[CentOS] OT - Linux NAS for Windows Environment

Tue Jan 31 17:22:37 UTC 2006
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 11:10, Troy Engel wrote:
> Ed Morrison wrote:
> > I'm looking to find a Linux NAS solution for a Windows network.  Looking
> > into FreeNAS and OpenFiler.  Anyone using these or any other solution? 
> > Any comments/suggestions?
> 
> >From the longtime experience direction, be sure to figure out the
> snapshotting upfront; a good snapshot rotation can save you so much pain
> it's not funny; many commercial NAS (NetApp, SnapServer, EMC, etc) have
> this integrated. When looking at a DIY linux NAS, you may have to roll
> it up.

I think there are still problems with LVM2 snapshots.  And, you
have to realize that there are certain disasters where the
snapshot will melt too.

> We snapshot roughly like so: [8a,12p,4p M-F] [nightly 2 nights
> retention] -- this setup is enough to provide instantanious file restore
> without having to deal with the backups. (classic "hey IT, I deleted a
> file last night...")
> 
> Personally I've used rdiff as a snapshot-esque tool and it works pretty
> well, but not very good when the underlying link dies; it's not the
> exact right tool. rsnapshot is also in the same vein, but again it's not
> quite the exact snapshot type of thing that a NetApp provides. I bet
> there are better choices out there...

A really nice tool for nightly backups with a history kept on-line
is backuppc http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/.  It probably
isn't practical to do runs more often than daily, but the
compression/linking scheme allows keeping a much longer history
than you would expect.  You can also designate 'owners' for
a machine and allow them to restore their own files or grab
older copies back through the web interface.  Since the
backups generally run at night you may be able to stick some
big drives in a desktop machine that would otherwise be idle
to run it.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com