[gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Mark Knecht]

I've got a 2 year old Gentoo machine that got patched together using a
lot of small hard drives which worked fine for what I used the machine
for 2-3 years ago but the machine isn't getting used much anymore. The
processor, memory & MB are all reasonably good - i5-661 & 4GB  - but
my laptop & VM compute server are both faster - so I was wondering
what I might do with the box. I saw a Wired article last night about a
guy building a NAS box using Debian which got me thinking. I've got a
bunch of 1TB Green drives which would make a good base for storage so
there's no cost in doing this, but I don't know anything about network
attached storage that just works out of the box with Windows clients
and I have NO desire (or time) to spend learning stuff that's very
Windows specific.

If there is a good solution for me it needs to support both Win XP and
Win 7 machine and shouldn't require anything be added to the Windows
VM.

Years ago I tried this basic guide:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml

I don't remember why but I didn't have much luck with it. However it's
been updated and cleaned up a lot so maybe it's OK.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Cheers,
Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Spidey]

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On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:38, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:

> I've got a 2 year old Gentoo machine that got patched together using a
> lot of small hard drives which worked fine for what I used the machine
> for 2-3 years ago but the machine isn't getting used much anymore. The
> processor, memory & MB are all reasonably good - i5-661 & 4GB  - but
> my laptop & VM compute server are both faster - so I was wondering
> what I might do with the box. I saw a Wired article last night about a
> guy building a NAS box using Debian which got me thinking. I've got a
> bunch of 1TB Green drives which would make a good base for storage so
> there's no cost in doing this, but I don't know anything about network
> attached storage that just works out of the box with Windows clients
> and I have NO desire (or time) to spend learning stuff that's very
> Windows specific.
>
> If there is a good solution for me it needs to support both Win XP and
> Win 7 machine and shouldn't require anything be added to the Windows
> VM.
>
> Years ago I tried this basic guide:
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml
>
> I don't remember why but I didn't have much luck with it. However it's
> been updated and cleaned up a lot so maybe it's OK.
>
> Thanks in advance for any ideas.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
>
The easiest solution, most used, is probably SAMBA. You should give it a
chance again.

Claudio Roberto França Pereira (a.k.a. Spidey)
hardMOB - HTForum - @spideybr
Engenharia de Computação - UFES 2006/1

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Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:49 AM, Spidey <spideybr@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:38, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
>>
>> Years ago I tried this basic guide:
>>
>> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml
>>
>> I don't remember why but I didn't have much luck with it. However it's
>> been updated and cleaned up a lot so maybe it's OK.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any ideas.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Mark
>>
>
> The easiest solution, most used, is probably SAMBA. You should give it a
> chance again.
>

Yes. Samba is the basis of the link above, and I figure it's going to
be the underlying technology that does the work. I was just wondering
if there was a more user oriented, possibly GUI based app that did all
the dirty work sort of like the CUPS web interface does with CUPS
configuration.

Thanks,
Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Daniel da Veiga]

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On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 12:43, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:49 AM, Spidey <spideybr@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:38, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> <SNIP>
> >>
> >> Years ago I tried this basic guide:
> >>
> >> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml
> >>
> >> I don't remember why but I didn't have much luck with it. However it's
> >> been updated and cleaned up a lot so maybe it's OK.
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance for any ideas.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Mark
> >>
> >
> > The easiest solution, most used, is probably SAMBA. You should give it a
> > chance again.
> >
>
> Yes. Samba is the basis of the link above, and I figure it's going to
> be the underlying technology that does the work. I was just wondering
> if there was a more user oriented, possibly GUI based app that did all
> the dirty work sort of like the CUPS web interface does with CUPS
> configuration.
>
>
SWAT?


-- 
Daniel da Veiga

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Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Pandu Poluan]

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On Oct 4, 2011 8:41 PM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've got a 2 year old Gentoo machine that got patched together using a
> lot of small hard drives which worked fine for what I used the machine
> for 2-3 years ago but the machine isn't getting used much anymore. The
> processor, memory & MB are all reasonably good - i5-661 & 4GB  - but
> my laptop & VM compute server are both faster - so I was wondering
> what I might do with the box. I saw a Wired article last night about a
> guy building a NAS box using Debian which got me thinking. I've got a
> bunch of 1TB Green drives which would make a good base for storage so
> there's no cost in doing this, but I don't know anything about network
> attached storage that just works out of the box with Windows clients
> and I have NO desire (or time) to spend learning stuff that's very
> Windows specific.
>
> If there is a good solution for me it needs to support both Win XP and
> Win 7 machine and shouldn't require anything be added to the Windows
> VM.
>
> Years ago I tried this basic guide:
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml
>
> I don't remember why but I didn't have much luck with it. However it's
> been updated and cleaned up a lot so maybe it's OK.
>
> Thanks in advance for any ideas.
>

If you want to rebuild it totally, why not go the simpler route of
installing 'soft appliances' like FreeNAS, OpenFiler, or Nexenta?

