

Solaris + ZFS = The Perfect Home File/Media Server - j2d2
http://bitdrop.st0w.com/2009/05/16/solaris-zfs-the-perfect-home-file-and-media-server/

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ComputerGuru
Good setup, but way too expensive for what adds up to a highly-advanced NAS.

I don't at all disagree with the OpenSolaris/ZFS assessment, but the hardware
is a bit on the heavy side. You really don't need that server motherboard
(knock 100 dollars off the price). The CPU is also overkill, and ECC RAM isn't
necessary though at that price it's not exactly a bad idea either.

The remaining cost is just HDs - you can knock one off the list if you use
RAID-Z instead of RAID-Z2 and remember to replace a drive as soon as it goes
bad.

OpenSolaris itself doesn't need a full 320GBs for the OS and its software: an
80GB hard drive will suffice and then some.

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catch23
For the really cheap solution, you can just get a mini-itx atom board, mini-
itx case, and a few external usb enclosures for the hard drives. It's what I
have at home, running opensolaris on Xen. I mapped the usb drives natively to
opensolaris so I'm not creating disk images on each. It's still fast enough to
stream movies on. Not counting the external hard drives, it'll probably cost
you around $200 for the PC, and about $125 per terabyte (usually around $25
per usb enclosure).

One of the reasons I used Xen is because OpenSolaris still lacks proper
network drivers for just about all the network cards I own. It also had issues
with my external usb drives, so it was just easier getting linux to handle the
hardware interfaces to opensolaris.

I use it as timemachine backups for my macs & media storage... but on a cheap
budget.

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ciupicri
Have you tried/thought about VirtualBox?

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catch23
I used Xen because I know it well. I'm sure it would probably work with
VirtualBox or dozens of other virtualization platforms.

~~~
ciupicri
I see... but unfortunately Xen dom0 has becoming unavailable in the latest
Linux distributions, e.g. Fedora and Ubuntu. Also Red Hat seems that it will
go with KVM in its next version.

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rjurney
I love ZFS. I was on the mailing list for a year just to watch it develop. It
is amazing. I love Solaris. When I deploy applications on it I get warm and
fuzzies.

I've used ZFS + Solaris at home and with Sun hardware in several companies for
'appliance' servers that we deployed on-site in remote locations. We were able
to achieve reliable storage on a 1U server without paying for a RAID card. It
was great. ZFS is great for the budget. Now I want it at home.

But where's the simple appliance to do this? For a home fileserver I just want
a small box large enough to hold 4 disks, and I want it to set me up a RAID-Z
or mirrored ZFS when I pop them in, and serve them via all the common methods
I pick via a simple web interface.

Why has nobody done this? I've looked, and the only ZFS 'storage appliances'
are software packages.

At present I have a RAID-1 mirror on cheap external drives on a mac mini, and
I _KNOW_ the array will degrade within a couple years. Has always happened to
me with software RAID. ZFS would be great, but there is no such appliance.
(And yes, I tried the patch to make OS X write to ZFS... so slow it virtually
locked the system).

Please, someone: build this. It will be a great product. You can offer much
better storage reliability than can cheap RAID with ZFS.

~~~
notmyname
It sounds like what you are looking for is a Drobo (www.drobo.com). It has
some shortcomings, but it is great for dead-simple backups that protect
against hard drive failure.

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joshu
I am excited about drobo but I've heard too many horror stories.

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weaksauce
What kind of horror stories?

I am looking for something like this instead of tape backups. I looked at some
NAS devices that hold five drives and seem pretty robust. One of the devices
can mirror itself to another NAS over the network so you can have two separate
places to store your data and not have a hardware failure of one device kill
the other.(one exception would be the case where the master device gets
degraded to the point where bad data is being written to it and then
propagates the changes to the other device. I don't know how likely this
failure situation is though.)

~~~
joshu
I've just heard whispers of data loss bugs more than a few times. I recommend
some searching.

I think the dual NAS idea is a good one; I'm considering it.

I do crave a higher bandwidth connection to disk.

I wish OS X would ship with ZFS. A mac mini + zfs + JBOD seems fascinating.

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notmyname
I've build something similar for home/small-office use. My experiences are at
<http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server>. Daz at <http://sigtar.com/> has
done similar things as well, and I've found his site to be invaluable as I
have built my file server.

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spydez
Thanks for the links... You've made my day with that ACL rule.

I had the new file permissions issue but hadn't had time to hunt down the
solution.

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zcrar70
This looks nice, but $1300 seems a little overkill for a home file server!
(unless it's a home office?)

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kailoa
About half of that is the cost of the drives. That's not going to change no
matter which solution you get.

Compared to the 4-bay $500 Drobo, (plus $200 for DroboShare) it's not bad
considering he's getting exactly what he wants.

The trade off is that he has to maintain the Solaris box, and the
size/footprint of the overall solution.

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javanix
Hopefully acquiring Sun will accelerate Oracle's work on btrfs, and we Linux
users can get our own copy-on-write system.

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gaius
More likely Oracle will abandon work on BTRFS now that they have real ZFS.

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sneakums
Yeah, if I were Oracle I'd definitely throw away a native Linux filesystem in
the late stages of development and start porting some goofy jock-ware from an
alien kernel. But I'm _not_ Oracle and so they're foolishly carrying on with
their insane scheme: <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-
systems.btrfs/2880>

~~~
gaius
Oracle have said that Solaris is the main reason they bought Sun.

~~~
sneakums
Nothing I have said contradicts this.

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Rickasaurus
I've had a lot of success with ZFS in FreeBSD running on some very old
hardware with a small ram upgrade and a stack of SATA hard disks.

I did try OpenSolaris first but it didn't like my old hardware.

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btw0
I don't know if anybody is interested in Qnap TS-219, it's green and cheap

<http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs>

It uses an arm based 1.2GHz CPU with 512MB memory, it is officially supported
by Debian:

<http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/>

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jonah
there was a similar post on nerdblog recently:
<http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html>

