Reader's Voice: Building Your Own File Server

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[citation][nom]mapesdhs[/nom]That's a pointless comment. If I don't pay money for something, it's free. Arguingabout one's time being worth something is meaningless - people waste more time inthe pub, watching soaps, sitting on the toilet, etc. It's not that hard to learnhow to use a different OS if one is used to Windows, and you might just learn a fewthings along the way.Ian.[/citation]

Thats a grand generalization of people and probably works great for people without young children. Everyone has their priorities. If I'm at home, I'm either busy with my children or passed out asleep. If I do have a bit of time in between those 2, its helping to clean house. This isnt to say *I* don't know other OSes, but its foolhardy to believe that everyone has time to spend on another OS. My time is worth a lot to me since I have so little of it and judging by your comment you must have a lot of it and thus put little value on it.
 
[citation][nom]jeffunit[/nom]True, Windows Home Server is cheaper. But it doesn't support *any* software raid. Linux and BSD support all kinds of RAID,including 5 and 6. With FreeBSD you can even get RAID-Z and RAID-Z2 with ZFS. Personally, I don't like losing data when a single drive dies. Windows Home Server doesn't even support RAID 1, based on everything I have read. If you want software RAID support and Microsoft Windows, I think the solution is Windows Server 2008.[/citation]


white papers on how windows home server protects its shares/files.

Page 10 is where it starts talking about that feature.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=40c6c9cc-b85f-45fe-8c5c-f103c894a5e2&DisplayLang=en


 
[citation][nom]tbhall77[/nom]white papers on how windows home server protects its shares/files.Page 10 is where it starts talking about that feature.http://www.microsoft.com/downloads [...] layLang=en[/citation]

It does look interesting (of note is you need word 2007 to read the document), however file replication is pretty primitive, as it has 100% overhead. My 7 drive raid-5 array has 14% overhead. So windows home server is basically RAID-1 on a per-share basis.

Also I suspect windows home server isn't easy to use with linux or apple's mac os computers.

With linux:
1) it is free
2) you can connect it to almost any type of computer
3) you can do RAID-1 or 5 or 6
4) if you really want to replicate shares, you can do it manually, or likely someone has already written software to do
it automatically.

But if all of your computers are windows, and you don't mind buying twice the storage you need, it seems like a bad solution.
 
[citation][nom]jeffunit[/nom]It does look interesting (of note is you need word 2007 to read the document), however file replication is pretty primitive, as it has 100% overhead. My 7 drive raid-5 array has 14% overhead. So windows home server is basically RAID-1 on a per-share basis.Also I suspect windows home server isn't easy to use with linux or apple's mac os computers.With linux:1) it is free2) you can connect it to almost any type of computer3) you can do RAID-1 or 5 or 64) if you really want to replicate shares, you can do it manually, or likely someone has already written software to doit automatically.But if all of your computers are windows, and you don't mind buying twice the storage you need, it seems like a bad solution.[/citation]


Look, initially, all I came on here to say was for you to know your audience. Yes, it was a 3am rant, but still your last page stinks and is written like its your blog. Very unprofessional. Take some time to look around this site and count how many articles even mention linux, mac, or an enterprise quality os like win2008. They'll be dwarfed by the number of Windows articles benchmarking windows video games.

As I mentioned in another post on here, I dont have a lot of free time. If you can't be bothered to do some google searches to do research for your own article then maybe you should be writing on Tom's. It takes nothing to go to www.microsoft.com and look at their product line. It also takes nothing to google "nas" and "network attached storage". You didn't mention at all the other free software that is made for making a nas. As someone else mentioned there is freenas. There is also openfiler, and naslite.




 
[citation][nom]tbhall77[/nom]Yes, it was a 3am rant, but still your last page stinks and is written like its your blog. Very unprofessional. Take some time to look around this site and count how many articles even mention linux, mac, or an enterprise quality os like win2008. They'll be dwarfed by the number of Windows articles benchmarking windows video games.As I mentioned in another post on here, I dont have a lot of free time.[/citation]

I have a problem. I want to backup several computers with several terabytes of data. I found a solution that works, and is reasonably inexpensive. It so happens that I picked Linux to be the software element of the solution.

