On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:38:49AM +0000, Laurie Brown wrote:
Chris G wrote:
Or like me with my Buffalo Linkstation, fighting up against the slightly buggy samba version it runs.
Another one! :-)
<me too!>
That's why I like the WD MBWE, accessible Linux in it so you can easily install rsync and rdiff-backup etc. without serious hacking.
Chris, care to expand on this please? Currently as backup for ourselvs and clients I have a couple of PCs with lots of disks in, RAID-1 one as backup and the other as the backup's backup. My electricity bill here is massive, over £500 a month, and I'm looking at ways to reduce it significantly. Investment in low-power modern kit seems the only way, so I'm very interested in what you said above as we use rdiff-backup here...
The actual device I have is the 2Tb version of this:-
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=589
I found it after searching around quite a lot looking for something that does have NFS and doesn't cost too much. The following site is quite useful too:-
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/
Out of the box the MBWE has NFS support (as well as lots of other things), does RAID between the two hard disks (you can choose the sort of RAID you want) and has ssh login. There are web configuration pages to set it all up.
For adding software to the MBWE you can go to:-
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/
It has its own software repository with a deb/rpm like format which automates installs and dependencies called optware. Once optware is installed on the MBWE it's like using yum or apt-get to install software.
For its price the MBWE is good, it's not the world's fastest system by any means though. The Web configuration runs quite slowly for example, but the actual data transfer via its ethernet seems quite quick (the smallnetbuilder site above has speed benchmarks and comparisons).