On Feb 9, 2012 9:07 PM, "J" <dreadpiratejeff@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> Nah... it's just putting everything together in a nice, easy to
> configure package. You could do the same thing with any *nix machine,
> you just may have to do a little more leg work.

That's sort of what I thought, but there is really not much leg work once
you know what you are doing. Course I still recall the first time I set my
server up with no idea what I was doing... That was a process spread out
over two weeks. A significant portion of that consisted of trying to get
cups working with networked printing. So I can see how a "ready to go" can
be attractive.

> I've not messed TOO much with FreeNAS but I noticed in the screen
> shots it seems to include an interface for creating aggregated.
> links... that sounds interesting... didn't notice that before.

Heh, I don't even know what that means.

>
> As for zfs (not xfs), it's fairly new but I "think" it's generally
> supported out of the box by most distros. I've only used it on
> single-disk short-lifetime test machines, though, so I can't speak to
> any real benefits to using zfs over ext*, vfat, ntfs, jfs, etc... the
> only one I can say to avoid is ReiserFS because... well, it's not
> being supported or developed anymore. :/
>
Wikipedia indicates its journaling, and some other stuff. But I don't know
enough about filesystems to know if what it was saying was unique or what
have you. Anything that oracle is involved in though...

> > In the
> > how-to above they appear to be reccomending striping across three used
> > hard-drives with no redundancy. What is that, like increasing your
sucess
> > of loosing everything by 66%?
> Negative...
>
> They explain all three options, mirroring, striping and "RAID-Z1"
> which I'd never heard of until tonight. But from what the Goog tells
> me, that's just what the hip kids are calling RAID-5 these days.
>
> IN any case, they explicitly stated that in the box they were
> building, with three drives of completely different sizes, mirroring
> would only give them 74GB of storage, striping would give them almost
> 500 GB but the best would be to have three drives of identical size at
> a minimum and do a RAID-5.
>
> They also stated a second time that the BEST solution would be three
> disks of identical size in either a RAID-5 or 2 drives striped and one
> as a hot-spare... both of those options make valid sense to me, though

I agree that both of those options make sense. I also hold that 74 GB
mirrored is better than 500 GB striped across three disks. It was around 5
K USD to rebuild a 120GB RAID-0 several years ago when the company I worked
at had one go down.

> So a simple Ubuntu Server system will probably end up being
> what I use, with NFS, CIFS and CUPS running on my LAN.

Yep, that is what I use currently. Still 8.04 kicking strong.


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