No experience with the QNAP, but here's what I'd do. Get a refurb Dell server and stuff it full of disks.
Put FreeNAS on it. Done. Kurt On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > SHORT VERSION > > Anyone here used the QNAP appliances as an SMB file server ("Windows > File Sharing") in an Active Directory environment? How'd it go? > > (Not as an iSCSI target or other block-level protocol.) > > LONG VERSION > > I'm looking for what will basically be a network-attached disk > drive. Non-critical file storage for things like ISO images, hard > disk images, archives of old user files, installation sources, that > sort of thing. SMB will be the protocol. Clients will be Win 7, XP, > and that one Win 2000 computer I just can't get rid of. Permissions > will be pretty simple, basically a couple of groups, > read-only/read-write/none, pull from and authenticate to our Active > Directory. No interest in running any applications on the box, nor > doing anything more than file copies to/from it. We're not going to > be running application off it (unless you count installers). No block > level protocols like iSATA, ATA-over-Ethernet, etc. Hardware will be > twin mirrored 4TB disks, maybe a third sometimes gets attached to make > an offline backup. Rack mount. > > One option would be a Dell R210-II running CentOS Linux, Linux > kernel software RAID, Samba, etc. I've done that before. It works. > > But management here is concerned that good Linux people are harder > to find than Windows people. They don't like that my minions don't > have expertise with such systems. So I'm considering something that > comes with a bit more hand-holding, a bit more "ready-to-go, > out-of-the-box". And NAS hardware can be cheaper than general-purpose > server hardware. > > Specifically, I'm looking at the QNAP TS-412U. Four bays, what > looks like a decent web UI, claims to do Active Directory integration. > All sorts of flashy bells and whistles we'll never use, but oh well. > It's significantly cheaper than most rack-mount general-purpose > servers will be. But if their SMB stuff is borken (I presume they're > using Samba, but how you configure Samba matters a lot), it's no good > to me. > > Thoughts/suggestions/experiences/etc. welcomed. > > -- Ben > > >
