Proposed Setup

[Skazazes]

Hey guys, first post! I was wondering if some of you gurus could give the setup I have scribbled out on a piece of paper a look and let me know if it is possible. I was at Microcenter on Saturday and already pulled the trigger on some hardware, but I think you will approve of it. My final build will look something like this (unless you guys see a problem with it.)

• (CPU) Xeon 1230 V2 (HAVE)
• (Mobo) X9sCM-F-O (HAVE)
• (RAM) TBD 16 GB (Thinking Kingston, obviously ECC, 8 to get started with tests then another 8 ASAP)
• (CASE) Define Mini
• (PSU) Seasonic SS-400FL2
• (Drives 1) I might be getting 5 x 1TB Samsung IDK anything about drives that I can test on/use permanently?
• (Drives 2) What I eventually WANT is 6 x 2TB WD Reds

The Mobo and CPU are non negotiable as I got the pair for $310 at Microcenter (Motherboard is a refurb), even though they might not be able to handle all of what i want to do (Maybe they can? You tell me). Everything else is up in the air if you see red flags, but I really wanna keep the case as is.

Now for the FreeNAS portion. I remade my sketch on some bubble website and i think you can get the gist of it.

Media, Backups, and Data are all datasets I think as I am still not 100% with all the terminology. And then file access beneath them is done in permissions? This is where I get a little intimidated after flipping through the whole manual and a bunch of guides. I think getting a test rig going will be the only way to truly understand it from there.

Well either way, please let me know what you think about my hardware choices, whats possible and not, and weather or not in your opinion just jumping in and messing around before I put the box into full use will help me understand some of the fuzzy areas further.

Thanks in advanced,
Sean

ALMOST FORGOT
As you can see under the Hardest (not possible) to replace section I plan on doing a semi "Off site" incremental backup. If would just be two spare 500GB hard drives in a 1 week rotation holding ZFS snapshots in a fireproof safe in my garage in a hard drive box of some sort. Is this even possible? To always have one of them with a backup copy no more than 1 week old on it them unplug it and move it to a safe location? Is it even logical? again, let me know!

 

[Skazazes]

Beginning to think i posted this in the wrong sub. Can someone steer me straight?

 

[danb35]

Your mobo and CPU seem quite reasonable, and likely to cover what you need. Kingston RAM has gotten kind of a bad reputation here; I'm using Crucial in my servers FWIW.

I'm afraid your bubble chart doesn't do much for me in terms of understanding what you're trying to do. I can tell that you want to handle streaming media using Plex (you'll want plenty of RAM for that), some shared files via CIFS and some via AFP (why both protocols?), and backups to a Time Machine share--so far this shouldn't be a problem. It sounds like you also want the individual users' AFP shares to only be accessible to those users--this should also be possible AFAIK, but I'll admit I haven't done much with permissions.

 

[anodos]

I prefer to create 1 dataset per share. It makes management and customization of snapshots simpler.
Personally, I'd switch the "Individual Data" AFP Shares to be either (1) multiple CIFS shares or (2) a single CIFS share with permissions appropriately set to achieve your desired behavior.
The last time I messed with time machine backups was with FreeNAS 8.x. They were a bit flakey over wifi (Time Machine kept randomly thinking the sparsebundle backup was corrupt). I do not know if is still the case. The issue at the time was annoying enough that I just purchase a separate external hard drive to do my time machine backups.

How are you planning to do backups? Have you purchased a good UPS?

By the way, make sure you set a quota on the time machine dataset.

 

[Skazazes]

Your mobo and CPU seem quite reasonable, and likely to cover what you need. Kingston RAM has gotten kind of a bad reputation here; I'm using Crucial in my servers FWIW.

I'm afraid your bubble chart doesn't do much for me in terms of understanding what you're trying to do. I can tell that you want to handle streaming media using Plex (you'll want plenty of RAM for that), some shared files via CIFS and some via AFP (why both protocols?), and backups to a Time Machine share--so far this shouldn't be a problem. It sounds like you also want the individual users' AFP shares to only be accessible to those users--this should also be possible AFAIK, but I'll admit I haven't done much with permissions.

Got it, crucial. Just need to find a compatible set thanks for the heads up.

The time machine share would be a stand alone share with nothing else on it. The CIFS share would just be a communal file storage place, CIFS because the music on it would be used by my SONOS system which I dont think can read from AFP. And then the other AFP shares would be smaller, individual person shares for things like homework and such. Does that make it seem more logical?

 

[anodos]

Got it, crucial. Just need to find a compatible set thanks for the heads up.

The time machine share would be a stand alone share with nothing else on it. The CIFS share would just be a communal file storage place, CIFS because the music on it would be used by my SONOS system which I dont think can read from AFP. And then the other AFP shares would be smaller, individual person shares for things like homework and such. Does that make it seem more logical?

Apple is already in the process of migrating away from AFP (starting with Mavericks). I honestly don't see the point in using it instead of CIFS for your 'individual shares'.