[NTLUG:Discuss] Software RAID NAS Box

[Craig Gill]

You also might look at the openfiler project, its Centos based and will do
just what you want (making the box a NAS), it also make the box an iSCSI
target if you so wish.
http://www.openfiler.com/

Craig


> Okay, a little background:
>
> I've got this old box from the office... a server with a failed drive
> that is way out of warranty and will not be used by the business for
> anything.  So what do I do with this?  New toy!
>
> This box is an iomega NAS box.  It came with Windows 2000 installed and
> 4 123GB drives where a small amount of each partition was set up for the
> OS and the rest of the HD space was configured as a software RAID5.
> Fairly simple.  The hardware is a relatively simple system board with
> on-board video, 512MB RAM, floppy controller, two IDE ports and all
> that.  The system board also has a HighPoint IDE RAID controller which
> is really just another software RAID which means two more IDE
> controllers with the expectation that software RAID drivers will be used
> on them... so yeah, 4 IDE ports.  This device also has some strange
> little device to interface the IDE ports to these removable drive trays.
>   (Interestingly, it interferes with trying to attach IDE devices
> addressed as "slave" somehow...)  Finally, there's two 10/100 ethernet
> ports and a PCI slot with a riser and an Adaptec SCSI RAID card. (not in
> use)
>
> So I want to do this under Linux (of course) and I bought 4 400GB drives
> from outpost.com.  (They're pretty cheap... )  I'm going to install
> CentOS on the box with the intent of using it as a means of serving up
> FTP, SMB and NFS services.  I'm giving some thought to how I might set
> up the partitioning and all that.  Initially, I'm just thinking of
> mimicking the previous scheme when it was running under Win2K.  In this
> case, each drive will have the same partition scheme:
>
> 100MB /boot,
> 2GB {swap},
> 4000MB /
> *everything else* /data
>
> The non-swap partitions should be RAID where /data would be a RAID5 and
> the other two RAID1.  CentOS didn't issue any complaints when I wanted
> to set everything up as RAID and then set the actual /boot, / and /data
> partitions up in the Linux software RAID.  I think the installation
> failed while files were copying because of a bad install DVD... (I'll
> check it in a bit and burn another one if needed)
>
> Okay, so I'm soliciting comments and better ideas..?
>
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