If you want to buy a hardware raid card for $500-$1000, feel free to do so. If you want to buy a microsoft server OS to do software raid, I am sure it will work. If you want to use microsoft home server and buy twice as many disks as I did, you can do that too.

I have built two working systems. They were inexpensive, solved my needs, and have been quite reliable. There are many other ways to solve the problem. I don't claim to have all the answers.

If I had lots of money, and little time, I would buy a netapp turnkey solution. It will likely be faster, and more reliable than any other solution. It will also be more expensive than any other option mentioned. I happened to learn quite a bit in building my fileservers. I enjoy learning new things.
 
I almost setup something like this ... then I realized .. I get get by with popping a 1 TB drive into my one windows PC that on 24x7 ... then syncing it with an external HD once a day.

I want to build one anyway but I just can't justify it heh.





 
[citation][nom]sonofliberty08[/nom]i like Mandriva too , but why stop at here ? u should continue writing about how to confrig the Mandriva for file server .[/citation]

I did but that is for a second part, which will cover software installation and configuration of linux, security, raid and samba.
 
[citation][nom]sonofliberty08[/nom]oh , and did anyone use 2.5 HDD for file server ? will it be reliable than the 3.5 HDD ?[/citation]

2.5 inch disks are great for being small, and low power.
They are likely as reliable as 3.5 inch disks.

Unfortunately, when it comes to cost per gigabyte, they are
well behind 3.5 inch disks. You can get 1.5tb for $100 with a 3.5 inch disk, but the biggest 2.5 inch drives are only 500gb, and around $100. That is 3 times as expensive per gig...
 
I had FreeNAS for a while, worked great. Trying out WHS now and about to build a new hardware box. Controller/Hardware based RAID is great for large high-throughput scenarios, but in a home NAS it's overkill IMHO and adds needless complexity.

I would be interested in the best CPU (looks like AMD Phenom II chips have best ratio of low power to high processing & multi-core). I also echo the above comment about how low power HDDs function in this environment.
 
I don't say this lightly - consider Windows Home Server. I installed it on an old P4 box with 700Mb RAM just to tinker, and soon stopped work on my server project altogether. It was just too easy to get up and running, integrate with the 9 computers in my house for management and backup and share files all over the place.

I've operated Linux servers at home for years but WHS does everything I need with minimal intervention (having kids really reduces sysadmin time :)

It doesn't support RAID without a hack, but you can flag files/directories to be duplicated across drives to protect against single disc failure (with no RAID array to rebuild) and no specific RAID controller to replace to retrieve data.

As a Windows box, there's a ton of software available - I run uTorrent, leaving my desktop off at night. I also run a DLNA-complaint media server (PS3 Media Server) and am integrating a caching proxy that will let me manage/track my kids' internet access. It offers remote access, including remote desktop connections and warns me if backups fail.

It's $100 for OEM software. In terms of the time savings for me, it's been priceless and it never, ever taxes my old P4.
 
My expectation from TG reviews is to cover home systems, not high end office products. So in that light, I find this review to be more than adequate. There's plenty of other resources available for work situations, and readership here would go down significantly if they started focusing on that.

We're still running a PentD 3.0GHz CPU and 2GBs DDRII-800 with Windows 2003 SBS via gigabit ethernet on our home/small business LAN. We have several 2 TB RAID 0 Arrays on it for backup storage, which is fine. We don't need backups for our backups, so redundant arrays are a waste for us.

But we still find ourselves using E-SATA more for backup now. If it wasn't for MS Exchange, we'd get rid of the server altogether. So much cheaper and easier to just get multiple external drives with E-SATA and 1TB HDDs. Not to mention that the E-SATA drives are shut down when not in use, which you can't really do on a server.

I'm often baffled by what people think they need to run for hardware to have a decent home server for storage.
 
darklife41 writes:
> I'm often baffled by what people think they need to run for hardware to have
> a decent home server for storage.

I think some people are obsessed by speed even when they don't need it. Ditto
redundancy. As you say, a couple of external SATAs is pretty simple and often
does the job nicely. However, I expect there's a hefty degree of tech fun getting
more complex configurations working, ie. the various types of RAID, high speed
networking, that sort of thing. Some are more interested in networking
technologies and storage than they are in CPU overclocking and gfx.

