Converting a spare PC to a NAS
After virtualizing some of my applications at home using Xen I have found myself with a free machine and I thought making that box into a rough and ready filer might prove useful. After discovering that IDE really does appear to be on it's way out (1Tb disks aren't available in IDE flavour) I ordered a PCI 4 port SATA card and a 750Gb disk. 500Gb is probably the sweet spot but if you're limited in terms of how many disks you can fit into a machine bigger is probably better.
The first software I tried was OpenFiler. It was easy to install and has a good web interface for configuring disks and sharing partitions. Only there is one problem. Despite having facilities like snapshotting and LVM it doesn't allow for local users to be set up. So if you're planning on running in a domestic environment you're going to need LDAP, NIS or Active Directories set up to allow you to authenticate to mount shared partitions. It was a real shame to have to give up on as it looked like well featured software.
Freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net) lead me to FreeNAS, a FreeBSD based live CD that can either be installed on HDD or run from CD, writing config information onto a USB stick or floppy. While being less fully featured than OpenFiler it supported NFS, SMB and appeared to have local user authentication (although I'm not convinced that was working and the documentation seemed to back that up). FreeNAS allowed media on the machine to be played on UPnP devices, allowed backups using Rsyncd and was very easy to use from the web interface. However I ran into a problem. One of my disks (which appeared fine under OpenFiler, Debian and Ubuntu) just didn't show up at all. Also there was not journalled file system such as EXT3 or ReiserFS available, I'm not familiar with FreeBSD and don't know if this is a "feature" of the underlieing operating system or not but in the event of a power failure I could see the prospect of waiting nervously for a file system check to complete..
After striking out twice I'm still looking around, I can see myself having to install Debian and configuring up SMB or NFS manually. Its such a shame not to be able to use either of these two distributions, I'll be keeping an eye on them to see if any of the issues I experienced are resolved. If anyone knows of other ways to do this let me know.
The first software I tried was OpenFiler. It was easy to install and has a good web interface for configuring disks and sharing partitions. Only there is one problem. Despite having facilities like snapshotting and LVM it doesn't allow for local users to be set up. So if you're planning on running in a domestic environment you're going to need LDAP, NIS or Active Directories set up to allow you to authenticate to mount shared partitions. It was a real shame to have to give up on as it looked like well featured software.
Freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net) lead me to FreeNAS, a FreeBSD based live CD that can either be installed on HDD or run from CD, writing config information onto a USB stick or floppy. While being less fully featured than OpenFiler it supported NFS, SMB and appeared to have local user authentication (although I'm not convinced that was working and the documentation seemed to back that up). FreeNAS allowed media on the machine to be played on UPnP devices, allowed backups using Rsyncd and was very easy to use from the web interface. However I ran into a problem. One of my disks (which appeared fine under OpenFiler, Debian and Ubuntu) just didn't show up at all. Also there was not journalled file system such as EXT3 or ReiserFS available, I'm not familiar with FreeBSD and don't know if this is a "feature" of the underlieing operating system or not but in the event of a power failure I could see the prospect of waiting nervously for a file system check to complete..
After striking out twice I'm still looking around, I can see myself having to install Debian and configuring up SMB or NFS manually. Its such a shame not to be able to use either of these two distributions, I'll be keeping an eye on them to see if any of the issues I experienced are resolved. If anyone knows of other ways to do this let me know.