FrankenServer Part 2: Initial Set Up, Window(s) Pains, and Another Ethernet Situation

In Part 2 of the FrankenServer saga, I poke around inside the PC, set up a media server, and troubleshoot my new wired LAN.

Read Part 1 here!

A week after my order was shipped (thanks for the delay, FedEx!), the PC arrived snugly tucked into a box full of bubblewrap and packing peanuts. The seller included a USB WiFi/Bluetooth dongle that I immediately tossed into a drawer and a Displayport to HDMI converter that I put to one side in case I needed it. I didn't realize that Displayport was becoming so common that some PCs—like this one—have no HDMI ports at all. This is great for monitors, as I find Displaypot to be far less fiddly, but my TV and receiver only have HDMI. I dug through my crate of cables to find the right combination of adapters and cables that would support 60hz. Luckily, I had a Displayport to HDMI cable that would do the job. 

The first order of business was to open up the PC and see what were were working with. I was pleased to find two 8GB sticks of RAM running in dual channel rather than a single 16GB stick. This would theoretically give the CPU and integrated GPU a bit of a boost in some situations, but that remained to be seen. Still, it was a nice surprise. The drive cages were predictably empty and, unfortunately, devoid of extra SATA cables, but luckily I had about half a dozen of those lying around. The one thing that I really should have taken into consideration was that the included optical drive would use one of the three SATA ports, leaving only two for drives. This didn't impact my plans all that much, but it would have been nice to have some spare ports for some extra SSDs. For the time being, I hooked up a 4TB HDD from my old Windows install to serve as the primary storage drive and a 1TB SATA SSD (my former game drive) just for kicks. I'll probably grab a PCIe card with extra SATA ports in the future.

Finally, the 250W power supply was seemingly transplanted from a ProDesk 400, which was more of a curiosity than anything. I figure that most of these SFF HP PCs share components. 250W should be plenty for now, though if I ever decide to get a low-profile GPU, I might run into trouble.

 

Window(s) Pains 

As hinted in the previous post, the PC came with Windows 11 Pro, and while I had shifted all of the other PCs in the house to Linux, I figured I would keep this one on Windows at the start for a few reasons. The most obvious was that I was lazy and didn't want to reformat the drives I already had to a filesystem more amenable to Linux. There was the simple fact that Windows is compatible with pretty much everything, and while I've been having good luck with Fedora on my main PC, I wanted to make sure that this thing worked before I tinkered with it too much. One additional point of consideration that I learned after switching to Linux last year is that Amazon, Netflix, and most major streaming services that use DRM will not play content in 4K on Linux. It would generally be simpler to use the TV's app versions of Netflix et. al , but having the option to stream in a browser would be nice in case the apps act up (as they occasionally do) or for the inevitable future in which Google and/or Hisense render the TV OS completely unusable with ads and bloat. Our current TV's home page has been serving up ads for The Kardashians and some "erotic thriller" on Tubi, so perhaps that day will arrive sooner than I think. In any case, there's a spare NVMe slot on the motherboard if I want to install Linux down the line. I'll have to reformat the drives though...we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Windows 11 was largely new to me, as I had only ever spent about 30 minutes in the OS on my primary PC. I updated my old Windows installation to W11 "just in case" and then promptly installed Linux to another drive. The only times I had ever logged into Windows were when I jailbroke my Kindle and when I needed to update the firmware on a game controller. Since then, I had forgotten how much Microsoft and Copilot nonsense infested the OS, so I set about stripping away all the unnecessary AI and data collection functionality that I would never use.  I was able to uninstall OneDrive and most of the included Microsoft apps easily enough. I used Chris Titus' oft-recommended Windows Utility for the rest.

 

So, how bad is Windows 11 in daily usage? I'll start with some positives to be fair, of which there are actually a few! At 4k/2160p and with the display scaling cranked up to 300%, Windows 11 is pretty usable from the couch. The taskbar icons and most apps scaled appropriately, with only a few old and stubborn holdouts whose pop out menus were cut off at the bottom, leaving me unable to accept settings changes. I ended up settling on 250% scaling as a happy medium.

My 2.4Ghz Logitech K400 keyboard worked as expected. The real surprise was how well my new Steam Controller worked as a mouse in Windows as long as Steam was running (which wasn't a problem since I launch Steam at startup). My Fedora PC wasn't quite sure what to do with the peripheral, and it kept asking me if I really wanted to give the controller access to the desktop. This ended up being one of the few things that Windows handled well right out of the box. I tweaked some of the button assignments to my liking using Steam input, but most of the defaults worked well, and internet browsing on the controller was a breeze with the rear buttons mapped to middle click and back/forward. I could even bring up an on-screen keyboard and type with the touchpads like on the Steam Deck, though occasionally a window would take priority and awkwardly block the keyboard. Launching a game natively or through Remote Play would change the controller over to gamepad mode, where—you guessed it—it worked like a gamepad.

Where Windows 11 became a real pain in the ass is the Settings menu, which follows the same redundant and needlessly nested format that Microsoft has been obsessed with since Windows 8. Everything takes at least 3-4 more clicks than necessary, and underneath all of that, there's still the old school Control panel that handles options that Microsoft just doesn't feel like surfacing in the main Settings menu for whatever reason (along with a bunch of items that needlessly appear in both). 

