, I reasoned out that the files I was working with had a data rate about twice what my awful repeater hub supported, which is probably the first time I came to really understand and respect streaming speeds and their implications for multimedia playback.

  Smaller Solutions
  For a period, I didn’t have a NAS. Then I got an Apple AirPort Extreme, which I noticed had a USB port. So I bought a dual drive brick to plug into it and used that for a time. Later (2009), I had this thing called the MSI Wind Nettop which is the only PC I’ve ever seen that can use a CompactFlash (CF) card for a boot drive. So I did just that, and installed a large drive so it could function as a NAS, as well as a headless dev box. I’m still amazed at what a low-power I/O beast this thing is, at least when compared to all the ARM SoCs I have tried in the intervening 1.5 decades. I’ve had spinning hard drives in this thing that could read at 160 MBytes/s (‘dd’ method) and have no trouble saturating the gigabit link at 112 MBytes/s, all with its early Intel Atom CPU.

  Around 2015, I wanted a more capable headless dev box and discovered Intel’s line of NUCs. I got one of the fat models that can hold a conventional 2.5″ spinning drive in addition to the M.2 SATA SSD and I was off and running. That served me fine for a few years, until I got into the ARM SBC scene. One major limitation here is that 2.5″ drives aren’t available in nearly the capacities that make a NAS solution attractive.

  Current Solution
  My current NAS solution, chronicled in my last SBC post– the ODroid-HC2, which is a highly compact ARM SoC with an integrated USB3-SATA bridge so that a SATA drive can be connected directly to it :

  
  

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS

  
  

  I tend to be weirdly proficient at recalling dates, so I’m surprised that I can’t recall when I ordered this and put it into service. But I’m pretty sure it was circa 2018. It’s only equipped with an 8 TB drive now, but I seem to recall that it started out with only a 4 TB drive. I think I upgraded to the 8 TB drive early in the pandemic in 2020, when ISPs were implementing temporary data cap amnesty and I was doing what a r/DataHoarder does.

  The HC2 has served me well, even though it has a number of shortcomings for a hardware set chartered for NAS :

  1. While it has a gigabit ethernet port, it’s documented that it never really exceeds about 70 MBytes/s, due to the SoC’s limitations
  2. The specific ARM chip (Samsung Exynos 5422 ; more than a decade old as of this writing) lacks cryptography instructions, slowing down encryption if that’s your thing (e.g., LUKS)
  3. While the SoC supports USB3, that block is tied up for the SATA interface ; the remaining USB port is only capable of USB2 speeds
  4. 32-bit ARM, which prevented me from running certain bits of software I wanted to try (like Minio)
  5. Only 1 drive, so no possibility for RAID (again, if that’s your thing)

  I also love to brag on the HC2’s power usage : I once profiled the unit for a month using a Kill-A-Watt and under normal usage (with the drive spinning only when in active use). The unit consumed 4.5 kWh… in an entire month.

  New Solution
  Enter the ODroid-HC4 (I purchased mine from Ameridroid but Hardkernel works with numerous distributors) :

  
  

  

  ODroid-HC4 with an SSD and a conventional drive

  
  

  I ordered this earlier in the year and after many months of procrastinating and obsessing over the best approach to take with its general usage, I finally have it in service as my new NAS. Comparing point by point with the HC2 :

  1. The gigabit ethernet runs at full speed (though a few things on my network run at 2.5 GbE now, so I guess I’ll always be behind)
  2. The ARM chip (Amlogic S905X3) has AES cryptography acceleration and handles all the LUKS stuff without breaking a sweat ; “cryptsetup benchmark” reports between 500-600 MBytes/s on all the AES variants
  3. The USB port is still only USB2, so no improvement there
  4. 64-bit ARM, which means I can run Minio to simulate block storage in a local dev environment for some larger projects I would like to undertake
  5. Supports 2 drives, if RAID is your thing

  How I Set It Up
  How to set up the drive configuration ? As should be apparent from the photo above, I elected for an SSD (500 GB) for speed, paired with a conventional spinning HDD (18 TB) for sheer capacity. I’m not particularly trusting of RAID. I’ve watched it fail too many times, on systems that I don’t even manage, not to mention that aforementioned RAID brick that I had attached to the Apple AirPort Extreme.

