From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1NrGYq-0000XV-0p for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:06:50 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2E67FE0AC4 for ; Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:06:47 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp.hotchilli.net (mta3.th.hotchilli.net [62.89.140.53]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AA069E0ACD for ; Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:18:22 +0000 (UTC) Received: from static-87-243-200-80.adsl.hotchilli.net ([87.243.200.80] helo=[10.0.1.253]) by smtp.hotchilli.net with esmtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1NrFnx-0008PW-Hv for gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org; Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:18:21 +0000 Message-ID: <4B9E87FA.3090600@shic.co.uk> Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:18:18 +0000 From: Steve User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.3 ThunderBrowse/3.2.8.1 Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Strategy for using SAN/NAS for storage with Gentoo... References: <4B9E343A.4040908@shic.co.uk> <87d3z53b2u.fsf@newsguy.com> <854dca5c1003150849l16b375ddl89ad2e20a8f6a135@mail.gmail.com> <4B9E5FA4.1040501@shic.co.uk> <7D7A990E-4680-472D-8408-FFABFE82EDBA@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <7D7A990E-4680-472D-8408-FFABFE82EDBA@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: 4c4ff039-1b0c-4571-991e-8a1d3ef32e6f X-Archives-Hash: 5b374718b6da5b8c981f1114f786903c On 15/03/2010 18:21, Stroller wrote: > It's hard to be more specific without knowing your usage. Yes... I was deliberately vague to see what options came up... but I can be more specific. The budget is miniscule - and the performance demands (bandwidth and latency) are completely non-challenging. It's in this context that I'm looking for reliability and availability... and I'd like to have unix permissions working properly. Security is a moderate concern - the physical network is secured - but there is a broadband connection which exposes various services. > For storage of a "mere terabyte" you can buy a networked storage > enclosure which will accommodate two drives. These are cheap, do > mirroring, will accommodate standard 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB drives, but are > probably not too fast. A cheap NAS enclosure is a definite possibility - there'd be no performance issue - though this leaves three key questions: 1) Will it support unix file-permissions and can I be (fairly sure) it will be secure if someone hacks my Wi-Fi? 2) Will I be able to put the (majority of the) gentoo filesystem on it - or will I need to have a fully booted system to connect? 3) Can I use two entirely separate devices and mirror to both? (I expect the failure of the enclosure to be at least as likely as the failure of a drive.) > If you build your own server you can use software or hardware RAID. Hmmm... building my own server - I've done that in the past, but my plan is to minimize DIY with a view to minimizing the number of components that might fail. Ideally, I'd have four devices - one with a CPU and memory (the server)... booting from Flash or CD or whatever (+a replacement in the cupboard); two separate boxes with drives in them (mirrored storage); one (wired) Ethernet hub and broadband gateway. I'd connect to the network from a separate desktop/laptop to interact with it - either locally or remotely. > I wouldn't get too het up about Samba / CIFS vs NFS. Samba / CIFS can > be faster than NFS, even in an all-Linux environment. Other times it's > not. This seems pretty much random, depending upon whom is doing the > benchmarking. On an intellectual level, at least, I find neither > wholly satisfying - it would be really nice to have a Linux-native > network filesystem that does authentication / permissions properly. > But both do work. Well the 'server' will be running Samba - and it's the back-end storage for that I'm trying to resolve. CIFS definitely looks problematic - since Unix permissions for server data are one valuable separation between publicly accessible services and my private data. NFS might be OK (it doesn't "feel" great) - though I *really* don't want to move from one server to two when I'm aiming for reliability. > I looked at ZFS, but decided that Solaris, from a look at the HCL, was > too picky over hardware. I think ZFS is great, I no longer think it's > the future. My selection of cheap hardware is far wider under Linux, I > can install Gentoo and just `emerge mediatomb` and stream movies to my > PS3. I like ZFS, conceptually, though I don't like Solaris. I'm aware that Apple have toyed with adopting ZFS and that it is available for BSD... A *really* neat solution would be a (pair of) cheap NAS devices running an appliance distribution of BSD with ZFS - exporting a NFS mount... possibly over a VPN? Hmmm - I'm trying to avoid complexity, too. Hmmm.