Hi, I'm buying some new hardware to setup a home server. The server's primary job will be to act as a backup/file server.
I'll use a 500GB SATA drive for the OS installation and will setup two WD Red drives in mirror using softraid(4). A NFS or CIFS share later and that should be enough to start with.
If I setup a script that'll shutdown the machine if it detects that one of the drive went bad, how secure (from loss) do you think my data would be in softraid mirror with FFS2?
A bunch of people (on a certain FreeBSD based NAS forum) chastise users who lost data for not having backed up their NAS. Well, isn't your NAS already a backup? Of course, I'm talking about a home NAS here where the content is only occasionally accessed. Is it me that's mixing up the two responsibilities, file server and backup server when I shouldn't?
Also, the server will probably also run OpenSSH, OpenNTPD (for the internal network only), httpd and maybe some mail services and will stand behind a separate dedicated OpenBSD pf gateway. I think httpd is chroot jailed by default and will probably just serve static HTML files. Do you guys see any unreasonable risks for my data in that setup? I know that ideally those services should be on a separate machine than my file server/backup but that won't be an option in my little home setup, at least for now.
Lastly, hardware wise, anybody have impressions on the SuperMicro A1SAM-2550F with OpenBSD or in general? It's seems plenty powerful for the job (and more) while being fairly low power. Would you suggest going more for a Supermicro X10 motherboard with a separate CPU that could be upgraded down the line (if need be)? I'm also hesitating between this and a much cheaper Biostar 1037U Celeron based embedded motherboard, but weren't sure of the quality for something that would stay on 24/7.
Many thanks for all you hints and advices. Dom
