John R Pierce wrote:

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

Hi all

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.

Has anyone done this? If so, please share a bit in your experiences :)

you might look at openfiler, too. same idea as opennas, only its linux based. web management interface, supports NFS and CIFS/SMB sharing, etc etc.

IMHO, a storage server really /should/ have ECC memory to minimize the potential for data corruption by random memory errors. this, however, requires a server chipset, as 99% of desktop stuff doesn't support ECC at all.

you are, btw, way overspecing the cpu. a storage server would be fine with a much slower processor than any of those.

---

What kind of processing does the NAS server really do? I mean, it won't do actual calculations / DB access / etc, those will all be done by the host OS / server, right?

For the price difference, the bigger CPU is a better investment, which could also be reused for something else (xen server?) if this doesn't work out. Unfortunately, the only ECC capable motherboards I can get my hands on will be XEON, which is much more expensive than a normal desktop type motherboard. And the CPU's will cost more.

Steve Tindall wrote:

On Sun, 2008-06-29 at 19:16 +0200, Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

Unfortunately, the only ECC capable motherboards I can get my hands on will be XEON, which is much more expensive than a normal desktop type motherboard. And the CPU's will cost more.

Consider using an Asus socket AM2 motherboard, as they support ECC.

A popular choice is the Asus M2N-E with 6 SATA connectors (not to be confused with the M2N-E SLI), but any of the nforce 500-series Asus motherboard should work fine with CentOS.

Modest AMD socket AM2 45watt dual cores are relatively cheap.

Steve

---

Thanx Steve, I don't see that mobo on my suppliers' price lists, but I'll shop around a bit

Rainer Duffner wrote:

Am 29.06.2008 um 09:08 schrieb Rudi Ahlers:

...

Hi all

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.

What hardware do you own that is not supported?

I haven's used FBSD (or any other BSD) since 4.9, and I know what hassles I had back then with some NIC's. But, it's worth a try. This is a Linux list, so I didn't think a BSD suggestion would come from it :)

...

Has anyone done this? If so, please share a bit in your experiences :)

While it can certainly be done with CentOS, I'd take a look at Solaris/OpenSolaris for that purpose. ZFS really beats anything else out there. But you need a lot of RAM. 2 GB is good, 4 GB would be better ;-) Actually, the calculation is that it needs a GB of RAM for every TB of managed data. So, if RAM is scarce and the feature of ZFS are not needed (for whatever reason), CentOS may be still be a good option.

cheers, Rainer

I don't know Solaris. At all. I've never seen it (i.e. file & directory structure, security, kernel, etc). Apart from ZFS, what else would I gain? Can ZFS work on Linux? If not, I'm sure I could give Solaris a shot.

1GB per TB? mm, ok. This is my first attempt to this, so there's still a lot to learn. With 6 SATA slots available (2U case), I would probably only have about 3 - 4TB available (depending on whether I got for RAID 6 or 10) - so I would really only need 4GB RAM, but I'm sure if I spend a bit more cash on the mobo, I could get one that supports 8TB.

I currently have a PC, with 4GB DDRII 667 RAM, i6750 CPU & some 160GB HDD's, but want to replace the HDD's at some stage when I have more cash.

Am 29.06.2008 um 21:07 schrieb Sorin Srbu:

...

-----Original Message-----

...

Actually, the calculation is that it needs a GB of RAM for every TB of

managed data.

How do you reckon this? Ie, what's the basic assumption(s) for the statement? Parity calculations for stripes or what? I don't follow.

I can't say I've ever heard any such like, so please do enlighten me!

It used to be written in the solarisinternals.com wiki - but I can't seem to find it anymore.

ZFS is a moving target, in some ways, so the requirements may have changed or are no longer that simple.

But it made sense in the early days, when SUN's thumper (X4500, 2*DC Opteron, 48 disks, 16 GB RAM) more or less fit the requirements perfectly.

cheers, Rainer

A cheap server: there are many different values of cheap; it all depends on what you need it for. For my home network, I just picked up a brand new Dell Poweredge PE2900 server (from Dell) with two quad-core 2.33 GHz processors, 24 GB memory and two 250 GB SATA disks for $2800. Price was too good to pass up for a system in this class. I am adding another four Seagate NS 750 GB SATA disks with caddies for about $550. Runs Centos 5.2 and a bunch (>20) of Xen DomU's.

