Home NAS suggestions?

[Simon F]

OpenMediaVault is the new kitchen sink toy, it seems, but still in early 0.4.x territory.
It's based so debian linux, so easier hardware and software support probably but no ZFS on it, just regular RAID.

Thanks for the heads up. Seems tricky to get all the right options in one convenient distribution.
[UPDATE] Hmm.. looks promising OpenMediaVault might do the trick for the WakeOnLan with the Proliant.

For the ethernet adapter, a simple cop out would be to use another one. I thought, there are no slots, they can't be seen from pictures of the computer open but.. there are slots, only visible from behind.
So, you could drop in a cheap Realetk. Then I made a google request to be sure about WoL, and oh dear..
http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?5807-WOL-Realtek-8111E

Yes it does have two PCIe slots, and though they are not that easy to access, I might have a scrounge around to borrow a card to see if it fixes the issue. I do seem to recall reading that some Linux distribs do work with the on-board chip which would be preferable.

FreeNAS 9.x is "expected" in mid 2013, when it'll use FreeBSD 9.x, and I don't know about NAS4free. But you maybe will get better hardware support, someday

For Imagemagick, did you try the "ports collection", or plain building from source the manual way (that can be worth doing if it's just one piece of software, install it in /opt.)

"Ports collection"? Hadn't come across that. Will have a search. As with a lot of things, it can probably be solved given enough time but sitting at a computer at home for extended periods tends to annoy the family

 

[Blazkowicz]

core i3 with ecc ram running nexenta.

The other notable thing about the HP microserver is it comes with ECC out of the box.

 

[Blazkowicz]

"Ports collection"? Hadn't come across that. Will have a search. As with a lot of things, it can probably be solved given enough time but sitting at a computer at home for extended periods tends to annoy the family

You probably know about "apt-get install foo" : magical, always works, no effort on your own, it takes care of the dirty work.
Well there it would be the same thing.. assuming it's enabled in NAS4Free.. assuming it doesn't need to be much configured.. assuming it works at all with no dependency and errors hell.. assuming FreeBSD project's recent internet site issue don't affect it (it should affect 9.1 not 8.x).. assuming a 5 minute job doesn't turn into a 2 hour one.

I'm downloading freeBSD 8.3's basic ISO to try it out in virtual machine - a command-line only system will be fine (and any graphical thing I install may run through virtual network on my linux's X server and window manager)
Really wanna try it. I heard the man pages are very detailed and well maintained, there's even a documentation.

I used Solaris 7 in university back then (crazy machine with 8 300MHz CPU and 4GB RAM, a lot of SCSI storage.. but we used that from rooms full of thin clients, and we were many simultaneous users)
FreeBSD should be similar, i.e. a whole OS that fits together consistently and compatible a lot with itself over years. A linux distro is a mish-mash of disparate stuff that comes from hundreds of places and doesn't stay in place, next to that. But that surprisingly works well too. It's a mystery to me that all these gigantic OSes, with their tons of fragile drivers and n-ty layers of complexity work at all. [/end of digression]

 

[shiznit]

Nexenta 4 beta is out, based on Illumos now. I'm still running 3 but that's because I have 2 esxi hosts, lots of VMs, 2 pools, FC, iSCSI and NFS/CIFS and I can't afford for anything to go wrong. However, if I was starting from scratch I would probably use 4. I remember a post from some old Sun ZFS guys saying most members of the old team are at Nexenta/Illumos now, it will be the premier ZFS platform going forward.

I've tried Linux LVM and OpenIndiana w/Napp-it, Nexenta is by far the best imo if you can stay under the 16TB limit for the Community edition. It supports VAAI on block storage which really helps if you run ESXi, and if you load up on ram deduplication actually works. The gui is much nicer than Napp-it imo, and it has a fully functional custom shell.

All my OI pools and folders imported with no issue and performance with a Core i3-2100 is great. Sometimes I see 50% cpu during storage vmotion from one pool to another, not bad at all since I have compression enabled on all folders. I would be hesitant do run it on the HP Micro, ZFS uses checksums for all transactions and with compression enabled it might be asking too much.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Heavy duty stuff it seems you do.
Of course, if this home server is full of photographs, sound and video then compression is useless.
if you have some compression-friendly stuff to store I guess you can have a different storage pool (or slice or whatever the name is) and enable compression on that, assuming you need to.

Nice to hear the Nexenta team is still going (and others), hold outs of the OpenSolaris debacle I suppose. Oracle is good for this, when they can something or appropriate it (like OpenOffice.org) the devs leave the ship but continue doing it under another name .
So, what if Oracle decided to destroy Virtualbox for no good reason, it would surely go on with a new life of its own..

 

[shiznit]

Heavy duty stuff it seems you do.
Of course, if this home server is full of photographs, sound and video then compression is useless.
if you have some compression-friendly stuff to store I guess you can have a different storage pool (or slice or whatever the name is) and enable compression on that, assuming you need to.

Nice to hear the Nexenta team is still going (and others), hold outs of the OpenSolaris debacle I suppose. Oracle is good for this, when they can something or appropriate it (like OpenOffice.org) the devs leave the ship but continue doing it under another name .
So, what if Oracle decided to destroy Virtualbox for no good reason, it would surely go on with a new life of its own..

You guys build software, I build infrastructure . I don't post much here since I rarely have anything of value to add to the discussion, but I like learning more about 3D because building gaming PCs is what got me into computers in the first place so I read this board. The microserver could work well if you're not going to use block storage but rolling your own core i3/supermicro would be cheaper and much better all around.

Don't get me started on Oracle virtualization, I had to roll out a critical app in OVM 3.1 recently and it was very painful.