Re: NAS appliance or home server

In article <VA.000014a8.20c3576c@nospam.aaisp.org>,
Daniel James  <wastebasket@nospam.aaisp.org> wrote:
>In article news:<fkyMbbaRxapIFwSK@shrdlu.com>, Bernard Peek wrote:
>> I acquired a mini-ITX board and put it into an old ATX case. There's a
>> lot of fresh air inside the case but that's no real problem. It's got a
>> whisper-quite 170W PSU and with an old disk makes a usable web-server.
>
>I've got a VIA EPIA M10000 board in a Morex Venus 6... er ... the one
>before the current 669 model. It was built as a MythTV box but it actually
>gets used as a spare linux desktop and occasional TV - I never found the
>time to set up MySQL and MythTV on it. Nor could I ever work out why a PVR
>application needs an industrial-strength RDBMS ...
>
>It certainly has the power to run a simple server apps ... but it really
>struggles to rebuild its Gentoo system from source when there's been a
>major upgrade. I think the initial build took about a week, and it can
>take a day or two to update now even with a 3GHz P4 machine helping with
>distcc. I don't think using a mini-ITX system as a distcc /server/ will
>make much impact on compile times on other machines.

I've built lots of stuff out of the VIA boards (including NAS boxes) -
the trick is the do the actual compilation on a separate PC, the migrate
it over...

(But when I wur a lad, my 1st Linux box was a 66MHz AMD chip - ye gods
it was slow compiling stuff compared to todays CPUs!)

>The Venus case is bigger than I'd want for a server/NAS box, and there's a
>good bit of fan noise -- from the PSU especially. If I go down the
>mini-ITX route for the fileserver I'd want to use a fanless CPU in a
>smaller case with one large slow fan ... and an external PSU brick.

I've built a few NASes in a Venus case -

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid542

It has enough room inside and a nice big, but quiet fan at the back. I
use Western Digital drives, and while they're not the fastest, they run
very cool. Mobo's I use is usually the VIA CN1000's which have both IDE
sockets and SATA, so I boot them off IDE flash (which then runs from ram),
which then leaves all the SATA drives for storage.

Eg:

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ram0             124M   91M   34M  73% /
tmpfs                 245M     0  245M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/md1              111G   66G   40G  63% /data
/dev/md2              120G   41G   73G  37% /archive

# uptime
07:36:33 up 396 days, 22:13,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
117185984 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md2 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
127009792 blocks [2/2] [UU]



>> Have you considered recycling a laptop?
>
>Yes ... but I don't know of a laptop that can take two 750GB drives ...

If it has a USB port, it'll take a Drobo...

http://www.drobo.com/Products/Index.html

Drobo box which can take up to 4 drives - USB connection, and the "share"
box which sits under it with an Ethernet connection... Painless, but I
don't think the share supports NFS, just sambaystuff...

However the Drobo itself does support ext3 over USB, so use it as a
"disk drive" to your own NAS platform rather than the drobo share - which
might seem like overkill, but it's one advantage is that from initial
turn-on it looks like a 2TB drive regardless of how many (or few) drives
it physically has. So start with 2 x 750 drives and when these fill, just
pop another in, and another and the box will manage the drives and you'll
still see the same, original disk size - no need to resize partitions,
or hope that you can resize the mirror/raid system and extend ext3 ....

Personally, I'd go down the miniITX + drives route myself though, but
the Drobo does seem like the solution for people who don't want to open
the lid...

Gordon
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Bruce Stephens (16.08.2008 12:49)