Steve

Sorin Srbu wrote:

...

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf

Of

...

Steve Thompson Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2008 8:39 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] settings up cheap a NAS / SAN server, is it possible?

A cheap server: there are many different values of cheap; it all depends on what you need it for.

Yupp, break down the requirements into the following three options:

• Good
• Fast
• Cheap

Pick any *two*. You can never ever have all three. It's a natural law or something. 8-)

---

---

Sure, SATA isn't as fast as SCSI, so I sacrifice that, but SCSI won't give me the same space (3TB) as SATA either. So, a gigabyte mobo + 6x 1TB SATA HDD's + 4GB RAM + 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo isn't too bad?

Les Mikesell wrote:

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.

I mainly want to use it as a backup server for hosting servers, so I'll focus on FTP / SSH / SFTP / iSCSI (if possible), and maybe NFS - I don't want SMB (for security reasons). I'll probably also add Webmin to allow users to browse their backups via HTTPS, manage folders, etc.

We already use SME Server 7.3 in the office, and it works great, but it doesn't support RAID 10, and needs min 6 drives for RAID 6, so I can't add a hot spare in this chassis. Also, ideally I'd like to run the OS from a USB memory stick / CDROM to keep it secure & fast to boot. I'll probably use LDAP authentication, with a seperate LDAP server, or maybe a separate IDE HDD / 16GB USB drive for authentication, still need to decide on this

...

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.

We're limited to the higher end equipment in our country, like Netgear, Dell, Sun, etc - which is too expensive IMO. A 4 drive 1U Netgear box without HDD's cost about $3500!

Les Mikesell wrote:

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

I mainly want to use it as a backup server for hosting servers, so I'll focus on FTP / SSH / SFTP / iSCSI (if possible), and maybe NFS - I don't want SMB (for security reasons). I'll probably also add Webmin to allow users to browse their backups via HTTPS, manage folders, etc.

You might like backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) for a backup system that will let individual machine 'owners' browse/restore their own backups while using compression and linking all duplicate files to use much less disk space than you'd expect. There's some tradeoff in speed compared to straight rsync and it needs more CPU, but the disk savings and ease of use might be worth it.

Yes, Backuppc is one of the programs we'll suggest :)

But it will also be used for Linux control panels like cPanel, Plesk, Webmin, etc which use traditional FTP backup (via local LAN only).

Les Mikesell wrote:

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

...

...

I mainly want to use it as a backup server for hosting servers, so I'll focus on FTP / SSH / SFTP / iSCSI (if possible), and maybe NFS

• I don't want SMB (for security reasons). I'll probably also add

Webmin to allow users to browse their backups via HTTPS, manage folders, etc.

You might like backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) for a backup system that will let individual machine 'owners' browse/restore their own backups while using compression and linking all duplicate files to use much less disk space than you'd expect. There's some tradeoff in speed compared to straight rsync and it needs more CPU, but the disk savings and ease of use might be worth it.

Yes, Backuppc is one of the programs we'll suggest :)

The pooling won't have the same effect if you run many separate instances sharing the file server. If you run a single instance that backs up many machines, you only actually store one copy of each unique file and all duplicates become hardlinks to that instance whether the duplicates are found across hosts or in different runs of the same host.

If these are real or virtual hosts you can give their owners web access to only their own host's backups. If you have virtual web sites on the same host you have to go through some contortions to split control but it is still possible.

Yes, I realize that, but it would save space for those hosts who have more than 1 copy of the same file. Each account on the backup server will belong to one host / reseller / VPS owner.

...

But it will also be used for Linux control panels like cPanel, Plesk, Webmin, etc which use traditional FTP backup (via local LAN only).

And those won't have any pooling.

I'm not too concerned about this :)

David Mackintosh wrote:

Despite a lot of fidding, configuring, testing and tuning, neither result is very good when it comes to NFS performance. We've gone so far as to run everything as noatime (ie local mount, nfs export, and nfs client mount) hoping for better performance.

Have you updated to Centos 5.2 yet? And if so, did it improve NFS performance?

David Mackintosh wrote:

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 02:08:33PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:

...

Have you updated to Centos 5.2 yet? And if so, did it improve NFS performance?

Sorry, these computers are in production now so I can't fiddle with them.

Besides, this would be a "long" upgrade -- they are both CentOS 4.x systems.

