My Ultimate Home Storage Solution.....

Part 1b : Infrastructure Decisions

Well, after a long week in the workplace, it is time to kick back, watch a little SciFi and play with my toys. So back to my project. Unfortunately for you I am going to take a little detour and then go back to go over the details as I got a little case of impatience and went ahead and go my server up an running.

I found out that my first candidate machine [Compaq Deskpro EN] actually had a PIII processor which was about 500Mhz. but it only had about 384 MB of ram. so I started digging through my boxes of memory to see if I could find some Compaq compatible ram that were 256 MB. The board only has 3 slots so I can only hope to get 768 MB. of ram.

The recommended minimum is 512 MB as I have opted to use the FreeNAS product since I have played with it years ago and thought that it had potential for such a frugal geek that I am.

Now I want to tell you that my primary motivation for choosing this project was because I WANTED to have SAN fabric in my home network for the massive amounts of data and files that I have but I just could not find reasonable used products on eBay and I don't think EMC sells used Symmetrix for home use. ;) There for the next best thing would be to institute NAS and since I have a Gigabit network in my basement datacenter ;) I felt that I could get reasonable performance. I also did not want to be tied to using a dedicated OS platform like Windows as I have a mixed network with Mac OSX, OS9, Windows (2000,2003,XP,Vista, W7,95/98), Linux (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Puppy, SLES, RHEL,), UNIX (AIX,Solaris,OpenSolaris,HP/UX, True64) and even some unusual OS such as Plan9 and Haiku. :)

I also wanted to setup iSCSI initiators to be able to emulate the same functionality that you get with SAN fabric like SRDF (which is why I wanted to do twin server but we are not there yet and will be a later project). So for now a single place where I can backup up my various usb external drive to a single place where I can implement raid and have connectivity from various machines regardless of OS platform is my goal. If I am able to integrate my XBOX 360, WII and PS2 and Dreamcasts will be a plus!

ASIDE : I also have a couple of Apple IIes that I play with from time to time so if anyone has any old Apple Ethernet cards that they want to donate, just send me a not here and I will be happy to take them off of your hands. ;) ;).

Now, I downloaded FreeNAS and installed it on the smaller 4 GB IDE hardrive that was on the machine and left the 40 Gig disk to use to server up. I then pulled out 6 18 Gig SCSI Ultra disk that I had retired from service a couple of years ago but still had data on them. The machine had a Fireport40 SCSI controller in it which I knew would be fine for these test.

I was curious to see if FreeNAS would recognize it and when I fired it up, it picked it right up and immediately I heard the awful sound of one of the SCSI disk clicking.....click.....click.....click. So I knew that I had one that was bad.

Here are a couple of pictures of my drives. I will update them with some better pictures soon.

Note : Don't pay attention to the dates as my little camera needed to be reset! :)

After I removed the bad drive, I was able to fire it up and one of my volumes had one of my older music libraries on it so I decided to set it up as a CIFS/SMB file share and also as an iTunes media share which went very well. I was able to have 6 PC (Windows, MAC and Linux) streaming tunes from the same share. NO dice on the xbox 360 as it only likes Window Media server.

I am going to close this out for now, as I will come back to update this blog and continue with my little diversion as I try to resolve a couple of technical issues and get the media server setup the way I want and then I will go back and add the infrastructure details.

Eunix

My Ultimate Home Storage Solution.....

Part 1 : Infrastructure Decisions

After searching around on the web for storage solutions, I have decided to go for a NAS solution because it is the least expensive. I already have a WHS (Windows Home Server) setup in my environment (that I will recycle later for reasons that I will explain later) but I have decided to go with FreeNAS for reasons that I will go into detail later when I have time to post the supporting reference links.

Today I want to outline the options of computers that I am going to use for this project.

I have severs older Compaq racmount servers with Xeon processors and loads of SCSI disk but they just suck too much power and most people won't have them laying around at home. I also have a bucket load of older Pentium and AMD class desk tops that may be fine but I don't feel like digging through boxes of old RAM to find matched sets.

