After all my recent maundering about there being no low powered systems suitable for backup servers I did a bit of lateral thinking and looked at NAS servers again (I had looked a couple of years ago). They have got a lot cheaper now and there seem to be two or three which offer what I'm after (specifically Linux/NFS support).
Synaptic, Qnap and IcyBox all offer NAS servers which handle NFS as well as SMB shares. Synaptic and Qnap go beyond that and offer SSH access to the server, a web server, PHP/mySql and python even! It may be that the IcyBox servers do as well but I haven't investigated in detail.
Power consumption is pretty low, the Synaptic DS209 for example, with two 750Gb disks claims 25 watts when active, 10 watts when idle.
Prices are in the £100 to £200 range without disk drive, adding a big SATA disk will only be £70 or so.
I think there will be one replacing my garage linux box quite soon and I can use the garage system as my general purpose test bed.
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 10:36:36AM +0100, Chris G wrote:
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 10:34:17AM +0100, Chris G wrote:
Synaptic, Qnap and IcyBox all offer NAS servers which handle NFS as
Oops, that's Synology not Synaptic.
A little further research on Google (especially the reviews and comparisons found at www.smallnetbuilder.com) has led me to the Western Digital My Book World Edition II. Price for a 2Tb version of this is about £215, it has ssh access built in, no hacking needed, power consumption is 16 watts when active, 5 watts when idle. The performance is not quite as good as the top of the range Synology and Qnap ones but it's *way* cheaper.
£215 for a low powered Linux box with 2Tb of storage seems excellent value to me.
So I'm off to buy one and will report back when I've played with it a little (if anyone is interested).
On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:38:45 +0100 Chris G cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
So I'm off to buy one and will report back when I've played with it a little (if anyone is interested).
I'd be interested (in this and any other low power NAS).
I currently run two slugs, both running debian lenny. One has 1TB of disk attached and is my DNS/DHCP server and local rsync backup for my desktops, the other (with a 500 Gig disk) is my local debian/ubuntu apt-mirror. Neither uses much in the way of power, but 32 Meg of ram and bugger all in the way of CPU makes them a tad slow. I've considered atom based eeePCs. but then the slugs still work (and anyway are just way too cool) to dump.
Mick
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On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 08:40:35PM +0100, mick wrote:
On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:38:45 +0100 Chris G cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
So I'm off to buy one and will report back when I've played with it a little (if anyone is interested).
I'd be interested (in this and any other low power NAS).
I currently run two slugs, both running debian lenny. One has 1TB of
What's a "slug" - Slough Linux User Group is all that comes to mind!
.... aaahhhhhh!!! One of those little Linksys boxes. I get the feeling that the one I'm buying has quite an active Linux user community with it, I'm off to investigate that now.
disk attached and is my DNS/DHCP server and local rsync backup for my desktops, the other (with a 500 Gig disk) is my local debian/ubuntu apt-mirror. Neither uses much in the way of power, but 32 Meg of ram and bugger all in the way of CPU makes them a tad slow. I've considered atom based eeePCs. but then the slugs still work (and anyway are just way too cool) to dump.
Mick
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 08:46:46PM +0100, Chris G wrote:
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 08:40:35PM +0100, mick wrote:
On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:38:45 +0100 Chris G cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
I currently run two slugs, both running debian lenny. One has 1TB of
What's a "slug" - Slough Linux User Group is all that comes to mind!
.... aaahhhhhh!!! One of those little Linksys boxes. I get the feeling that the one I'm buying has quite an active Linux user community with it, I'm off to investigate that now.
It's actually the same community that supports the NSLU2 that supports the Western Digital box (MBWE) too.
On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:08:31 +0100 Chris G cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
It's actually the same community that supports the NSLU2 that supports the Western Digital box (MBWE) too.
The debian ARM community is quite active - and Martin Michlmayr in particular is amazingly prolific and helpful.
sheeva plugs are currently getting a lot of interest.
Mick
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------