I may have struggled to set up certain things in Fedora Linux, but as far as general everyday usability, most items were laid out in a sensible fashion. As noted in one of my entries last summer, the display menu surfaced nearly every setting I would have wanted, even things like refresh rate and multiple monitors. Compare that with Windows 11's nested menus that require you to click into half of the setting before you can modify it:

This was only the tip of the iceberg. Some of these bewildering design decisions existed for years in previous versions of Windows, while others compounded old issues with additional layers of needless confusion. Why do I need to click into an Advanced menu just to change my display resolution and scaling? Why does the Start menu stubbornly pull search results from the internet before my own drives? Why are half the options in right-click menus hidden behind "Show More Options"? Why am I unable to freely move that little weather widget around? Why are programs that minimize to the notification area hidden by default? Why is the Recycle Bin only accessible from the desktop? Why are some of these annoyances only fixable through registry edits? 

I'm still not sure how I solved one particular nuisance, which was the computer going to the lockscreen after an indeterminate amount of time. This didn't matter much for the server side of things, as network connections still worked, but I did find it annoying when I was still working on the PC. I have no problem with being able to set a definitive time frame after which the PC will automatically lock; however, I was not able to isolate the precise setting that was causing the PC to lock on its own, nor was I able to determine the time frame. I would change the TV input back to the PC to find it locked...about half the time. I turned off every setting related to sleep or screen locking, including a few hidden ones that were not with the rest of the Power settings. Did you know that there two different lock settings in the Accounts and Sign In options? Yes, it's true!

I don't think Dynamic Lock is available on this PC considering that it doesn't have a webcam or anything that could determine if/when I am physically away from my PC, but I imagine that there are many office workers who have become flummoxed by this hidden setting.

Eventually, one of the half dozen Policy or Registry edits I tried made a difference. We'll see if it sticks after the next major Windows update!

 

The Ethernet Situation, Part 2

Up next was setting up remote access, which was easiest part of my entire day. All I had to do was simply flip the Remote Desktop toggle in the System settings and then install Remmina on my Fedora desktop upstairs. Creating a connection profile was also painless: I just had to enter the server's local IP, log in with my Windows 11 credentials, and boom, I had control of the HTPC on my second monitor so that I could set up file sharing on both computers at the same time. This really came in handy, because otherwise, I would've been running up and down the stairs even more than I already was.

I had previous tried using SMB (Samba) sharing on my desktop running Fedora, and I never got that running consistently. The user authentication was pretty wonky and required me to re-enter my password every few minutes. Sometimes, I'd get stuck into some kind of authentication loop. FTP seemed like a faster and more reliable option. Setting up the Filezilla server and client required some very particular steps, but there was no shortage of tutorial videos on Youtube. 

The part that caused things to spiral out of control for a few hours was the obscenely low speeds I was getting in both directions. Whether uploading to or downloading from the HTPC, transfers were running at around 25-30 megabits a second, with some rare spikes up to around 80. This was, at best, around 15% of what I expected from a gigabit connection in normal usage. What really baffled me was the fact that when I ran an internet speed test, my desktop was only getting around 150Mb/s down and 15Mb/s up. We have a 300 MB/s FIOS plan. What the hell had happened to my router or MoCA adapters, and when? How long had I been living with upload speeds from the early 2010s?

What followed was quite a lot of running up and down the stairs between the second floor office and the networking cabinet in the garage. I honestly lost count of everything I tried. I swapped out ethernet cables and bypassed my network switch. I plugged a laptop into the same cables and switch to see if my PC was at fault. I fiddled with with ethernet  settings in the Fedora terminal. I combed through the router and MoCA adapter's control panels. I turned off at least three different energy saving features for my ethernet adapter. I removed the MoCA splitter in the network cabinet (which was not plugged into any other cables except the one I was using) and directly connected the router to the office. Nothing changed. 

I decided to investigate the router itself. A few Google searches revealed that Verizon routers do not always play nice with third party adapters. Perhaps a firmware update broke compatibility at some point. I suppose I got what I deserved for using the default Verizon router instead of buying my own, but then again, I figured that the coax port clearly labeled for MoCA 2.5 would, you know, work with my  MoCA 2.5 adapter.  Luckily, 2023 Alex purchased two of those GoCoax adapters by mistake, before he learned that the Verizon router had a MoCA port built in. Well, let's take a moment to thank 2023 Alex for his foresight, because I was able to bridge the coax connections between the office and the router using the extra GoCoax and a spare patch cable.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

 

And so, after about two hours of increasingly desperate troubleshooting, the issue was solved, and I was back to the internet speeds I was paying for as well. FTP transfers weren't quite at gigabit speeds, but they were at least hitting 500-600Mb/s on average, which was plenty fast.

Setting up the media server was as simple as installing Jellyfin, opening the program in a browser window, and loading my media folders. Jellyfin was able to intelligently tag shows by title and season with reasonable accuracy (it initially thought that Gundam: Thunderbolt was some Chinese show called Thunderbolt Fantasy). Some files played without a hitch, but mkvs ran into transcoding issues with the Jellyfin web player. This was quickly fixed by installing a third-party Jellyfin client. I opted for Wholphin on my TV, and while it did feel silly to stream video from the HTPC through ethernet to our router and then back to the TV that was 2ft away, I never noticed any buffering or audio sync issues. Besides, sometimes using a remote was the easier option than switching inputs and grabbing my Steam controller just to launch videos in VLC. 

Overall, the first few days with FrankenServer were bumpy but ultimately positive. All of the basics were working, as planned, and even though Windows 11 was a pain to deal with, the media server functionality didn't require me to actually engage with Windows after the initial set up. Jellyfin handled in-network streaming beautifully, and any media obtained (*cough*) in the future could be easily transferred over FTP and then modified as needed via the Jellyfin web client. 

Next time, we'll weigh options for remote backups, test out gaming performance (both local and streaming) and perhaps even set up a birdwatching server!