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Building a NAS

jro.io

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Re: Building a NAS

#131

Post by davemtl »

melp wrote: post #127
davemtl wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for shamelessly copying the steps in the Bhyve video I created. :-) You'll be pleased to know that in the 9.10 nightly train, the base OS has been upgraded to FreeBSD 11 and the GUI has a UI for Bhyve, also enables VGA consoles.

Hah, I have no shame m0nkey! They're great videos. So the 9.10 FreeNAS GUI will have bhyve management stuff in it? Or did I misunderstand that?

It's in the nightly releases, so it'll likely come to the stable train at next release.

Re: Building a NAS

#132

Post by roel_v »

zurn wrote: post #114
roel_v wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That report isn't quite accurate; you can install updates automatically on the device I have (I don't know if there was some point in time where that wasn't possible; seems like a basic feature). Some require reboots though, which is why by default updates aren't automatic. Who sets their servers on fully automatic updates (and reboots) anyway? I mean, even forgetting about the reboots - you don't want fileservers to…

This kind of NAS should definitely automatically update and reboot rather than become wormable. A high-availability file server is a different beast from a home NAS.

The one I have is not a home nas. It's a rack mount machine with a bunch of 'enterprise' features, and marketed/sold as such.

Re: Building a NAS

#133

Post by squarefoot »

ChefDenominator wrote: post #120
squarefoot wrote: post #99

I rebuilt my home NAS a few months ago. Former one was a huge Debian tower box with one system+temp storage disk plus 3 soft RAID1 pairs. It worked well for about 6 years, save for a partial failure due to bad disk connectors (SATA connectors are among the worst junk ever designed by a human). CPU was a low power Celeron more than enough for the task. When building the new one I wanted to reduce to the minimum both p…

For OMV, you did something wrong. I've been using the project since its first public release. Never had any real issues.

Yup, I'm completely sure about that as nobody else seemed to have experienced the same problems, but after trying to reflash a couple more times I eventually gave up. That doesn't mean I won't try on a different system in the future though.

Re: Building a NAS

#134

Post by MarkSweep »

cannonpr wrote: post #107
Jaruzel wrote: post #100

People are going to hate me for this, as it's not a Linux solution... but after trying various *nix NAS distros and being disappointed, I settled on letting Windows do it for me: - Get a generic small tower box with 3-4 year old hardware in it via eBay (or a business IT clearance site) - If it's not got Windows on it, find a dirt cheap copy of Windows Server 2008 (again eBay etc). - If there's no SATA RAID on the mot…

Out of curiosity, how do windows filesystems for solutions like these compare to ZFS in terms of reliability and features ? ZFS has been my only choice for NAS servers at home primarily due to it's data integrity features.

The combination of Storage Spaces and ReFS is pretty nice. Drives are added to storage pool and then block devices are allocated out of the pool. The blocks devices are thinly provisioned and expandable, so it's more flexible than it sounds. If you create a block device that has redundancy (either mirroring or RAIDZ-like parity), you get the data integrity like ZFS. I beleive the system also does periodic scrubbing.

One advantage of this setup is you can have multiple block devices of differing parity on top of the same pool. The pool is also more flexible than ZFS, allowing you to add drives of different sizes and later remove drives.

The main thing I miss from ZFS is the ability to create snapshots and do zfs send/receive for backups. Also not being able to read the source code is a bummer.

Re: Building a NAS

#135

Post by alphapapa »

Incredibly comprehensive article. Thanks for sharing.

First thing that jumps out at me, though: in the photos at the top, the UPS is on the floor.

Get that UPS off the floor! When your house suffers minor flooding (burst pipe, overflowing toilet, leaky roof, etc), it will be sitting in it. You think it won't happen--but then it does, and if your electronics on the floor don't get damaged, you're lucky.

Re: Building a NAS

#136

Post by melp »

alphapapa wrote: post #135

Incredibly comprehensive article. Thanks for sharing. First thing that jumps out at me, though: in the photos at the top, the UPS is on the floor. Get that UPS off the floor! When your house suffers minor flooding (burst pipe, overflowing toilet, leaky roof, etc), it will be sitting in it. You think it won't happen--but then it does, and if your electronics on the floor don't get damaged, you're lucky.

Good call... I'll prop it up on something soon. This is on the second floor of my house, so it's safe from flooding, but I'd hate to have spilled water kill my stuff.

Re: Building a NAS

#137

Post by hrez »

boredprogrammer wrote: post #91
ValentineC wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB) Thanks, I didn't realise these exist. I've been wanting to create a DIY version of Synology's "slim" model line [1] for a while, but haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf enclosure that would fit my needs. Putting six drives in a 5.25" bay is a fantastic idea. [1] https://www.synology.com/en-glo…

I came across this product recently: https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1 which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?

I like the design and 2.5" choice. But if it doesn't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong. Something like that running FreeNAS (w/o dedup) would be ideal for me.

Re: Building a NAS

#139

Post by cvwright »

cat199 wrote: post #125
jonathankoren wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case. Personally, I don't even know where I put this second NAS, since it would need power and bandwidth, unless you really wanted to sneakernet a NAS, which would work, but seems really weird. My home nas is small enough where I can reliably backup to some USB external drives and store in a drawer offsite. According…

> You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case. Think pretty much the only viable solution for this for home users is to have a 'peering agreement' with a trusted friend where you each colo the others machine at your home.. however this can be tricky because you're sticking all of your sensitive stuff in someone elses house and trading some level of full n…

Why not use borg/attic to create an encrypted/HMAC'd backup on the USB drive?

Re: Building a NAS

#140

Post by hrez »

jonathankoren wrote: post #37
mjevans wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually the cheapest way over time. If you're able to tag stuff you know you want to keep and it's a smaller set you could look in to something like Backblaze B2 (previously a featured story on HN); the storage costs are relatively moderate, but restoration from it will cost you. I haven't yet heard of any solution along the lines of "Rent a (large) NAS for a month" for those times that you're upgrading your…

You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case. Personally, I don't even know where I put this second NAS, since it would need power and bandwidth, unless you really wanted to sneakernet a NAS, which would work, but seems really weird. My home nas is small enough where I can reliably backup to some USB external drives and store in a drawer offsite. According…

Without ZFS (as far as I can see) OpenMediaVault is failing at its main job i.e. keeping data safe. That's not the tradeoff I would make.
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