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.
