On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 11:00 +0100, Henk van Lingen wrote:
Hi Bryan, Please tell. I have to replace our old Sun Enterprise fileserver (solaris8), which does NFS and Samba (homedirectories, projects file space). It will be x86 hardware, but I'm looking for the best filesystem for the job (let's say one terabyte). It has to have quota and ACL support.
NetApp is very costly per $ versus traditional file storage. But the Data OnTap OS with WAFL filesystem was basically designed by 2 of Sun's original NFS designers. WAFL works very different than most traditional UNIX server filesystems.
The WAFL filesystem has a couple of different modes for network filesystem protocol access. One catered towards NFS, another catered towards SMB -- but you can access from both simultaneously, there are just considerations.
Solaris/x86-64 has a good bang-for-the-buck, and UFS supports quotas as well as Samba 3 ACLs. I haven't used their new filesystem with Samba though (anyone, anyone?).
I'm doing CentOS on servers these days, but I presume ext3 is not the best choice in this case. Previous postings of yours suggest XFS is the way to go. However, it seems hard to find an enterprise class linux distro with XFS incorporated?
Unfortunately, I'm finding it difficult to recommend XFS on Linux at this point. Not until Red Hat gets serious about it.
And how does a FreeBSD solution compare to linux/ext3 or linux/xfs?
XFS is being ported to FreeBSD, as some of the licensing issues have been worked out. But I wouldn't trust it anywhere close to even Linux at this point.
I'm a little outta date on FreeBSD and Samba, the last time I used Samba on FreeBSD was version 2.2 several years ago (yes, yes, I know, quite hypocritical for the guy who wrote the BSD appendix in "Samba Unleashed" -- but that was 5 years ago).
What are the considerations in case of a NAS filer instead of a raid-box connected to hostmachine?
Nothing really. I mean, you traditionally don't have full shell/filesystem access in a NetApp filer, and you need a "sister admin system" (one system with special mounts) to administer some "/etc" files, but otherwise, they are pretty nice.
Especially for fail-over, but it'll cost you.