---

---

This raises an interesting question. What do you do in this kind of scenario? How do you upgrade a NAS / SAN with say 5 / 10 TB worth of data?

nate wrote:

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

This raises an interesting question. What do you do in this kind of scenario? How do you upgrade a NAS / SAN with say 5 / 10 TB worth of data?

Lots of the more modern enterprise arrays support online upgrades. Some of them even support re-distributing data across the new spindles to maximize performance/limit hot spots.

I personally wouldn't want to purchase any storage array that will have important data on it that doesn't have these abilities.

My favorite storage company - 3par has some of the more advanced online optimizations, sample -

http://www.3par.com/documents/3PAR-do-ds-08.0.pdf

Grow data online, convert between RAID levels online, migrate data between spindle types(FC<->SATA) online etc. Create a volume, and you never have to worry about answering the question 'is it really optimal?' because you can change it at any time without application impact or downtime.

nate

---

Nate, what EXACTLY does that have todo with the topic? We're talking about a self-build NAS / SAN running on Linux (and UNIX), NOT a commercial product

nate wrote:

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

nate wrote:

...

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

This raises an interesting question. What do you do in this kind of scenario? How do you upgrade a NAS / SAN with say 5 / 10 TB worth of data?

...

Nate, what EXACTLY does that have todo with the topic? We're talking about a self-build NAS / SAN running on Linux (and UNIX), NOT a commercial product

Everything I believe. Everything is a commercial product unless your building the circuit boards from scratch. Your specific question was how do you upgrade a NAS / SAN with say 5 / 10TB worth of data? My answer is you build one that can be upgraded online.

And the array I mentioned previously runs on Debian. The largest EMC arrays run on Linux as well.

While EMC won't let you self-build their high end systems, there are other companies that sell SAN/NAS gear that runs on Linux that will let you "self build".

nate

---

No, it's not quite the same thing. A commercial storage device is built in a such a way that the OS (normally on a separate HDD / PROM / flash disk / etc) can be upgraded with the suppliers pre-built patches.

We're talking about doing this totally from scratch. i.e, how to build one from PC components you have / purchased from a supplier yourself. This also involves setting up the software (in this case CentOS, but FreeBSD & Solaris was recommended as well). If I wanted a commercial product, then I would have contacted the vendors and asked them this question. And if you've been following the thread, you'll see that we discussed Intel & AMD, SATA, SAS & SCSI, software & hardware RAID, etc, not which commercial device works better and which don't.

It's nice to know what commercial vendors offer a way to upgrade the OS, but I'm not interested in a commercial pre-built product, I don't have that kind of capital

Sorin Srbu wrote:

...

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

Grow data online, convert between RAID levels online, migrate data between spindle types(FC<->SATA) online etc. Create a volume, and you never have to worry about answering the question 'is it really optimal?' because you can change it at any time without application impact or downtime.

Sounds awfully expensive. True?

Most of them are, but you can add whole shelves of disks. I'm not sure it matters so much in a case that holds six drives that you fill from the start and then have nowhere to grow anyway.

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf

Of

Les Mikesell Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 3:32 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] settings up cheap a NAS / SAN server, is it possible?

Sorin Srbu wrote:

...

...

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

Grow data online, convert between RAID levels online, migrate data between spindle types(FC<->SATA) online etc. Create a volume, and you never have to worry about answering the question 'is it really optimal?' because you can change it at any time without application impact or downtime.

Sounds awfully expensive. True?

Most of them are, but you can add whole shelves of disks. I'm not sure it matters so much in a case that holds six drives that you fill from the start and then have nowhere to grow anyway.

The guy who initially asked, IIRC, wanted some 3-4TB storage. This can be accomplished easily with a regular mid/maxi-size tower and a handful of 1TB-SATA drives. Even the midsize oldish Compucase-case I have at home can fit four 3,5"-drives in the hd-cage and another four in the 5,25"-bays. Suppose you fill that case with 1TB-drives and you have 8TB available. My argument is that there is no explicit need for the hardware you mention, despite how sexy it sounds. 8-)

My understanding was that he wanted some kind mid-level kind of storage solution based on hw he already had and not sink the entire budget on a roomful of EMC etc hardware. OTOH, this discussion has been a bit sidetracked since the beginning. 8-)

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

You're quite right with what you say. I have a 2U chassis already, with a Gigabyte motherboard + 2GB RAM + Core 2 Duo E7650. I also have a few 160GB SATA HDD's laying around, but they're too small. So, I'll be option to put 6 (if I can get the HDD cages fitted into the chassis) 1TB HDD's into it instead, which with RAID 10 will give me 3TB space.

