Comments on: Hackit: Network Attached Storage?

By: Matthew

Matthew — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:20:54 +0000

@Jul

You wanted a way to do incremental backups. rsync can do that, if you backup to a new destination directory each night, using the “–link-dest” option. With –link-dest, files are synched if they are different to the previous version, but hard-linked if they’re the same.

On a related note, I’d thoroughly recommend the folks at “rsync.net” for a secure reliable off-site backup. (no connection, blah blah)

By: ReKlipz

ReKlipz — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:03:27 +0000

I recently decided to create my own nas solution as well.

I purchased the cheapest microATX board that has integrated DVI and integrated gig-e from newegg, $25. Turns out, it was also the only microATX board with 6 onboard SATA ports. I also snagged an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+, and 2GB of DDR2-800.

Having already blown my budget on the $25 mobo (:-), I opted to not buy a hardware raid controller, and instead just use software raid. I purchased four 750GB Samsung F1's (because the two sammy HD501J's I use in my gaming rig are wonderous). The drives sit in two ICY Dock 2x5.25 -> 3x3.25 hot swap enclosures.

Plopped on debian lenny (testing), setup mdadm with raid 5, setup boot from a flash stick I fixed with a female 5x2 pin header, and away she goes. I installed X11 and mplayer, and it'll even decode 720p with plenty of room to spare (some of first cpu, plus whole second cpu for grabs). It can't quite handle high quality 1080p, but majority of the rips are only 720p anyways.

I can transfer to my gaming setup via FTP 70MB/s no problem, and can receive at 65MB/s easy as well. Not sure if the write bottleneck is my gaming setup read speed (doubt it...), the integrated NICS (doubt it), or just the software parity overhead (more than likely), but this is plenty good for what I use it for.

HIGHLY recommend rolling your own solution if possible, would be a really fun hack to make it with a microITX board... :)

By: anthony

anthony — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:06:49 +0000

thomas, i must agree. roll your own is the best solution, not dependent upon any particular platform or piece of hardware. i use a microatx board & case, e2140 cpu underclocked, 1gb ram and an external 5 drive sata hotswap enclosure. the machine is running ubuntu 8.04 server fitted with 4 x 320gb drives software raid 5 + 2 x 80gb (semi-mirrored) for the OS. i’m pretty happy with the performance and only pulling ~90w on my end.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:46:46 +0000

Roll your own server (if you have the guts) :o) I had a LaCie Ethernetdisk lying around (yes, the rack mountable one) – originally it was running XP Embedded (total rubbish) – installed 1 GB RAM (only has 128 originally), kicked out the rubbish XP and installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server (Hardy Heron) instead. Now I have a fullblown LAMP to boot, running two WordPress blogs, a gallery site, a site for my business and a DLNA UPnP media server. Everything on a Via C3 800 MHz CPU using under 50 Watts of power :o)

By: pkway

pkway — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:05:09 +0000

built my own file server with an old dell dimension 2400 (I think I bought it new for $100!) running Redhat Linux. got tired of having to be a sys admin at home and wanted RAID 5 support, so bought a QNAP box and installed 3 750-gb drives.

now everything is automated - raid support, multimedia streaming, ftp, web server, bit torrent client (encrypted even!), etc. and it runs cooler, quieter and using less energy than the dell

qnap came with its own backup software. it worked okay but i upgraded to something with more functionality: synbackse. i have a bunch of cron jobs set up to back up each of my home PC's every few days. i haven't done so yet, but will soon implement snapshots to i can roll back to different points in time.

By: joe

joe — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:58:27 +0000

Here’s a problem nobody seems to think of: Your primary disk becomes corrupt, or begins failing. Later that night, rsync runs automatically, where it happily overwrites your backup with corrupt data, and deletes any files on the destination that the source can’t cough up. Congratulations, you’re fucked.

Anyone have a way around this?! Wish rsync had an option to “rename deleted files to .filename and delete them after a week”…

By: Gregor Best

Gregor Best — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:51:31 +0000

I use one of these very old IBM Netstation Thin Clients.
My dad and I hacked together an IDE interface for its motherboard (which was basically just soldering a new pinheader on), then made a frame for an off the shelf Samsung 400 GB IDE hdd and added a Molex connector from the power supply as well as two fans.