  I had long been planning to use bcache, the block caching interface for Linux, which can use the SSD as a speedy cache in front of the more capacious disk. There is also LVM cache, which is supposed to achieve something similar. And then I had to evaluate the trade-offs in whether I wanted write-back, write-through, or write-around configurations.

  This was all predicated on the assumption that the spinning drive would not be able to saturate the gigabit connection. When I got around to setting up the hardware and trying some basic tests, I found that the conventional HDD had no trouble keeping up with the gigabit data rate, both reading and writing, somewhat obviating the need for SSD acceleration using any elaborate caching mechanisms.

  Maybe that’s because I sprung for the WD Red Pro series this time, rather than the Red Plus ? I’m guessing that conventional drives do deteriorate over the years. I’ll find out.

  For the operating system, I stuck with my newest favorite Linux distro : DietPi. While HardKernel (parent of ODroid) makes images for the HC units, I had also used DietPi for the HC2 for the past few years, as it tends to stay more up to date.

  Then I rsync’d my data from HC2 -> HC4. It was only about 6.5 TB of total data but it took days as this WD Red Plus drive is only capable of reading at around 10 MBytes/s these days. Painful.

  For file sharing, I’m pretty sure most normal folks have nice web UIs in their NAS boxes which allow them to easily configure and monitor the shares. I know there are such applications I could set up. But I’ve been doing this so long, I just do a bare bones setup through the terminal. I installed regular Samba and then brought over my smb.conf file from the HC2. 1 by 1, I tested that each of the old shares were activated on the new NAS and deactivated on the old NAS. I also set up a new share for the SSD. I guess that will just serve as a fast I/O scratch space on the NAS.

  The conventional drive spins up and down. That’s annoying when I’m actively working on something but manage not to hit the drive for like 5 minutes and then an application blocks while the drive wakes up. I suppose I could set it up so that it is always running. However, I micro-manage this with a custom bash script I wrote a long time ago which logs into the NAS and runs the “date” command every 2 minutes, appending the output to a file. As a bonus, it also prints data rate up/down stats every 5 seconds. The spinning file (“nas-main/zz-keep-spinning/keep-spinning.txt”) has never been cleared and has nearly a quarter million lines. I suppose that implies that it has kept the drive spinning for 1/2 million minutes which works out to around 347 total days. I should compare that against the drive’s SMART stats, if I can remember how. The earliest timestamp in the file is from March 2018, so I know the HC2 NAS has been in service at least that long.

  For tasks, vintage cron still does everything I could need. In this case, that means reaching out to websites (like this one) and automatically backing up static files.

  I also have to have a special script for starting up. Fortunately, I was able to bring this over from the HC2 and tweak it. The data disks (though not boot disk) are encrypted. Those need to be unlocked and only then is it safe for the Samba and Minio services to start up. So one script does all that heavy lifting in the rare case of a reboot (this is the type of system that’s well worth having on a reliable UPS).

  Further Work
  I need to figure out how to use the OLED display on the NAS, and how to make it show something more useful than the current time and date, which is what it does in its default configuration with HardKernel’s own Linux distro. With DietPi, it does nothing by default. I’m thinking it should be able to show the percent usage of each of the 2 drives, at a minimum.

  I also need to establish a more responsible backup regimen. I’m way too lazy about this. Fortunately, I reason that I can keep the original HC2 in service, repurposed to accept backups from the main NAS. Again, I’m sort of micro-managing this since a huge amount of data isn’t worth backing up (remember the whole DataHoarder bit), but the most important stuff will be shipped off.

  The post Adventures In NAS first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.