Thus, I don't want to spend more money to buy new equipment if I have this already.

Using CentOS is preferred since I know it the best. I haven't used

This thread is quite interesting, I think quite a lot of people who contributed to it dont seem to realise you can do everything using just the stock CentOS distro, and if you are using CentOS-5, the scsi-target tools will let you setup and manage iscsi targets as well.

Setup lvm on the raw drives, and get snapshot and lvm mirror support as well.

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

I think my action plan now will be to figure out how to install CentOS on a USB memory stick and make it boot on any machine (making it easy to replace if need be), and then to play around with the RAID a bit and see how well it works.

Another option you may want to consider is a PATA->CF adapter. I use these for my OpenBSD firewalls and have them installed on 1GB CF cards. Performance should be better? Compatibility certainly is better, there's no way I could boot to USB off these aging P3-800 systems. The CF cards just show up as regular HDs

I use these ($7): http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH

Paired with Lexar CF cards. Not all CF is created equal, well maybe it is today. I found my Lexar CF cards were 5-10x faster than my Kingston cards of the same size, which surprised me. Not that I need high performance in firewalls that do no disk I/O but it was painful for the OS install to take hours(Kingston) instead of minutes(Lexar). Both pairs of CF cards are a few years old, today maybe everything out there is reasonably fast.

At least with the above adapters be aware that those adapters above do stick up. I think a 2U chassis can fit them(I have tons of experience in supermicro systems). But no guarantees. You may need another adapter or perhaps a male to female IDE cable so that you can mount it another way in the chassis.

I suppose you could even get two and run RAID.

Just don't put your swap on the flash if you can avoid it.

nate

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Rudi Ahlers Rudi@softdux.com wrote:

nate wrote:

...

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

I think my action plan now will be to figure out how to install CentOS on a USB memory stick and make it boot on any machine (making it easy to replace if need be), and then to play around with the RAID a bit and see how well it works.

Another option you may want to consider is a PATA->CF adapter. I use these for my OpenBSD firewalls and have them installed on 1GB CF cards. Performance should be better? Compatibility certainly is better, there's no way I could boot to USB off these aging P3-800 systems. The CF cards just show up as regular HDs

I use these ($7): http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH

Paired with Lexar CF cards. Not all CF is created equal, well maybe it is today. I found my Lexar CF cards were 5-10x faster than my Kingston cards of the same size, which surprised me. Not that I need high performance in firewalls that do no disk I/O but it was painful for the OS install to take hours(Kingston) instead of minutes(Lexar). Both pairs of CF cards are a few years old, today maybe everything out there is reasonably fast.

At least with the above adapters be aware that those adapters above do stick up. I think a 2U chassis can fit them(I have tons of experience in supermicro systems). But no guarantees. You may need another adapter or perhaps a male to female IDE cable so that you can mount it another way in the chassis.

I suppose you could even get two and run RAID.

Just don't put your swap on the flash if you can avoid it.

nate

---

Thanx, nate

That's a good suggestion, but I think the USB memory sticks could work better / more reliable, and will be easier to access in the cabinet. I'll play around with it a bit and see how it works.

--

Kind Regards Rudi Ahlers CEO, SoftDux

Web: http://www.SoftDux.com Check out my technical blog, http://blog.softdux.com for Linux or other technical stuff, or visit http://www.WebHostingTalk.co.za for Web Hosting stuff

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Hi,

(I apologize in advance if someone thinks this is OT)

I've been reading this thread since it started, and what I could really say is you should go for freenas, it can be installed in a matter of minutes in a usb pendrive, I use it on a 2gb kingston one using an IBM eServer tower chassis, Intel D201GLY2 mainboard, 1Gb 667Mhz RAM, 2 HDs those are 750gb SATA in RAID5 which are hold entirely for backing up my servers, that include M$ SQL, M$ Exchange, CentOS LAMPs and CentOS MySQL boxes(about 500Mb daily using Samba and NFS)this box has been running about eight months now, also I have another one running on an old Dell P3 using a cheap VIA SATA PCI card and a CF to IDE adapter which holds 320Gb and 500Gb SATA HDs for my personal backup and haven't had any issue except for my electrical bill that increased a few mexican pesos only. The best thing it's you configure all via web, and there's no need to learn FreeBSD at all.

