Alice Wonder
Cadet
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2013
- Messages
- 7
Hi, I came to this project with the full intent of using FreeNAS for my backup project but I am seriously having second thoughts and thinking about using CentOS instead.
I would like my reasoning checked because I would hate to make this decision based upon a mis-conception.
Nutshell - I have an old Mac II that I aquired in 1998 and back then was planning to fix (bad power supply) to run some of the classic Apple applications for nostalgia - e.g. Tetris and Dungeons of Doom. I never fixed it and now not going to.
So I will be gutting the inside (lot of room inside) and basically custom building a backup server out of it - so I can have the unit sitting in my entertainment cabinet as a conversation piece but also acting as a backup server for my LAN.
Four 4TB 5400 RPM disks for the NAS, 1 SSD for the OS, motherboard / CPU that do not use a lot of power, low profile power supply. Obviously I'll have to cut out the original back and custom make one.
I also want to use it for an SVN server, CTAN mirror, and yum mirrors for Fedora and CentOS. The SVN server being backup to the NAS but the mirrors are pointless to backup.
From what I gather, FreeNAS has been designed to use the entire disk it is installed on with fixed partition sizes that can not be modified at install time and without the ability to run arbitrary services within the FreeBSD environment that FreeNAS is built upon.
So in order to do what I want with FreeNAS, I would have to install a second disk (e.g. thumb drive) for FreeNAS creating an additional point of failure, and then run those things from a virtual machine using the SSD creating additional complexity and resource management such as how much RAM is allocated to the virtual machine.
I don't want a system where I'm not really root and all design decisions, including what software is available to install, is controlled by someone else without me being able to easily modify it.
I want a system where I can do a minimal install, set up the SSH daemon (and I always use a non standard port even on my LAN), ssh in and use a package manager to install the additional software I need.
I like the concept of virtual machines in enterprise, it is especially important for security where an exploit in, say, your mail server doesn't result in your web servers being compromised. However I really don't think I need them for my home LAN NAS server.
So I've decided that even though ZFS is superior to LVM2 for backup (ZFS on Linux is possible but license issues it's not in the kernel, so I would have to patch the kernel or use userspace implementation - neither of which appeal to me) that I will use CentOS with LVM2/ext4 for my LAN backup server, giving me true control over my system designed to meet my needs running on my hardware.
I already have to have an SSD separate from the NAS spin disks for the additional services it will provide, going the CentOS route also thus avoids the need for a thumb drive that creates additional points of failure (the thumb drive and the USB ports, which do occasionally go bad)
I don't need the GUI web based administration, ssh works fine for me.
Thoughts?
I would like my reasoning checked because I would hate to make this decision based upon a mis-conception.
Nutshell - I have an old Mac II that I aquired in 1998 and back then was planning to fix (bad power supply) to run some of the classic Apple applications for nostalgia - e.g. Tetris and Dungeons of Doom. I never fixed it and now not going to.
So I will be gutting the inside (lot of room inside) and basically custom building a backup server out of it - so I can have the unit sitting in my entertainment cabinet as a conversation piece but also acting as a backup server for my LAN.
Four 4TB 5400 RPM disks for the NAS, 1 SSD for the OS, motherboard / CPU that do not use a lot of power, low profile power supply. Obviously I'll have to cut out the original back and custom make one.
I also want to use it for an SVN server, CTAN mirror, and yum mirrors for Fedora and CentOS. The SVN server being backup to the NAS but the mirrors are pointless to backup.
From what I gather, FreeNAS has been designed to use the entire disk it is installed on with fixed partition sizes that can not be modified at install time and without the ability to run arbitrary services within the FreeBSD environment that FreeNAS is built upon.
So in order to do what I want with FreeNAS, I would have to install a second disk (e.g. thumb drive) for FreeNAS creating an additional point of failure, and then run those things from a virtual machine using the SSD creating additional complexity and resource management such as how much RAM is allocated to the virtual machine.
I don't want a system where I'm not really root and all design decisions, including what software is available to install, is controlled by someone else without me being able to easily modify it.
I want a system where I can do a minimal install, set up the SSH daemon (and I always use a non standard port even on my LAN), ssh in and use a package manager to install the additional software I need.
I like the concept of virtual machines in enterprise, it is especially important for security where an exploit in, say, your mail server doesn't result in your web servers being compromised. However I really don't think I need them for my home LAN NAS server.
So I've decided that even though ZFS is superior to LVM2 for backup (ZFS on Linux is possible but license issues it's not in the kernel, so I would have to patch the kernel or use userspace implementation - neither of which appeal to me) that I will use CentOS with LVM2/ext4 for my LAN backup server, giving me true control over my system designed to meet my needs running on my hardware.
I already have to have an SSD separate from the NAS spin disks for the additional services it will provide, going the CentOS route also thus avoids the need for a thumb drive that creates additional points of failure (the thumb drive and the USB ports, which do occasionally go bad)
I don't need the GUI web based administration, ssh works fine for me.
Thoughts?