Nas

[DrunkenZombiee]

Aside:
My refund for the £100 cashback offer was acknowledged within a week of submitting the form and the cheque is due some time before 7th May.

I got mine within the month which I was not expecting as usually it can take some time for deals like these.

I am still loving my little Server, running a few interesting services on it these days like a media indexing tool to relabel all of my MP3s properly and the recent addition of one one of these for just over a fiver plus NEXTPVR server and XBMC12 frodo clients means TV on any device on my home and TV on the move in different countries. I did have to hack 2008 R2 to use BDA digital devices which was a PITA but it worked in the end!

DZ.

[suicidal_monkey]

If I can find the old RAM you are welcome to it, but I don't remember where I put it now or even if there are enough slots for it to be of any use!

Aside:
My refund for the £100 cashback offer was acknowledged within a week of submitting the form and the cheque is due some time before 7th May.

let me know if you find it and if there's a slot in the server for it we can work out the beers

I missed the best deals and the cashback, which could have been a third hard drive and raid 5 or the 16gb ram but decided it was still worth it! Those additions can come later. Ram is more likely than disk space based on my current usage/plans. Don't know what you lot store on all those GB

[suicidal_monkey]

:g:Are any of you using encryption in your file-servers?

Within  Nas4Free, so far as I can tell from my searching, the only encryption  option is to encrypt each disk individually, and entirely, before adding  them to a ZFS vdev. There's no partial encryption option (at least not  one I have found) and the password for each disk can be different. The  encryption happens at the disk level, underneath ZFS, not certain how  that interacts with. You need to mount/decrypt each disk after a reboot,  and then re-init the ZFS pool.

The other option seems to be to  create (with or without disk encryption) the ZFS vdev, pool, and  dataset/volume and then create an encrypted volume with something like  truecrypt (...or this?)  inside/on-top-of ZFS. ZFS will essentially manage the  read/write/mirroring of already-encrypted data. Not certain nas4Free  supports this sort of setup going by the forum posts I came across -  perhaps I need to go with a more generic linux distro to achieve  that...?

:blink:choices.  I guess I could encrypt everything and be done with it. Anyone with any  suggestions / thoughts / experience setting this sort of thing up?

[suicidal_monkey]

Decided to try putting Ubuntu Server on my microserver...

Turns out that it's a bit of a pita to make Ubuntu server install off a usb stick. It kept complaining it couldn't find the cdrom. The forum posts I found on it were confused, so I gave up and went to look for a CD-ROM drive. I have two - One is old and is PATA/Molex, the other SATA (with SATA-Power, no Molex) - and the N40L has a SATA data connector, but Molex power, and I couldn't find a Molex-->Sata power adapter in my drawer of computer junk.
:eyebrow:

I got there in the end, with a bit of help from an old PSU that did have sata power connectors...
[ATTACH=CONFIG]2047[/ATTACH]

[BrotherTobious]

My god Ben you still have that keyboard!!!!!!

[suicidal_monkey]

Indeed, it has survived well over a decade of abuse now, and is still useful for LANs and last-night computer configuring. Only had to disassemble it 2 or 3 times to rinse out beer and wine...

[DrunkenZombiee]

MDADM will take an age to make your RAID array. It told me 2 days so I gave up and put another OS on.

[suicidal_monkey]

MDADM will take an age to make your RAID array. It told me 2 days so I gave up and put another OS on.

I was planning to still use zfs for Linux, which I think is instead of (?) MDADM, but then I was going to put something like a truecrypt container on it that I will mount and share.

I am not certain I properly get the proper architecture of a file server yet, but in my mind I have this: ZFS pool as underlying (redundant raidz) volume. On this I create folders like /music and /photos, which I mount in the server and share over the network. I then create my truecrypt container, mount it on server, and share the mounted directory. Access to the shares should not require any interactive login (might sort out certificates...) but if a drive is removed or stolen the truecrypt container should be a reasonable barrier.

The main reason I decided to try a more complete server distro was because it looked like nas4free didn't give me the option of an encrypted folder/share? I'm less keen on the full disk encryption as the only solution it offers as it's not clear how I could access the data off one disk following os/system failure. Happy to be persuaded otherwise!

[suicidal_monkey]

ZFS pool as underlying (redundant raidz) volume. On this I create folders like /music and /photos, which I mount in the server and share over the network. I then create my truecrypt container, mount it on server, and share the mounted directory.

After some more reading, I think I might now understand why this might not work well with zfs...
To zfs the truecrypt container would appear as a large file. When a file is modified zfs doesn't modify the file in place, but it actually writes a new updated version, to protect the data. As the truecrypt container is a relatively large "file" this makes for a significant amount of writing for small changes. Should have a little time next week&weekend to experiment


Edit: mind you, the observation that it was slow/inconsistent writing was taken from a translated forum post in which the guy had a 1.6tb truecrypt container on a 1.8tb array, so perhaps 1 or 2 Gb won't be too bad :-) also probable that zfs would only rewrite portions of the file that change and not the entire thing, so provided truecrypt processes in blocks, which it must do surely, this should still be workable

[TeaLeaf]

let me know if you find it and if there's a slot in the server for it we can work out the beers

I sent you a PM a couple of weeks back but got no response.   Do you still need that RAM stick or do I get to bin it?

[suicidal_monkey]

I sent you a PM a couple of weeks back but got no response.   Do you still need that RAM stick or do I get to bin it?

Definitely yes please!
*goes to look at long lost pms...

[TeaLeaf]

£100 refund cheque arrived Friday. :thumbsup:

The RAM stick goes in the post on Monday Suicidal!

[TeaLeaf]

If anyone is still interred in getting a NAS or a micro server then please note that Ebuyer appear to have a supply of the HP N54L servers at £99.99 after the rebate and free delivery included.  Other suppliers may have some too.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

[TeaLeaf]

Long term use update:

The NAS is still going fine, still whisper quiet and nothing has failed.  It's left on 24/7 most of the time running a media server and simple storage with different accounts for each member of the family with accompanying permissions.

Very highly recommended for a cheap self-build NAS option and there are still regular deals to be found on this micro-server, net cost of circa £100.