Want to set up file server

As for the "what CPU", I'd dive into the classifieds and buy an entire low end Pentium 2 or 3 rig. It'll happily have the grunt to serve local media over the LAN, and be a small personal web/FTP server.

I'm rocking a P2 @ 350Mhz, 512meg ram, software RAID-5 (hell yep!), on Debian Linux.
You might mock, but it's got sufficient go to stream HD content over my local network. AND it runs SABnzbd, AND torrentflux. Oh, and idle it draws 55 watts, including the four hard drives in it. Plus, it's environmentally friendly; this system would have gone in the bin if I hadn't bothered to make it into a server!
 
blueacid said:
As for the "what CPU", I'd dive into the classifieds and buy an entire low end Pentium 2 or 3 rig. It'll happily have the grunt to serve local media over the LAN, and be a small personal web/FTP server.

I'm rocking a P2 @ 350Mhz, 512meg ram, software RAID-5 (hell yep!), on Debian Linux.
You might mock, but it's got sufficient go to stream HD content over my local network. AND it runs SABnzbd, AND torrentflux. Oh, and idle it draws 55 watts, including the four hard drives in it. Plus, it's environmentally friendly; this system would have gone in the bin if I hadn't bothered to make it into a server!
Click to expand...

Yes. I ran a PII 233 with 4x160 disks in software raid 5 for years successfully until a couple of years ago. It's really fine.

And I still have the board with 2x PIII 550s in it now but looking at it they probably draw to much to make it worth while now.

I've been looking at this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation which has very interesting numbers on the CPU wattages.

I have a PIII733 matx here and a PIII 1Ghz here and I think I shall deploy one or t'other as a freenas box. 2 x 2TB drives to start and add more s I find them. It should be fine. and fairly efficient. And by dedicating it soley as a fileserver i'm much less tempted to fiddle with it. Fit and forget.

If I was going to spend a bit, I'd consider either the rack bundles or the NAS bundles from mini itx which are pretty decent units that will take 4x 3.5 hds in low power and space saving case.
 
Been looking in more detail at this.

I have 2x1.5TB disks, to add to my 1.5TB disk on the way and considering my options.

What benefit does using Freenas or Openfiler give over 'just installing debian and setting up nfs/samba' ?

Other than a whole bunch of complications?

I'm talking in terms of a couple of users home network with network storage requirements being media and documents, software and backups.

I tried to install freenas onto a virtual box but kept getting server 500 errors when viweing the web page and I can't find anything to fix that.

I stuck Openfiler on and that does look quite nice, but for my uses I don't see any real benefit.


I think just either using an XP box/linux box, and just hooking the drives up (non-raid) and just ensuring back ups are made to usb drives, and sharing each drive out provides the simplest, most reliable, easiest to manage, easiest to upgrade solution.


If I want to change to a 2TB drive, I just connect it in, copy the data accross and remove the old drive. Where do I even start to do that with something like openfiler that sprawls LVM across all the storage pools?

Openfiler reminds me a little of the DAS/SAN we have a t work. 15 400GB drives in a 4U rack, another 15 1TB drives in another 4U and you carve out the space you require and it's all setup for hot swapping, with hotspares etc. If I had that sort of setup then great, but for 3 or 4 disks in a home setting I feel it's total overkill.


IME/IMO setting up linux raid, linux lvm, samba /ftp/ nfs really isn't that difficult to do from command line, so does that mean the 'value' of freenas is less to me, as someone perhaps can't set that stuff up would find freenas much more appealing?
 
whitecrook said:
Been looking in more detail at this.

I have 2x1.5TB disks, to add to my 1.5TB disk on the way and considering my options.

What benefit does using Freenas or Openfiler give over 'just installing debian and setting up nfs/samba' ?

Other than a whole bunch of complications?

I'm talking in terms of a couple of users home network with network storage requirements being media and documents, software and backups.

I tried to install freenas onto a virtual box but kept getting server 500 errors when viweing the web page and I can't find anything to fix that.

I stuck Openfiler on and that does look quite nice, but for my uses I don't see any real benefit.


I think just either using an XP box/linux box, and just hooking the drives up (non-raid) and just ensuring back ups are made to usb drives, and sharing each drive out provides the simplest, most reliable, easiest to manage, easiest to upgrade solution.


If I want to change to a 2TB drive, I just connect it in, copy the data accross and remove the old drive. Where do I even start to do that with something like openfiler that sprawls LVM across all the storage pools?

Openfiler reminds me a little of the DAS/SAN we have a t work. 15 400GB drives in a 4U rack, another 15 1TB drives in another 4U and you carve out the space you require and it's all setup for hot swapping, with hotspares etc. If I had that sort of setup then great, but for 3 or 4 disks in a home setting I feel it's total overkill.


IME/IMO setting up linux raid, linux lvm, samba /ftp/ nfs really isn't that difficult to do from command line, so does that mean the 'value' of freenas is less to me, as someone perhaps can't set that stuff up would find freenas much more appealing?
Click to expand...

Sounds like you got it - you're repeating all the thoughts that I had when setting up my server.

Mine is basically a media holder; it doesn't need to be quick or enterprise grade, but my requirements were for it to be a low power, low noise, "thing" which held all my stuff. With it being low power and low noise, overnight downloads were possible, and then any computer in the house could access the guest \MEDIA samba share and have at it.


If you're happy enough to command-line it up, go for it. I went into things as a newbie, I just searched for every forum thread possible that had to do with MDADM and went from there.

I don't have LVM though, so I'll be a bit stuck if/when I seek to upgrade. I'm not sure if I'll be able to add another drive and expand, or if I'm looking at a reformat. Nevertheless, I've got a full backup across several external hard drives (hello RSYNC), so it won't be the end of the world for me if that happens to be the case.
 
I think for MDADM you can (depending exactly how you have it set up),

1. remove drive and replace with larger drive.
2. rebuild array
3. goto 1 until all array disks are larger.
4. expand array to utilise 'empty' space on new drives.


I don't think I'm even going to bother with raid this time, it was decent 7 years ago or whenever I set it up with some 160 disks to get a massive 480 gig at the time. I think my main rig had a 60GB drive at that time. My main rig has 2x 500 drives in just now. If I had say 6x 1.5 drives right now, I'd probably consider building a dedicated freenas box with raid 5. But for literally 3 1.5 drives I don't think the 'benefit' is worth it. Definately chucking these couple of drives in to a small server box is the way to go. With my 3x 1TB usb drives for back up I should be fine.


Whenever people mention raid and stuff for home use etc I'm always reminded of these wise words: http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html
 
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