Hello, I'm looking for advice on how to build a small network of two file servers. I'm hoping most servers to be Plan9, clients are Windows and Mac OS X.
I have 2 houses separated by about 40ms of network latency. I want to set some servers in each location and have all data accessible from anywhere. I'll have about 2TB of data at each location, one location will probably scale up. What's the best option for RAID in Plan9? I understand I can use either Ken's fileserver or the Plan9 '#k' device. Can anyone shed some light on why I might want one and not the other? Are there any other options? Do you recommend fossil+venti or kfs? I've seen that a lot of people prefer kfs. Are there any options for block level encryption on Plan9? Is 9p suitable for this? How will the 40ms latency affect 9p operation? (I have 100Mbit). I assume there are no good 9p drivers for Windows so I can access my data directly. How good are the various Plan9 SMB servers? (On the long term I might write a 9p filesystem driver for Windows, I've been a Windows filesystem developer in a past life). Is it better if I use the Plan9 boxen only for AoE with a Linux on top that serves SMB? I'm hoping to use some laptops for this. I have a lot of unused ThinkPads that can run Plan9 around here. Are there some kind of external enclosures that can hold a reasonable number of drives and connect via eSATA or something? Are they fast enough? On an unrelated note, what do you recommend for VPN. In Plan9 is very easy as I can just import a namespace, but I have Windows and Mac clients. Are there any Plan9 options? If not, what else would you recommend? Right now (only one location) I am using a Solaris server with ZFS that serves SMB and iSCSI. It works great, there's nothing wrong with it, but I would like a Plan9 solution. Or do you think iSCSI would perform better with this latency? (I can't use AoE as AoE is not routable). Any tips are welcomed :-), Thanks, -- Aram Hăvărneanu