You should read the Knowledge base maybe it can help you more to make your mind: http://www.freenaskb.info/kb/

hope it helps,

cu when i cu.

"It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion."

"Todo el desorden del mundo proviene de las profesiones mal o mediocremente servidas"

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Scott Silva ssilva@sgvwater.com wrote:

on 7-2-2008 8:52 AM Victor Padro spake the following:

...

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Rudi Ahlers <Rudi@softdux.com mailto: Rudi@softdux.com> wrote:

nate wrote:

   Rudi Ahlers wrote:


       I think my action plan now will be to figure out how to
       install CentOS
       on a USB memory stick and make it boot on any machine
       (making it easy to
       replace if need be), and then to play around with the RAID a
       bit and see
       how well it works.


   Another option you may want to consider is a PATA->CF adapter. I

use these for my OpenBSD firewalls and have them installed on 1GB CF cards. Performance should be better? Compatibility certainly is better, there's no way I could boot to USB off these aging P3-800 systems. The CF cards just show up as regular HDs

   I use these ($7):
   http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH
   <http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH>

   Paired with Lexar CF cards. Not all CF is created equal, well
   maybe it is
   today. I found my Lexar CF cards were 5-10x faster than my
   Kingston cards
   of the same size, which surprised me. Not that I need high
   performance in
   firewalls that do no disk I/O but it was painful for the OS
   install to
   take hours(Kingston) instead of minutes(Lexar). Both pairs of CF
   cards
   are a few years old, today maybe everything out there is reasonably
   fast.

   At least with the above adapters be aware that those adapters above
   do stick up. I think a 2U chassis can fit them(I have tons of
   experience
   in supermicro systems). But no guarantees. You may need another
   adapter
   or perhaps a male to female IDE cable so that you can mount it
   another
   way in the chassis.

   I suppose you could even get two and run RAID.

   Just don't put your swap on the flash if you can avoid it.

   nate


   ______________________________________________

Thanx, nate

That's a good suggestion, but I think the USB memory sticks could work better / more reliable, and will be easier to access in the cabinet. I'll play around with it a bit and see how it works.

-- Kind Regards Rudi Ahlers CEO, SoftDux

Web: http://www.SoftDux.com Check out my technical blog, http://blog.softdux.com for Linux or other technical stuff, or visit http://www.WebHostingTalk.co.za for Web Hosting stuff

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org mailto:CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Hi,

(I apologize in advance if someone thinks this is OT)

I've been reading this thread since it started, and what I could really say is you should go for freenas, it can be installed in a matter of minutes in a usb pendrive, I use it on a 2gb kingston one using an IBM eServer tower chassis, Intel D201GLY2 mainboard, 1Gb 667Mhz RAM, 2 HDs those are 750gb SATA in RAID5

2 drives in raid5? Then it is really only a raid 0, and will fail sooner or later.

Even if it's fake RAID5(RAID software)? Didn't know that.

which are hold entirely for backing up my

...

servers, that include M$ SQL, M$ Exchange, CentOS LAMPs and CentOS MySQL boxes(about 500Mb daily using Samba and NFS)this box has been running about eight months now, also I have another one running on an old Dell P3 using a cheap VIA SATA PCI card and a CF to IDE adapter which holds 320Gb and 500Gb SATA HDs for my personal backup and haven't had any issue except for my electrical bill that increased a few mexican pesos only. The best thing it's you configure all via web, and there's no need to learn FreeBSD at all.

You should read the Knowledge base maybe it can help you more to make your mind: http://www.freenaskb.info/kb/

hope it helps,

cu when i cu.

---

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

-- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

on 7-2-2008 3:14 PM Victor Padro spake the following:

"It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion."

"Todo el desorden del mundo proviene de las profesiones mal o mediocremente servidas"

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Scott Silva <ssilva@sgvwater.com mailto:ssilva@sgvwater.com> wrote:

on 7-2-2008 8:52 AM Victor Padro spake the following:



    On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Rudi Ahlers
    <Rudi@softdux.com
    <mailto:Rudi@softdux.com>
    <mailto:Rudi@softdux.com
    <mailto:Rudi@softdux.com>>> wrote:

       nate wrote:

           Rudi Ahlers wrote:


               I think my action plan now will be to figure out how to
               install CentOS
               on a USB memory stick and make it boot on any machine
               (making it easy to
               replace if need be), and then to play around with the
    RAID a
               bit and see
               how well it works.