Rgds,

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Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[kashani]

On 10/4/2011 8:43 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:
> Yes. Samba is the basis of the link above, and I figure it's going to
> be the underlying technology that does the work. I was just wondering
> if there was a more user oriented, possibly GUI based app that did all
> the dirty work sort of like the CUPS web interface does with CUPS
> configuration.

	In Samba's case the config is pretty simple if you ignore printing 
which you should. Just add the IP range, setup a share, and add some 
accounts or leave it public. Probably take longer to setup a gui.

kashani

Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:
<SNIP>
> If you want to rebuild it totally, why not go the simpler route of
> installing 'soft appliances' like FreeNAS, OpenFiler, or Nexenta?
>
> Rgds,
>

Thanks for the suggestions. I didn't know about any of these.

Some comments:

1) The machine is already running Gentoo and is reasonably up to date.
(Within 30 days or so) I didn't want to start from scratch but rather
just wanted to remove a couple of drives which don't support system
needs, throw a couple of 1TB hard drives and hopefully I'm up and
running.

2) As for the three suggestions, and at a glance they all look very
capable of supporting my limited needs, I really don't want to learn
to maintain a server running different tools. (I.e. - anything not
portage)

I sure like the look of the FreeNAS pages though.

Thanks!

Cheers,
Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:01 AM, kashani <kashani-list@badapple.net> wrote:
> On 10/4/2011 8:43 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>> Yes. Samba is the basis of the link above, and I figure it's going to
>> be the underlying technology that does the work. I was just wondering
>> if there was a more user oriented, possibly GUI based app that did all
>> the dirty work sort of like the CUPS web interface does with CUPS
>> configuration.
>
>        In Samba's case the config is pretty simple if you ignore printing
> which you should. Just add the IP range, setup a share, and add some
> accounts or leave it public. Probably take longer to setup a gui.
>
> kashani
>
>

I suspect you are right, but Alan's recommendation of wicd was so easy
to set up and use I'm hoping someone did something similar for NAS
solutions. Also, my VMs are both Win XP and Win 7, and my
understanding of those is that remote support is different, so I'm
concerned I'll end up going down some rabbit hole trying to get the
new setup to support everything, but maybe I'm wrong about that?

- Mark

Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Pandu Poluan]

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On Oct 5, 2011 12:10 AM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:
> <SNIP>
> > If you want to rebuild it totally, why not go the simpler route of
> > installing 'soft appliances' like FreeNAS, OpenFiler, or Nexenta?
> >
> > Rgds,
> >
>
> Thanks for the suggestions. I didn't know about any of these.
>
> Some comments:
>
> 1) The machine is already running Gentoo and is reasonably up to date.
> (Within 30 days or so) I didn't want to start from scratch but rather
> just wanted to remove a couple of drives which don't support system
> needs, throw a couple of 1TB hard drives and hopefully I'm up and
> running.
>
> 2) As for the three suggestions, and at a glance they all look very
> capable of supporting my limited needs, I really don't want to learn
> to maintain a server running different tools. (I.e. - anything not
> portage)
>
> I sure like the look of the FreeNAS pages though.
>

TBH, I have no experience with either FreeNAS or Nexenta, but people I know
in other fora swear by them.

As to OpenFiler, I've deployed it several times in my office, twice for
production. It's quite easy to manage, especially since it's update-able
from the webGUI.

There *is* a learning curve, though. Exposing OpenFiler to act as a NAS box
that's accessible from Windows has a few gotchas, but after reading some
wikis, I got it up and running beautifully.

Rgds,

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Re: [gentoo-user] NAS for Windows - does any Wiki solution 'just work'?

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:
>
> On Oct 5, 2011 12:10 AM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:
>> <SNIP>
>> > If you want to rebuild it totally, why not go the simpler route of
>> > installing 'soft appliances' like FreeNAS, OpenFiler, or Nexenta?
>> >
>> > Rgds,
>> >
>>
>> Thanks for the suggestions. I didn't know about any of these.
>>
>> Some comments:
>>
>> 1) The machine is already running Gentoo and is reasonably up to date.
>> (Within 30 days or so) I didn't want to start from scratch but rather
>> just wanted to remove a couple of drives which don't support system
>> needs, throw a couple of 1TB hard drives and hopefully I'm up and
>> running.
>>
>> 2) As for the three suggestions, and at a glance they all look very
>> capable of supporting my limited needs, I really don't want to learn
>> to maintain a server running different tools. (I.e. - anything not
>> portage)
>>
>> I sure like the look of the FreeNAS pages though.
>>
>
> TBH, I have no experience with either FreeNAS or Nexenta, but people I know
> in other fora swear by them.
>
> As to OpenFiler, I've deployed it several times in my office, twice for
> production. It's quite easy to manage, especially since it's update-able
> from the webGUI.
>
> There *is* a learning curve, though. Exposing OpenFiler to act as a NAS box
> that's accessible from Windows has a few gotchas, but after reading some
> wikis, I got it up and running beautifully.
>
> Rgds,
>

I wonder if VMWare monitors this list? I just a couple a minutes ago
received an email offering me VMware vSphere Storage Appliance at the
low, low cost of $10,180. And that's 40% off list price! :-)

- Mark