Linux home server software – part 2

Networking

For networking I installed Samba and Netatalk. For the latter I recommend to not install it from the Ubuntu package sources, as they still only contain version 2. Netatalk 3 is so much easier to set up, as it uses only one config file. You can easily compile and install it from source by following this guide. I used the start script provided in this guide. A lot of Netatalk guides advice you to set up your hard disk with the Macs file system (MacOS Extended (Journaled) ) and install „hfsutils“, so that your Linux server can speak HFS+. I found this very unstable and its not necessary at all. Just use a Linux native file system for your backup disk. As the server speaks to the disk and not your Mac directly, this will work just fine.

The Samba part of this guide is still a great help, although it is back from 2012. I need the Samba server because my TV is equipped with a Raspberry Pi running Kodi (previous XBMC / RaspBMC), which connects to the media partition of my file server through SMB.

Plex

The „other thing“ connected to my TV is an Apple TV 4, running the Plex app. Plex has quite a nice user interface and some features that Kodi doesn’t provide, like sharing content with other Plex users.
To install, you need to obtain the package with wget, the most actual package can be found on the official project site.
I followed the guide on wiki.ubuntuusers.de (due a lot useful info on computer stuff can be found on the web in English, this is a very comprehensive source in German).
After installation, settings are done over a web interface. The address is: http://your.ip.adress.xxx:32400/web/index.html

Read in part 3 about installing and setting up OwnCloud with Let’s Encrypt certificate for secure access