           Another option you may want to consider is a PATA->CF
    adapter. I use
           these for my OpenBSD firewalls and have them installed on
    1GB CF
           cards.
           Performance should be better? Compatibility certainly is
    better,
           there's
           no way I could boot to USB off these aging P3-800
    systems. The
           CF cards
           just show up as regular HDs

           I use these ($7):

     http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH
    <http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH>

     <http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH
    <http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH>>

           Paired with Lexar CF cards. Not all CF is created equal, well
           maybe it is
           today. I found my Lexar CF cards were 5-10x faster than my
           Kingston cards
           of the same size, which surprised me. Not that I need high
           performance in
           firewalls that do no disk I/O but it was painful for the OS
           install to
           take hours(Kingston) instead of minutes(Lexar). Both
    pairs of CF
           cards
           are a few years old, today maybe everything out there is
    reasonably
           fast.

           At least with the above adapters be aware that those
    adapters above
           do stick up. I think a 2U chassis can fit them(I have tons of
           experience
           in supermicro systems). But no guarantees. You may need
    another
           adapter
           or perhaps a male to female IDE cable so that you can
    mount it
           another
           way in the chassis.

           I suppose you could even get two and run RAID.

           Just don't put your swap on the flash if you can avoid it.

           nate


           ______________________________________________

       Thanx, nate

       That's a good suggestion, but I think the USB memory sticks could
       work better / more reliable, and will be easier to access in the
       cabinet. I'll play around with it a bit and see how it works.


       --
       Kind Regards
       Rudi Ahlers
       CEO, SoftDux

       Web:   http://www.SoftDux.com
       Check out my technical blog, http://blog.softdux.com for Linux or
       other technical stuff, or visit
    http://www.WebHostingTalk.co.za for
       Web Hosting stuff

       _______________________________________________
       CentOS mailing list
       CentOS@centos.org
    <mailto:CentOS@centos.org>
       <mailto:CentOS@centos.org
    <mailto:CentOS@centos.org>>

       http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos



    Hi,

    (I apologize in advance if someone thinks this is OT)

    I've been reading this thread since it started, and what I could
    really say is you should go for freenas, it can be installed in
    a matter of minutes in a usb pendrive, I use it on a 2gb
    kingston one using an IBM eServer tower chassis, Intel D201GLY2
    mainboard, 1Gb 667Mhz RAM, 2 HDs those are 750gb SATA in RAID5


2 drives in raid5? Then it is really only a raid 0, and will fail
sooner or later.

Even if it's fake RAID5(RAID software)? Didn't know that.

Raid 5 need a minimum of 3 drives. The only way to get 2 drives in software raid is to create the array with the "missing" statement. With only 2 drives, you have a stripe with a failed parity.

So 2 drives is already missing one, and the next failure is doom. Raid 1 (mirror) is fine with 2 drives.

<snip>

    Even if it's fake RAID5(RAID software)?
    Didn't know that.

Raid 5 need a minimum of 3 drives. The only way to get 2 drives in
software raid is to create the array with the "missing" statement.
With only 2 drives, you have a stripe with a failed parity.

So 2 drives is already missing one, and the next failure is doom.
Raid 1 (mirror) is fine with 2 drives.

Then I will have to backup ASAP and re install the Array in Raid1, thank you scott. But the odd thing its that I've never had any errors regarding RAID or even HDs. Will recheck my config.

Make sure that it is raid 5 before you mess with it. I find it hard to believe that it let you set it up with only 2 drives.

Victor Padro wrote:

I am checking it right now and guess what, I thought I had RAID5, but I'm in Raid0, nothing to worry, no need to backup.

If your in RAID 0 then any disk failure will result in total data loss. RAID 0 stripes the data across configured spindles for maximum performance, it offers zero data protection(pun intended?).

nate

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Victor Padro vpadro@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Scott Silva ssilva@sgvwater.com wrote:

...

on 7-2-2008 3:14 PM Victor Padro spake the following:

...

"It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion."