For work environments though, there's a huge range in use. Some places have
no backups at all (many I would say), others have totally OTT setups, most
somewhere inbetween. Probably depends on the zeal of the admin in question.

It is scary though how often I come across companies that have no backups.
I recently repaired a system (SGI Indy) for a knitwear company that had
developed a fault in the gfx board (not bad I suppose, just one fault after
16 years of use). The system disk (ancient 9GB 50pin SCSI) was still working
ok but there was no backup, so I made a clone of the drive for them onto a
new 9GB SCA just in case.

For Discreet users on SGI systems, I suggest a second disk that is cloned from
the system disk on a regular basis (nightly, weekly, etc.) Things are a tad more
complicated when it comes to their data though.

At least there are many more options for how to do backups now. Certainly no
excuse for not having some kind of backup strategy.

Ian.

 
I've been designing and maintaining networks (and PCs) for 25yrs.

- First, I would and do ALWAYS build my own boxes. I can't understand why people use those from Dell, IBM, etc. To me, they aren't "compatible". I need to be able to fix a system in minutes. A 24/7 warranty is worthless.
- For my servers, I just use a mid-priced workstation ASUS MB with all the best & latest components. I use MS-Server products.
- With these NAS boxes and other such solutions, picture that you only have one NAS box that has a mirrored drives or Raid-5. You are using it as a main shared drive. The power supply or motherboard in the drive smokes. Now, the data and drives are fine. Since they were being run on Linux or whatever, how do you access the data and get everyone back to work? You need the drives to be on an O/S and controller such that you can take out the SATA drive and hang it off of a desktop PC and be back to sharing the data in minutes, not days.

** In the last two years, I've completely re-thought network design in regards to disaster prevention and recovery. I think that the ideas that I've implemented are rather ground-breaking. But, I may also be missing out on some others because I just work now days and don't keep up with the industry. Would anyone like to see an article on what I'm doing? Maybe collaborate & review my ideas before publishing? Maybe pick apart my design?

Ask yourself, "It's 10am and 50 employees are all working off the server. A pissed off employee hits the server with a taser. How quickly can I have the business back to work? Oh yeah, they are working on a bid for a $12M job that has a bid deadline of 3pm." "It's 8am & you get a call that everyone just got to work and a burglar took the server last night... The employees are all milling around the coffee and donuts and wondering what to do."

Matt at is-lan.com
 
No-one has discussed FAKERAID very much, and in my view the only thing to say about it is, don't use it in linux! The chipset usually has proper driver support in Windows, but the linux dmraid driver (device mapper RAID, not to be confused with mdraid for true software raid) is just not there yet. I once had a perfectly healthy mirrored (RAID1) pair of disks on dmraid. Some temporary boot problems with dmraid meant that only one of the pair would mount, which caused the pair to get out of sync. However, even though the chipset boot sequence was reporting the mirror status as "rebuild", dmraid just ignored it and merrily went on writing blocks inconsistently until the data on both disks were completely trashed. I was staggered to find that the data on healthy disks was destroyed by a driver whose job it is to protect data from disk failure through redundant storage.
I can now only recommend software RAID - CPU performance has far outpaced disk performance, so software RAID is a trivial task for modern CPUs.
One final point that is often overlooked for hardware RAID controllers is the proprietary nature of the on-disk format used to identify the RAID volume. This means that you must replace the RAID controller with an identical model. So if your RAID controller is obsolete, ou need to migrate your data to a new server before it fails. With software RAID, you can move your disks to any other system.
 
Would have been an interesting article if it didn't come off as being written by a teenager. I have experience in working with everything from datacenters to SMB data storage implementations and I have used a wide variety of OS configurations and maintain long term support contracts on many of them. As for the operating system, which a lot of people are opining about:
Windows Server 2008 R2: Extremely secure, fast but expensive. Tremendous driver support, I have tossed this on some boxes with pretty obscure hardware and it loaded without comment. Software RAID 5 is very easy to setup and this is what I run in my own home, mainly because I have less issues with getting it to talk to the other systems in my house than the following OSs. Although I am running RAID 10, due to speed and I/O improvements.

