[Discuss] Home NAS redux

[markw at mohawksoft.com (Mark Woodward)]

On 12/31/2012 10:43 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Mark Woodward wrote:
>> I sort of like having a web interface to the DLINK-321, are there any
>> similar projects for Linux?
> Not a lot of choices:
>
> Openfiler (CentOS based) http://www.openfiler.com/
> NASLite (commercial) http://www.serverelements.com/
>
> though there are a pile of "small business servers" that typically stick
> a proprietary web GUI on top of Linux and provide a bunch of services,
> like mail and storage. For example: ClearOS (formerly named
> ClarkConnect; CentOS based) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearOS or
> Amahi Home Server http://www.amahi.org/technology (a bit different in
> that it provides an "app store" of services you can install on Fedora or
> Ubuntu; claims to be fully open source).
>
> I'm not aware of a FreeNAS/Openfiler equivalent built on Debian or
> derived distribution, though you can always roll your own with a stock
> Debian and Webmin.
>
>
> Also in the FreeBSD camp is NAS4Free (http://www.nas4free.org/), and
> there are a few based on Solaris (Nexenta, OpenSMT).
>
>
>> I've used the Linux software raid in the past with mixed results. What
>> is your take on the modern iteration of the code?
> In my opinion Linux software RAID works great, and I've been reliably
> using it for years. I'm also of the opinion that LVM doesn't add enough
> upside to justify the effort of installing it and managing it, but
> you'll find lots of counter arguments for that.
I happen to like LVM2 quite a bit and, as a long standing and tested 
code base, its hard to beat. The new DM stuff loks interesting, but I'm 
not sure I trust it.
>
> The "holy grail" for a home storage server is one in which you can
> largely treat as an appliance, and easily stick new disks into it to
> expand storage, without compromising (long term) performance and
> reliability, and without having to manually "grow" file systems, or
> worse, backup and rebuild the file system.
I have a bit of code that I wrote a couple years ago called "reflection" 
that provides a FUSE based snapshotting and differential  backup and 
replication. I recently tested it on iscsi and was surprised that (a) it 
worked and (b) the performance was quite good, excellent in fact. The 
newer CPUs are so fast today that any computational overhead seems 
negligible.

I'm toying with resurrecting this code for my system.
>
> The proprietary Drobo DAS devices came the closest to this on paper, but
> they were expensive and performed poorly. Things like unRAID and
> Greyhole (pooled SMB storage) attempt to address some of these needs,
> but ZFS pools are probably the closest practical version available as
> open source, and it still lacks a bunch of automaton to be on par with
> Drobo. If Btrfs has matured enough to offer some of these features, then
> I'd be looking more closely at it.

Btrfs isn't exactly what I'm looking for. I think it is too much, and 
besides, I don't Oracle's intentions toward Linux. ZFS can only be done 
with FUSE, and if I'm going to use FUSE, I'd use my program, reflection, 
which does exactly what I want.
>
>   -Tom
>