[svlug] Lots o' disk space

[Don Marti]

begin Skip Evans quotation of Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 10:43:01AM -0500:

> She'd like to put together a box to back it all up 
>   too, so I did some Googling around and came 
> across this article that makes it look pretty 
> painless and straightforward.
> 
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8590

Pretty sensible except that a random PC case is not
going to provide adequate cooling for more than 2
drives, and Red Hat 9 is no longer an option, now
that the Fedora Legacy Project is shut down.

  http://www.fedoralegacy.org/updates/

(Somebody should go through all these old articles
and tag them with: "that made sense back in the day
(or not), but it's dangerous now")

If you like the RHT way of doing things, CentOS is
probably a better choice than Fedora if you want
a "set and forget" file server.  But if you want
to dork around with it, building the new kernels
when they come out to see how high you can get
your storage benchmarks and how low you can get
your PowerTOP wakeups, Fedora is a good choice.

On the other hand, if you want low maintenance and low
price, and won't be using it for anything
other than Samba, consider a dedicated NAS box:
http://www.greatcircle.com/blog/2008/01/09/great_little_so.html

On the gripping hand, you might want some kind of sync
tool that's more sophisticated than just raw Samba.
Unison, git, and offlineimap are three examples of
server-side stuff that will make an intermittently
connected laptop user's life easier.

> I certainly have no qualms about using fdisk and 
> mkfs like it says in the article, but I'm 
> wondering if the latest distros would find the 
> drives and do it all from the GUI install. Maybe 
> the Ubuntu Sever distro?

Yes, the up-to-date distros will let you set up LVM
and software RAID right from the installer.

> Also, does anyone have any advice on the HBA 
> cards? The article cites Promise Technologies, but 
> in looking around for information I found 
> recommendations for Tekram and Addonics as well.

If you're buying new hardware, just get a motherboard
with enough Serial ATA connections to support the
number of drives you want.  Which will probably be 4
or so in a fan-heavy tower case.  Check out the big
Antec cases at Fry's -- some have multiple front panel
fan mounting points, blowing right over the drives.
And set up smartmontools and lm_sensors.

> Lastly, if the install is successful, and say 4 
> 1TB drives are all up and going, each on its own 
> mount point, would Samba be a viable option to 
> access them from an OS X machine for transferring 
> video files.

Yes, Samba is what Apple uses, and they have good
client support, AFAIK.

-- 
Don Marti                                               +1 510-814-0932
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org         Linux device driver unconference: http://freedomhec.org/