Re: [tlug] White Box: Some Assembly Required ...

[kts <kts@example.com>]

Charlie:

My solution(s) to home data storage and media:

Fileserver, NAS4free: 

-NAS4free, 6 4Tb drives in a ZFS Raid-z2 config, one huge pool0 (4 useable=16tb, can lose any two drives and data is still safe) (embedded booting off USB3 key)

-Asrock H310M mini-ITX with minimalist Celeron G4900 chip, 16Gb RAM (4 onboard SATA ports, 2 PCIe-x1, 1 PCIe x8)

-LSI SAS2008 PCIE x4 in the x8 slot, provides 8 SATA controllers, with SAS-SATA breakout cables, flashed to IT firmware in HBA mode so no RAID junk to confuse/hide things from ZFS.

-Intel Gigabit LAN card in a PCIe x1 slot (too much hassle installing the latest Intel driver to use the newest onboard gigabit controller, current FreeBSD 11.1 but maybe in FreeBSD 11.3 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=206533) 

-450w gold PSU

-yes, FreeNAS and NAS4free purists motto is “do it right” with a real server motherboard & ECC would have been nice, but later, if the price is right. Stayed with well-known high-performing chipsets (Intel gigabit, the LSI 9211-8i chipset fully supported under FreeBSD. Originally had a RealTek chipped NIC, but performance was horrible, the Intel NIC does 4 times better throughput with no hiccups/timeouts watchdog errors. Amazon used goods, reasonable price and delivery times.

NAS4free runs headless and is easily configurable by a web browser, does file sharing via SAMBA for win/mac/*nix machines in the daily mix, AFP for Macs (and TimeMachine backups), NFS for *nix mounted drives over network. I can browse, copy, backup easily from all 3 clients. SSH, RSYNC, HAST, Syncthing, even a Lighttpd http server, DLNA, and more. 

ZFS is no speed demon because it was designed with data security as topmost priority (Copy On Write to avoid the data hole of normal RAID if power outage during write), and is a bit of a mix of RAID + Filesystem so it can handle devices, data striping, caching, LZ4 data compression, snapshots, scrubbing, etc). Apparently all disks in the pool of devices making up the block storage could be transferred to a different machine and re-imported safe and sound via ZFS, when that new server motherboard with cpu/ecc ram shows up. Mostly idles @40w with CPU @400mhz, but if heavy file transfers are underway it can spin both cores up to 3.1ghz, never seen that yet under my usage. ZFS does love RAM, it is happy to use 97% for disk caching, LZ4 compression before writes, hashing, etc. I have 12 SATA ports, 6 currently used, I could do another raid-z2… later. It sends me a daily email update telling me how happy it is. Easy to setup, start, forget, all PC`s/laptops from win/mac/nix can backup and transfer files via anonymous guest or user authentication over wifi or cable. Nice to have a large 2nd local copy of data, though not failsafe offsite backup though for “where is your data when the fire alarm goes off” security. 

Media server: PlexMediaServer

Hosted on my debian i3-4core (same mobo/ram as NAS4free box), in addition to small SSD for the system, and a 1Tb for /home, this has a 4Tb /srv/media drive, currently 2.5tb full of movies/TV/music etc, streamed to Chromecast or Firestick on TV, laptops over the local wifi. SAMBA also installed serving up the media folders, so I can copy downloaded media from the Mac laptops over to the media Music/TV/Movies folders which Plex then picks up. Would be easy to mount via NFS/RSYNC backup space for copying the media data onto the NAS4free box, or just store all the media data on the fileserver in the first place and mount it via NFS for plex to read from on the debian box. I like two copies, I get the warm fuzzies that way.

I also use Rapid-Photo-Downloader to import/rename photos/videos from flash cards and iPhone, cams, GoPro, sort them into folders /srv/primary-photos and /srv/primary-videos and at the same time back them up to the NAS4free box via NFS share to /mnt/pool0/archive-photo and ../archive-video folders. The cards can then be cleaned off to fill again. Handy to have space on the fileserver for those things, automagically backed up.

Digikam is used for photo-video view/sort/database/tagging, it reads from the /srv/primary-photo and vid folders locally, keeps its database and thumbnails on SSD space. When looking for a particular photo I find it in digikam, then copy it over from the /srv/primary-photo via CFS to the mac to then send to facebook or wherever. Tanabata is coming, must stoke the masses!

Each machine keeps the necessary primary data locally, then backed up / second copies on the local fileserver. I like having two copies of data locally just in case things go sideways. Makes flinging data around easier with enough hardware when reorganizing things. Still not set up with offsite backup yet, another project entirely, but necessary.

Regards,

Kevin Sullivan