On 2015-09-28, dominik...@openmailbox.org <dominik...@openmailbox.org> wrote: > I'll use a 500GB SATA drive for the OS installation and will setup two > WD Red drives in mirror using softraid(4).
Any particular reason not to just put the OS on the mirrored drives? > 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? There are lots of ways to lose data, a hard drive going bad is only one of them. I'm sure you can think of many possibilities. I'd *really* recommend some physical separation between backups and the server. At the very least, removable disks so they can be unplugged so that something like an electrical surge (perhaps from a nearby lightning strike) won't affect them - as long as they're not connected at the time. If you have internet with decent upload speeds, maybe an online service or a trade with a friend (you store backups on their machine and vice-versa) would work out well for this. > 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? Take a different view: Mirrored drives and RAID are not really for data protection, they're so you can keep operating in face of (some types of) hardware failure. Now, if you're intending to use this server to put a *second* copy of your files onto from some other machine, always keeping another copy, then mirrored drives might be good enough for you. But it involves a lot more discipline than setting up some automated backup schedule, and it means treating it differently than "the machine that you store files on". > 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. I've been pretty happy with similar (A1SAi) for low-powered systems, but the boards aren't all that cheap, and neither is RAM for them. I have seen fairly good prices on Dell T20 systems recently (GBP 200+vat for a xeon e3), which run OpenBSD nicely (note there are cashback offers in various european countries for systems bought this month i.e. today/tomorrow, info at https://plus.delltradetosave.com/gb/en/pages/promotions/qualifying - s/gb/<other country code>/). > 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. I wouldn't be too concerned about ability to do CPU upgrades later. If you run out of performance, rather than getting rid of the old CPU and adding a slightly faster one at quite a lot of expense, at that point you could get another little machine and split off some of those public/semipublic services.
