New NAS Server... Yay

My new server arrived. It is a HP Prolient DL 320S and has 12 drive bays in the front.

Unfortunately it only came with 3 drive caddies that will hold drives. There are 3 open spaces and the other 6 spaces are filled with blank things. Presumably to maintain proper airflow across all of the drives all the time. Unfortunately because of that they cannot be used for putting drives in. This means that for RAID 6  I need at least 4 Drives. Particularly if I want to keep my 2TB drive in there that I have at the moment I will need at least 6 more spaces for drives. So I need to get at least 2 more bays.

This is my precious. A 2TB SATA Hard Drive. This is really wat I have everything that I really don't want to lose on. As I said above I would like to move to a RAID 6 array for storage. However for now as long as I still have the space I can live with no redundency for now.

It boots !

It even has a GUI. Surely the first thing I have used in a while that has a GUI for system management stuff.

However the first problem I have found with the software I'm using. The GUI only shows support for Ext2. The 2TB drive has my data on it in an Ext4 partition. This is my only drive this big. Thankfully there is less than 1TB of data on it which means that I can use my external Hard Drive. Unfortunately it is currently also formatted Ext4.

So with the 2TB drive plugged into my only other computer that can plug into it, I have also connected my external drive and am reformatting the external drive.

This would be only a little bit dodgy. However apparently formatting a drive in Windows Vista takes a long time. It's been a few hours but it is still only at 20% so this will be sitting until tomorrow afternoon. Such is life.

But I have found a new home for the NAS. For now anyway.

It is on the floor but I don't think it will be a problem. It will probably be moving a fair few times yet so this won't be the last place it lives I dare say.

So the beginning for a very exciting project. But still a little way to go before I am happy with the way it is set up.

Cheers,
Rex

Big Changes in my serving

No I haven't re-built the kitchen. For the last 18 or so months I have been running a number of servers from this:

It doesn't look like much. And in terms of "real" professional servers it isn't. However it has been more than good enough for me. Unfortunately there are some things I am not really that happy about. Recently I have become very fond of Arch Linux and have been enjoying some of it's features more than the Debian that is installed on this server. I know Debian is probably better for servers, but I'm just doing this at home for fun. So I'll do what I want.

The other main thing I haven't been so happy about is storage.

This is what the case looked like after I opened it up for the 1st time in 18 months. Probably a record for one of my computers. As you can see, arranged across the bottom is my network storage array. A jumble of random drives that has very little rhyme or reason, other than I could get my hands on them for the right price.

What they look like out of the case.

This is going to be changing soon. I have bought a case on ebay that will hopefully work as a NAS box. This will be my next big server thing to do. Also depending on how I'm going, this jumble of random drives will probably be dispersed somewhat and the old 20GB drives either retired from server, or relegated to use as boot drives with regular backups. Probably boot disks.

Another thing I will be probably looking at is airflow. Mainly with regards to dust. The house I live in is not new and has had plenty of time to start producing dust. Also this house doesn't have a dedicated server room with filtered AC. Bummer. This however is nothing new and hopefully I can reduce the amount of dust in this case (and the new one) with some slightly (?) informed planning of case ventilation.

I haven't decided on what software I'm going to run on the NAS box yet. That will have to wait until I get it. But I am starting to realise that the hodge podge of HDDs and no actual backup is really, really quite bad. So I dare say that both of those things will change in the future, even if I keep them like this for now.

However if you do happen to have a bunch of reasonable sized HDDs burning a hole in your pocket I know a quiet place where they can go to stay.

Cheers,
Rex

Network Sharing - Samba, Linux and Macs

Just a quick one today. I've been having issues with my samba server here at home recently and I finally had to fix it today.

Problem:What was happening was my computers running Linux would be able to connect to the smb shares on my server and I have put my movie collection onto it that way. However my girlfriend's Mac could get onto the shares but could only paste small files. Nowhere near big enough for a movie.

What was happening is samba was sharing /media which has /media/part{1,2} in it which are both mounts to large hard drives that the movies are on. I have also set up the root partition to be very small and it has relatively little space left; which is fine because almost everything else is on other partitions.

When you tried to copy across a movie on the Mac it would say there was no space left on the device and it can't copy the files. When I turned on the status bar on finder I saw that no matter what folder I was in the space it was reporting free was small, about what df -h said was free on the server's root.

The solution? Share /media/part1 & /media/part2 separately so that the free space is reported correctly.

Why:It seems that samba only shares the free space for the root of the share. Unfortunately in this situation because there were partitions mounted within the share the free space was wrong. This wasn't an issue with my linux computers because they seem to just copy until an error is given, rather then testing for free space first. The problem with the Mac system is that because it seems to be testing to make sure it can copy first and it was seeing the incorrect size it just gave up at the beginning.

Sorry for the wordy post today. Hopefully this will help someone. Probably even me if I remember to look this up here.

Cheers,
Rex