Introduction
Today we have an interesting topic. We are going to cover a popular open source server software called UNRaid and how I have applied our NetBeez Solution to make my day to day life much easier. And as a tech enthusiast and someone who has a few TB of videos and footage from my YouTube channel, NetBeez has helped me manage my server, especially identifying reachability and performance issues.
Background
While NetBeez is an enterprise product that is utilized by many fortune 500 companies, the product itself is very flexible. Since it is designed in linux like most enterprise software, you can apply NetBeez in many situations. We have ISPs that send agents to customers’ houses for troubleshooting, we have a remote worker agent that can run on Windows 7, 10 and macOS systems.
UNRaid
UNRaid is a popular open source software built on Linux (just like NetBeez) that offers 2 main use cases as a server OS. Virtualization and storage, or both! I was first made aware of this from Linus Tech Tips where he did his popular 7 Gamers 1 CPU Video as well as making a storage server with over 320TB. His team also has other servers running UNRaid with over 1 Petabyte of storage as they film in 8k raw with Red Cameras. Here is my current application/installation of UNRaid.
How does NetBeez Install onto an UNRaid Server?
docker volume create netbeez-config-vol
docker run -d --restart=always -e "NB_SECRET_KEY=xxx" -v netbeez-config-vol:/etc/netbeez/persistence/:rw netbeez/nb-agent
How to Leverage NetBeez In-Home
So now that is done, you need to deploy an agent on your end-user devices that has access to the server. Simply use Option 4 or 5 depending on if you’re Windows or macOS. Now that is done, there are a few tests that I run. I schedule a network speed test daily on my UNRaid server to make sure it is hitting good download speeds.
I also have a ping test setup to the server’s IP: 10.0.0.168 to verify that the server is reachable.
And finally, I run an iperf test from my server to my laptop to verify that the speeds are what we would expect from an Intel AX200 WiFi card in a laptop.
How to utilize this in a business application?
As mentioned before, NetBeez is an enterprise product but we are a very agile company making sure that our solution is flexible to meet the customers needs. There are many companies who have centralized servers running Linux based server OS’s like UNRaid for managing file shares, storage and virtualization.
Let’s take a popular tech company, Linus Media Group, the company behind Linus Tech Tips.They employ about 50 people. So in theory, he could have an agent on each of his UNRaid Storage servers, an agent on his DR server and an agent on each connected device to the server would be a perfect use case for NetBeez. That would allow do a few things:
- Measure throughput from each workstation to the centralized servers, as he runs 10G networking to each workstation to a 40G external connection
- Troubleshoot performance issues such as the ones above
- Run ping and general reachability tests from each end-user device to the centralized servers both in office and at home
- Run consistent daily speed tests to verify he is getting the connection he is paying for
So even though Linus Tech Tips is not a fortune 500 company with thousands of employees, a small business like this could really leverage NetBeez on their day-to-day operations.
Conclusion
NetBeez is flexible, agile and ready to help customers solve their network monitoring pain points. Whether it’s remote cloud monitoring (stay tuned, we will cover this in the future), managing and troubleshooting people working remotely, or monitoring your remote/hybrid offices, NetBeez is a product for most.
