On 2015-09-28 20:15, Stuart Henderson wrote:
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?
Good question. Thought it was preferable to isolate one from another.
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.
You're right. It's gonna be behind a 3020j surge protector that filters
cable and telephone lines
also but when lightning strikes... That said, it's replacing a hard
drive in a usb2 enclosure. So basically right now while the drive isn't
always plugged, its low availability means that backups are done
infrequently. With the server being always on, it'll be easy for all the
family to push their data to the NFS share. In any case you're right and
highly critical files might be pushed to Tarsnap also.
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.
Indeed, but in reality doesn't it do both?
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".
The files are currently strewn over a couple of machines all over the
house.
I intended on deleting them once pushed to the server but maybe I should
keep them
at least on my desktop once they're tidied up.
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.
Thanks for the friendly tips and the nice discussion Stuart.
Dominik
