This article is an accompanying article for my video about installing Nx Witness on low-power and cheap hardware, go check it out!

Video part

As mentioned, this post is an accompanying post to a video, check that out first:

 

 

Shopping links

Sadly the MelePC isn’t for sale anymore, a good successor to this box (Actually has an upgraded CPU!) is the Chuwi Gemini Lake box: https://geni.us/38TzGV

Power meter used: https://geni.us/h8kokVq

Internal 1TB 2.5″ HDD: https://geni.us/9TP4W36
Internal 2TB 2.5″ HDD: https://geni.us/BacR

If you need (a lot) more storage, using an external USB3 disk is the cheapest option like these 4TB variants: https://geni.us/WEAsX9

Text parts

In this video I’m installing the 4.0 Beta of Nx Witness on Ubuntu 18.04. This is a beta version and not suitable for production systems! If you want to run Nx Witness in production and not just for test use the (also excellent) 3.2 version on Ubuntu 16.04 until the final 4.0 is released!

Download Ubuntu and create USB stick

During the video I do an operating system install of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. You can download the Netinstall ISO file here.

Once there you want to select the version and then download the “mini.iso” file. This is the file we are going to use with Rufus to flash to our USB stick.

The Rufus tool can be found here: https://rufus.ie/

Once you have all that, create the USB stick and you can continue!

Ubuntu OS install

*For my MelePC machine I change a BIOS setting to make it more Linux compatible!

During the OS install I accept most default options, the only things I change are the download server location (I’m in The Netherlands) and I select to install the “OpenSSH Server” package during the install so we can remotely connect to the machine with SSH later on.

Installing Ubuntu to the onboard 32GB E-MMC memory works great!

Installing extra packages

After the install completes I like to install the following packages using this command:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install dstat htop nano gdisk wget

Adding internal disk

cd /dev/disk/by-id
ls -l
sudo gdisk /dev/disk/by-id/DISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHERE
p (show partitions)
d (delete partitions)
1
d
2

(all partitions deleted, clear disk)

n (new partition)
[enter]
[enter]
[enter]
[enter]
w (write)
y

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/disk/by-id/DISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHERE-part1
y

sudo mkdir /mnt/internal1tb
mount /dev/disk/by-id/DISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHEREDISKIDHERE-part1 /mnt/internal1tb

sudo nano /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1  /mnt/internal1tb  ext4  defaults  0  0
[ctrl-x]
y
reboot

After these commands the disk should show up during the “df -h” and is available for use!

Nx Witness CLI install

Follow the video and download the Nx Witness Ubuntu server binaries from https://www.networkoptix.com/

While you need to download the Windows Client (or Mac/Linux) for the Ubuntu server binary it’s easiest to copy the URL so we can download it directly on the server machine using wget like so:

wget URL YOU COPY AND PASTE HERE

After downloading we are ready to install it

sudo dpkg -i nxwitnes.........................deb

This install will probably fail because of some missing packages, to fix this run

sudo apt-get install -f

This should fix the missing packages and the install should automatically continue!

Nx Witness GUI install

After all CLI stuff is done you can use the GUI on your machine to continue the install process.

And that is where this part of this text post ends, continue with the video for all the GUI parts!

Nx Witness NFS storage

To link an NFS share you need to install the NFS client package

sudo apt-get install nfs-common

Once you have that and you have an NFS share available on your NAS you need to create a directory to mount it

sudo mkdir /mnt/nasovernfs

Once that works we can do a test mount of the NFS share to that directory

sudo mount host.local:/nfsshare/directory /mnt/nasovernfs

Once that works we can add it to our fstab file again to make sure it reconnects during boot

sudo nano /etc/fstab
host.local:/nfsshare/directory /mnt/nasovernfs  nfs  auto  0  0

You can exit nano with [ctrl-x] again and make sure to save the changes and reboot the machine.

Once done, Nx Witness should automatically see the extra storage in the GUI!

All done!

If you have questions, leave them here, on the YouTube video or even better, join our Discord server where we talk about all kinds of things related to the channel!

To join the Intermittent Technology discord server, click here: https://discord.gg/abk5kuD