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. -- Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith at ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The best things in life are NOT free - which is why life is easiest if you save all the bills until you can share them with the perfect woman