"Todo el desorden del mundo proviene de las profesiones mal o mediocremente servidas"

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Scott Silva <ssilva@sgvwater.com mailto:ssilva@sgvwater.com> wrote:

on 7-2-2008 8:52 AM Victor Padro spake the following:

   On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Rudi Ahlers
   <Rudi@softdux.com
   <mailto:Rudi@softdux.com>
   <mailto:Rudi@softdux.com
   <mailto:Rudi@softdux.com>>> wrote:

      nate wrote:

          Rudi Ahlers wrote:

                            I think my action plan now will be to

figure out how to install CentOS on a USB memory stick and make it boot on any machine (making it easy to replace if need be), and then to play around with the RAID a bit and see how well it works.

          Another option you may want to consider is a PATA->CF
   adapter. I use
          these for my OpenBSD firewalls and have them installed on
   1GB CF
          cards.
          Performance should be better? Compatibility certainly is
   better,
          there's
          no way I could boot to USB off these aging P3-800
   systems. The
          CF cards
          just show up as regular HDs

          I use these ($7):

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH

<http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SY-ADIDE2CF-B1&cpc=SCH>

          Paired with Lexar CF cards. Not all CF is created equal,

well maybe it is today. I found my Lexar CF cards were 5-10x faster than my Kingston cards of the same size, which surprised me. Not that I need high performance in firewalls that do no disk I/O but it was painful for the OS install to take hours(Kingston) instead of minutes(Lexar). Both pairs of CF cards are a few years old, today maybe everything out there is reasonably fast.

          At least with the above adapters be aware that those
   adapters above
          do stick up. I think a 2U chassis can fit them(I have tons

of experience in supermicro systems). But no guarantees. You may need another adapter or perhaps a male to female IDE cable so that you can mount it another way in the chassis.

          I suppose you could even get two and run RAID.

          Just don't put your swap on the flash if you can avoid it.

          nate


          ______________________________________________

      Thanx, nate

      That's a good suggestion, but I think the USB memory sticks

could work better / more reliable, and will be easier to access in the cabinet. I'll play around with it a bit and see how it works.

      --
      Kind Regards
      Rudi Ahlers
      CEO, SoftDux

      Web:   http://www.SoftDux.com
      Check out my technical blog, http://blog.softdux.com for Linux

or other technical stuff, or visit http://www.WebHostingTalk.co.za for Web Hosting stuff

      _______________________________________________
      CentOS mailing list
      CentOS@centos.org
   <mailto:CentOS@centos.org>
      <mailto:CentOS@centos.org
   <mailto:CentOS@centos.org>>

      http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos



   Hi,

   (I apologize in advance if someone thinks this is OT)

   I've been reading this thread since it started, and what I could
   really say is you should go for freenas, it can be installed in
   a matter of minutes in a usb pendrive, I use it on a 2gb
   kingston one using an IBM eServer tower chassis, Intel D201GLY2
   mainboard, 1Gb 667Mhz RAM, 2 HDs those are 750gb SATA in RAID5

2 drives in raid5? Then it is really only a raid 0, and will fail sooner or later.

Even if it's fake RAID5(RAID software)? Didn't know that.

Raid 5 need a minimum of 3 drives. The only way to get 2 drives in software raid is to create the array with the "missing" statement. With only 2 drives, you have a stripe with a failed parity.

So 2 drives is already missing one, and the next failure is doom. Raid 1 (mirror) is fine with 2 drives.

Then I will have to backup ASAP and re install the Array in Raid1, thank you scott. But the odd thing its that I've never had any errors regarding RAID or even HDs. Will recheck my config.

...

-- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

-- "It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion."

"Todo el desorden del mundo proviene de las profesiones mal o mediocremente servidas" _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Could you PLEASE edit your replies?

Thanks.

mhr

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Scott Silva ssilva@sgvwater.com wrote:

<snip> ...

...

...

Could you PLEASE edit your replies?

Thanks.

mhr

Like your fine example of editing?

That was the point....

:-)

mhr

2008/7/3 Victor Padro vpadro@gmail.com:

Please don't SHOUT at me, ok?

Kinda takes all the fun out of it, doesn't it?

:-)

Seriously, I now realize that others had also made the same request, but after the email to which I responded. Shouting was not intended, just emphasis, which is tricky in a text-only environment.

