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