Windows Server 2003 R2: Secure and very reliable as long as it has been correctly configured, not very expensive if you can find one of the OEM CDs.

Windows Home Server R2: Built upon the Windows SBS platform (Windows 2003), it is fairly secure. The easiest of all options to setup. Uses its own software RAID implementation that was problematic in pre R2, but seems to be OK now.

FreeNAS: I have used this one pretty much since the devs released the first alpha. It has come a long way. If you are using a RAID controller, card support can be somewhat sketchy, however the community forum is very good at pointing you towards a fix. In terms of configuration, it isn't as easy as Windows, but the WebUI is still pretty slick.

Openfiler: Linux based, fully featured NAS/iSCSI Suite. Tends to be a little more involved to setup that FreeNAS, but has a lot more working features. Some SMBs I have are running this, with the support contract. The only bad thing I have to say is that so far I have had more Linux catastrophic failures than any other OS. This is more a personal observation that any comment on Linux itself.

OpenBSD: My personal preference over the WebUI interface based implementations. Requires some basic command line knowledge or at least the ability to google. Very secure, if configured correctly and very reliable.
 
[citation][nom]eppenoire[/nom]Would have been an interesting article if it didn't come off as being written by a teenager. I have experience in working with everything from datacenters to SMB data storage implementations and I have used a wide variety of OS configurations and maintain long term support contracts on many of them.[/citation]

Well, I am far from a teenager. I have 26 years of full time experience working on: 10 years with the first e-commerce system, 8 years at JPL, 1.5 years doing hard realtime medical systems, and 5 years doing defense work. I have used so many versions of unix including system III, 5, 7, zeus, bsd 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, ultrix, sunos, solaris, linux, freebsd, openbsd to name a few. I have used vms, dos, wfw3.11, win95, win98, winme, winnt, win2k, winxp, and vista.

I built the two fileservers in the article. I don't know any professional who uses any version of windows for fileservers, as it is lacking robustness and security.
 
I am terribly sorry to have implied that you were a teenager. My comment was completely influenced by the tone of the article, which concluded the same way some of my interns do, that Linux is best and Windows is useless. First off neither system is inherently more or less secure than the other, it comes down to the administrator's ability and foresight. Most people see the GUI in Windows and think because it is easy to setup it must be insecure. In a Windows environment AD gives me a high degree of atomicity and control over everyones access and control of either a Windows or Linux machine.

I don't preach using Windows as a file server OS, because I think it is overkill. My personal preference, if going with a HD based OS, is one of the BSD distros. However I have 27 clients who are using Windows based file servers although two of those may be switching over to hardware NAS/SAN solutions in the next few months. They had these boxes long before they met me and I have serviced numerous clients with similar systems. They are neither the majority nor the minority of companies running file servers.

Your comment above, reinforces a juvenile attitude that you may not have offline. I have met plenty of people who came off sounding very young and rash online, but were fairly subdued and well into their 50s offline. Furthermore, don't make sweeping comments without some kind of footnote to back it up. If Windows lacks security, then please backup your statement or link to some place that supports that view. The only security issues I come across with Windows platforms, stems from the user/admin and not the OS itself. Windows makes up the majority of systems in the business world and yet it surprises me how few people patch their boxes, even when excellent tools like WSUS exist. People who are not running a decent firewall like a Catalyst, SmoothWall or pfSense are my bread and butter, irregardless of whether they are running Nix or Windows.
 
[citation][nom]eppenoire[/nom]Furthermore, don't make sweeping comments without some kind of footnote to back it up. If Windows lacks security, then please backup your statement or link to some place that supports that view. The only security issues I come across with Windows platforms, stems from the user/admin and not the OS itself.[/citation]

I did make 'some kind of footnote', on page 6. I encourage you to read the article.

As for security, I refer you to MyDoom (estimated cost of 38.5 billion dollars), SoBig $37.1 billion, Love Bug $15 billion, and Code Red $2 billion. Also see IIS reports at CERT.

Now, you can say they are not really part of the OS, but due to poorly configured applications, which is true. But Linux isn't just the kernel, but all the apps that run on it. How much money have Linux vulnerabilities cost?

Does Windows server support raid 6? If not, why? Linux does.
 
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