[NTLUG:Discuss] Software RAID NAS Box

[Daniel Hauck]

Wow!  Looks like a really good direction to take with it.  It seems 
compact enough to be sure.

At the moment, I have CentOS 5 on there but I haven't done much with the 
box yet so as I look this utility distro over, I just may switch over to 
it.  (I'll test it in vmware first to see if I like it or not.)

But for the moment, I have my 1TB RAID5 system all set up.  I ran into 
some problems trying to set up the RAID in a way that I wished it could 
be, but it's all part of the challenges of running with a software based 
RAID system you know...


Craig Gill wrote:
> 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..?
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>