Good NAS boxes for Linux?
Does anyone hear use a NAS with their Linux system? I.e. some sort of Network Storage on their home/office network to provide backup disk space and other facilities? I have a Freecom NAS box with 500Gb in it which works OK'ish with Linux but I'd be interested in knowing if anyone has anything which works better. The main problem with the Freecom box is that its SMB implementation is rather old/limited and doesn't work particularly well with mount.cifs to mount the Freecom disk drive across the network. What I'd ideally like is a low powered computer on which I can run Linux. The Freecom NAS (and similar boxes) are Linux based systems but the software isn't easily accessible for updates/fixes etc. I could use an old PC but they consume much more power, the NAS boxes are often fanless and consume only 15 to 20 watts. -- Chris Green
Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hear use a NAS with their Linux system? I.e. some sort of Network Storage on their home/office network to provide backup disk space and other facilities?
I'm currently using a Thecus N2100. I've got 2 drives in it configured for raid. It's basically a very small computer running on an Arm. It's got a custom version of linux on the flash - there's a community out there with a slightly dated flash image of "full" linux, but I'm currently running a chroot'ed Debian install, so I've left the original flash in place.
Ive built a NAS/media PC using Epia mini ITX. It cost me about £220 with 500GB hardisk +dvd rom and a nice case. The motherboard I got is definitely on the high end and if all you want to do is run Samba the cost can be brought down lots + hardives are abit cheaper now. My box runs at 21W on idle. If you use a flash card for the OS, power consumption will probably be lower. Have a look at http://linitx.com/ Quite a decent company, though if you are picking up from there office in Needham market, check the stuff they give you. They gave me the wrong motherboard but there were no issues changing it. My box runs xubuntu, mythtv, samba (Does the network fileshare/backup stuff adequately for me) torrentflux for torrents and linpha for pictures. Its sort of a combination between NAS and media boxes that are out in the market currently. On Dec 10, 2007 12:07 PM, Bill Hill <mail@wbh.org> wrote:
Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hear use a NAS with their Linux system? I.e. some sort of Network Storage on their home/office network to provide backup disk space and other facilities?
I'm currently using a Thecus N2100. I've got 2 drives in it configured for raid. It's basically a very small computer running on an Arm. It's got a custom version of linux on the flash - there's a community out there with a slightly dated flash image of "full" linux, but I'm currently running a chroot'ed Debian install, so I've left the original flash in place.
_______________________________________________ main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
I'll second the recommendation of the Mini-ITX route and using Linitx.com My previous home media server was a N10000 board in a 1U case with a couple of drives hanging off it. Worked really well and despite also running my mail, a couple of websites and a upnp media server I never had performance issues. The only reason I upgraded was because I wanted RAID and the Mini-ITX machine didn't have the internal space or enough drive interfaces to do what I want. On a side note I do have a PIII 866 box in a SFF case that was actually a gigabyte NAS appliance in a previous life and then became my first media server..it may or may not have the >136GB drive limitation I can't be sure, there is also a slight complication during installation in that it is headless in the true sense (no VGA connector or PS/2 ports) So you have to either figure out how to do an installation with a serial console or do a basic installation on another machine or as I did, plug in a PCI gfx card for installation and stick a keyboard on the internal USB header. Free to a good or bad home, or it is probably going skipside in the new year Of course the other option is a NSLU2 with debian installed and a beefy USB hard drive, but then we are talking two boxes, limited performance and a bit of clutter.
On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 02:02:29PM +0000, Venura Mendis wrote:
Ive built a NAS/media PC using Epia mini ITX. It cost me about £220 with 500GB hardisk +dvd rom and a nice case. The motherboard I got is definitely on the high end and if all you want to do is run Samba the cost can be brought down lots + hardives are abit cheaper now. My box runs at 21W on idle. If you use a flash card for the OS, power consumption will probably be lower. Have a look at http://linitx.com/
Useful, thank you very much, it looks like a good solution. I'd probably not run Samba as I'd mount the drive across the network using NFS and/or do backups using rdiff-backup (which works over an ssh connection). I guess I could probably get away without a CD/DVD drive too by installing across the network though I'm not quite sure how you get the system to boot initially without either a floppy or a CD.
Quite a decent company, though if you are picking up from there office in Needham market, check the stuff they give you. They gave me the wrong motherboard but there were no issues changing it.
They're local as well - excellent!
My box runs xubuntu, mythtv, samba (Does the network fileshare/backup stuff adequately for me) torrentflux for torrents and linpha for pictures. Its sort of a combination between NAS and media boxes that are out in the market currently.
I'd probably not run X at all, just ssh and maybe a web server. -- Chris Green
participants (4)
-
Bill Hill -
Chris G -
Venura Mendis -
Wayne Stallwood