I do howerver have two older Compaq Deskpro Pentium II towers that I used as servers (up until last year) that I have already modifed the cases to support additional SCSI drives inside the cases. I also have three small HP/Compaq presario desktops that have more flexible cases that I can upgrade the microATX motherboards to Quad Core processors to use for virtual environments so I will hold on to those for another project.

My favor with the old Deskpros is that the back end bus has very good thru-put and even though they are the older slot Pentium II machines, they are still viable for what they did.


Here is a picture of the two cases. This is a solid case that I can expand later and mod the case and upgrade the guts but I will use them as is for right now!.

Ok let me pull these things out an put them on the bench to get ready! The next thing that I am going to look at is changing out the disk controller. I already have some nice SCSI w and wo raid but SATA and SAS drives look very promising. I would like to have each machine to support 3-5 TB in a single cabinet.

eUNIX

My Ultimate Home Storage Solution.....

Problem Definition and Goals

Quite frankly, the problem here is that I have a basement full of aged technology that I don't know what to do with. Many of the computers, servers and stacks of hard drives are still useful and I am one to squeeze every ounce of use out of what I have for my money.

So now I want to create a home storage solution that I can use with my Windows machines, My Macs, My Linux boxes, My Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and various other off brand operating systems. I also want to have a totally integrated solution that works with my Wii, my XBOX 360s, my ITunes libraries and my DVD collection and my GAZILLION photos.

In my quest for an ultimate HOME solution that can also suffice as my work playground, I have decided to start with a universal storage solution. At one time I wanted to pick up an old MTI SCSI storage array and secretly dreamed that my EMC rep would donate an old Symmetrix frame and a set of Brocade switches to my cause. But alas, the cost of HBA would keep me from buying that new BUSA next year! :)

I don't want to create a monolithic solution that will tie me into Windoze world but I want to be as universal as I can and re-use some of the older motherboards and drive cabinets that I have!

My goal is to find a solution that will fit my tight little penny pinching fingers and will also be functional and provide redundancy. I am NOT seeking to have the fastest storage solution (as it may not be required ) but if it turns out that it is not that costly to do so, then I will do it.

Hopefully with your help, the solution that we come up with will be a base line that you can do also and if you are able to base your solution off of a core-i7 then great! For me, if I can do this with an old 6502 Apple IIe....I Will! :)

Goal Summary

• Design a low cost home storage solution that is vendor neutral that will allow for the re-use of older technology that you may have tucked away in your closet! :)
  

eUNIX

First a little blog clean-up!

Before I get started or should I say re-started with this blog, I want to apologize to those who have posted comments whether I posted them or not for taking a look at my blog. Those of you who know me, know that I am extremely busy and that I have quite a few irons in the fire.

After long hours at work, helping other and seeing about family, it sometimes difficult post in my blog.

I also have to make a confession! When I started this blog I took for granted the amount of time and work that would be involved. I thought that it would be easy and quite similar to writing in my daily journal (which I don't do every day :( either). The good thing about a journal, you can mispell, scratch out and if anyone reads it after you are dead and gone....who gives a crap anyway!

Well such is not the case with a blog because you want readers and you also want to have information that will captivate them and have your audience grow with you!. I also created a secondary blog where I could re-write some of the on-goings in my corporate life into a story form but decided to abandon that because It was starting to look a little too much like some of those shows that we look at on TV and we would not want that would we! ;) ;).

Well, as I was passionate about some high tech things and wanted to share with you, I am going to try and re-start this blog with a slightly different flavor. This time I hope to talk about things that you want to hear about and I am going to encourage some interaction where we can make this Journey together.

I also have to make another confession that I was highly distracted by that thing called Facebook with Farmville and that Cafe thingy. Hell, my sister sent me the invitation to that Cafe game and as you may know, I had to get my COOK ON because I just could not let my little sister out cook me!

Well, I am going to close out this "Header Blog" and the next post that you see will be the beginning of a new era for Maximum Computing!

Eunix