On Oct 17, 2008, at 3:55 PM, Anathae Townsend wrote:
I've looked at a local retailer of computer equipment (they have good
prices) and noticed that the least expensive of the four drive NAS
appliances without drives was around $470 cdn. I pieced together a
mother
board, processor, memory, CF card, CF to IDE adapter, and case that
would
accept four SATA drives and was around $150 less expensive.
Consumer NAS devices. don't look so good with that. Also, from what
I hear,
the consumer NAS devices typically have barely enough power to do
simple
SaMBa serving.
How this is on topic for OpenBSD is OpenBSD seems like a good choice
to use
as the OS layer of the NAS. NFS, httpd (with ssl), ftp, sftp are
included in
the base install. Alternate Network File Systems are about the only
thing
that would have to be added, other than configuration settings and a
management interface. The final two are what I would be developing,
and
adding to a package or some other release bundle.
I'm sure you could do this with OpenBSD, and it would have some
advantages.
Make sure you have read and internalized
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#LargeDrive
before you start.
You might want to take a look at the FreeNAS project, at
www.freenas.org, which is based on FreeBSD.
They have built a popular software NAS appliance.
Your instincts to not use a consumer NAS appliance are right on,
IMHO. I had a very bad experience
with an InfrantNAS, when the motherboard itself began to fail, and
wasn't able to extract a replacement from the mfg without buying a
completely new unit. Never again!
Although I use (and love) OpenBSD for lots of different kinds of
servers, I have decided not to use OpenBSD for my NAS.
My needs involve software-based RAID for many terrabyte+ sized drives,
and for that I've found that ZFS with RAIDZ2 is truly amazing.
The best existing implementation of ZFS is under Solaris10, so that is
what I am using for now.
ZFS has been added to FreeBSD, but I am going to wait a few releases
to see how that implementation shakes out before trusting it with my
data.
