Rudi Ahlers wrote:
I want to look at setting up a simple / cheap SAN / NAS server using normal PIV motherboard, 2GB (or even more) RAM, Core 2 Duo CPU (probably a Intel 6700 / 6750 / 6800) & some SATA HDD's (4 or 6x 320GB - 750GB). My budget is limited, so I can't afford a pre-built NAS device.
Can this be done with CentOS? I've been looking FreeNAS (which is built on FreeBSD), and it look like a great project, but since the hardware support in FreeBSD is limit, I'd rather use Linux for it.
You can use a stock Centos - just set up Samba if you are serving windows clients and NFS for Linux/Mac clients. The only thing even slightly difficult is keeping authentication and user mapping coordinated between the windows/linux sides. You can also run whatever else you might want (web/ftp/email/streaming media servers, etc.) or even run it as a workstation too. If you are serving mostly windows clients and don't need NFS, you might look at SME server (http://www.contribs.org) as something easier to set up.
Has anyone done this? If so, please share a bit in your experiences :)
Are you pricing the low end NAS boxes (like Buffalo Linkstation/Terastation, etc.)? It might be hard to beat that if all you want is a file server. Most run Linux of some sort on ARM or PPC processors and may need to be hacked to add NFS or support >2gig files.