So, mea culpa, forgive me my shouting as I forgive your long, long replies.... :-)

Onward?

mhr

Victor Padro wrote:

I've been reading this thread since it started, and what I could really say is you should go for freenas,

isnt freenas also unionfs ?

Victor Padro wrote:

isnt freenas also unionfs ?

Yes it is.

I would therefore pass on freenas, purely on that one point.

Also, conder trimming your posts please

...

Also, conder trimming your posts please

What does that mean, I'm not a native speaker so I didn't follow that, sorry. Didn't want to ofend or even make mistakes, my only point its that freenas could do the job under a SMB enviroment. And I don't even compare CentOS between FreeNAS in anything.

Victor, What KB meant to say was "Consider trimming your posts". What that means is to cut away the non relevant text and only include in an indented manner what it is you are replying to. It helps to keep the post small, easy to follow and neat.

No harm done/meant...

jlc

Sorin Srbu wrote:

The guy who initially asked, IIRC, wanted some 3-4TB storage. This can be accomplished easily with a regular mid/maxi-size tower and a handful of 1TB-SATA drives. Even the midsize oldish Compucase-case I have at home can fit four 3,5"-drives in the hd-cage and another four in the 5,25"-bays. Suppose you fill that case with 1TB-drives and you have 8TB available. My argument is that there is no explicit need for the hardware you mention, despite how sexy it sounds. 8-)

Unfortunately it's common for most people that don't have experience with storage to confuse raw storage space with I/O performance(IOPS). It's not uncommon for someone to need say 4TB of space but need 50 or even 75 disks to use for that space because they need the IOPS. In my experience the average I/O size seems to be sub 20kB, which means a 10k RPM disk can only sustain about 1.9MBytes/second (15kB I/O size), before latency starts becoming a serious issue.

Of course if you have specialized applications you can probably push the I/O size much higher, I'm talking for just generic off the shelf type tasks, such as file serving, Oracle/MySQL databases, etc.

I came in late to the conversation I did see the original posts around wanting a cheap system and saw several good answers, I myself have used Openfiler and it's pretty good(for iSCSI, it seems flakey for NAS). Those types of systems really cannot be upgraded online safely. The poster I responded to asked about how do you upgrade, so I responded. The obvious answer for a "cheap" system is to upgrade the live box and reboot. There aren't many ways to upgrade such a system. Maybe if you have a cheap fiberchannel storage array(ala Infortrend) you can have two NAS front ends connected to the same back end storage, minimizing downtime and risk you can upgrade on system and flip people over to it, if it screws up you can flip back fairly quickly(though still not an online operation).

I recall a kernel update to Openfiler that caused random kernel panics. Fortunately I was able to go back to the earlier kernel. (this was running their "stable" distribution)

nate

Les Mikesell wrote:

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

...

David Mackintosh wrote:

...

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 02:08:33PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:

...

Have you updated to Centos 5.2 yet? And if so, did it improve NFS performance?

Sorry, these computers are in production now so I can't fiddle with them.

Besides, this would be a "long" upgrade -- they are both CentOS 4.x systems.

---

This raises an interesting question. What do you do in this kind of scenario? How do you upgrade a NAS / SAN with say 5 / 10 TB worth of data?

I haven't done anything that big, but I normally put the OS on a small mirrored pair of swappable drives so an upgrade consists of swapping those drives with a new set pre-installed in a spare chassis. That way you are only down for the time it takes to reboot and if anything goes wrong you can put the old set back. In any case you wouldn't be doing anything to the data partitions in an upgrade.

ok, so in your setup the OS is totally separate from the data itself?

So, I guess I need to rethink my setup. Since I have a 2U chassis, which can only take 6 drives, I guess I should maybe look into running the OS from a USB memory stick or something.

John R Pierce wrote:

...

ok, so in your setup the OS is totally separate from the data itself?

indeed, almost all my servers are setup this way, too. A pair of smaller disks, 36GB or 80GB are mirrored for the OS and software, then populate the rest with large disks in raid10 or raid5 for whatever task this server is intended for (database or bulk storage, or whatever).

This strategy is probably most useful when you have several machines that are similar enough to swap drives and keep a spare chassis around that you can use as a backup and to build/test your next major update. I generally use smaller disks for the 1st pair, but if there is extra space you can use it for something that changes slowly enough that you would be able to rsync it over to the replacement before the swap. The main thing is to not include the OS drives in LVM or RAID0 with the others that you don't expect to swap.