For the network, as we don't have Token Ring at home, we ripped out the PCI riser card to make place for the hdd and added a regular PCI network card to the now available single PCI slot on the mainboard. We had to cut a little bit off the PCB to make it fit but it works for alost a year and a half non-stop now.

On the OS side, we decided to use Debian (I can't really recall the version) and set up NFS and SMB access to the drive (350 GB of which are dedicated to user data) as well as a CUPS server for printer access.

By: Mr Pedant

Mr Pedant — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:58:07 +0000

Hey, who stole all the capital letters?

By: Dark_AvEnGer

Dark_AvEnGer — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:53:47 +0000

i’m using a RAID5 array of 4×400gb SATA drives.
unfortunatly the write speed to the nvidia chipset in RAID5 sucks. looking to upgrade to a Adaptec 5805 and maybe 4×1tb drives :-)

By: Jeff Baitis

Jeff Baitis — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:30:29 +0000

Indeed, Brian -- ZFS storage pools are incredibly easy to export as iSCSI volumes:

zfs set shareiscsi=on volume_name

One of my favorite blogs describes using iSCSI with Mac OS X Time Machine. This looks particularly interesting:

http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/zfs_and_mac_os_x

Regards,
Jeff

By: gyro_john

gyro_john — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:40:32 +0000

My computer came with a SATA motherboard and an IDE 320GB drive. I bought a second hard drive of the same size, but SATA. I made an exact copy of the original drive using Norton Ghost, made that my main drive, cleaned off the IDE drive. Used Partition Magic to create a Backups partition on my main drive. Now to do backups I do two things:

1. Every weekend I drag the crucial stuff into a new dated folder in the Backups partition on my main drive. Takes two minutes maybe. Never found that troublesome enough to bother figuring out how to automate it. After a couple of months that gets bulky and I delete the oldest ones.

2. When I feel like it, (every month or so) I use Norton Ghost to make a new exact copy of my main SATA HDD onto the IDE one. That's bootable in case of HDD failure.

What this *doesn't* give me is off-site backup, so I'm gambling that, if the house burns down, I was able to run out with the computer (chopped-off cords a-danglin') before I pass out from smoke inhalation.

By: barry99705

barry99705 — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:40:28 +0000

freenas “just works”, but is slow, openfiler is a pain in the ass to set up, and cryptonas just falls off the network for no reason.

By: Robert

Robert — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:37:51 +0000

@8 – Linux is hardly server grade – however, bsd is. Be careful not to lump Linux in with more robust *NIXs…

By: FingAZ

FingAZ — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:14:31 +0000

I bought a Western Digital MyBook World edition (500GB), which to be honest, was total rubbish at first- apon routing around (mainly at http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/) i have disabled the rubbish software that is pre-installed, and now have it running as a media server for my PC's, PS3 and xbox360; sharing music, pics, and videos- as well as a web based torrent client, web server, and FTP server.
It's very flexible apon investigation and there's a solid community backing it too.
I would recommend it to anyone who is familiar with terminal based linux, or anyone willing to learn like myself!
For additional backup or speed, the 1TB version has two 500GB drives in raid (upgradable), and both models also allow for connecting additional external drives via USB for access!

By: Zuhaib

Zuhaib — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:02:14 +0000

One thing that got left out was rolling out your own NAS by using Server-Grade OS like Linux or *BSD.
I have used freeNAS in the past and its great at doing what its meant to do, and while you think with its BSD-core it would be Hacker friendly but its not. Its setup so stripped down that I had a hard time getting any Bittorrent client to install properly and run.

I would have liked to check out OpenFiler had I heard about it, but I just gave up and install Ubuntu-Server. Using something like Webmin you get a decent web interface and since I am running this on a retired system (my old Gaming machine) I can use it too its full power. Almost like a NAS-plus. Some might scream bloody marry that you should never cross a NAS and data server but for home use its great. Only downside is keeping everything up with a custom built system like mine, in my case I know I have a fault SATA card that will for no reason cause the Server to lock up from time to time. But this is the cost you have to pay if you want to DIY.