[Discuss] Adventures in N40L Land

[Jerry Feldman]

On 02/12/2012 01:16 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> The box and disks arrived early last week but I didn't get a chance to do anything with it until today.
>
> The box has 6 SATA ports on it: 4 in the RAID cage, 1 on the motherboard for an optical drive, and 1 eSATA port on the back of the chassis.  The 250GB disk that ships with the unit takes one of the RAID cage slots.  I moved this up to the optical drive bay where it runs fine as a system drive.  It has a USB socket on the motherboard for an internal flash drive for those who want to go that route.
>
> I wound up getting a batch of Western Digital WD20EARX disks at MicroCenter.  Same price as NewEgg.  That's hard to beat.  The Hitachi disk will go to some other purpose.
>
> Flash boot with FreeNAS was my original intention.  I abandoned it for vanilla Debian because I couldn't get the sharing services to start.  A NAS box is pretty useless if it can't share file systems.  So, Debian Squeeze onto the box, recreated my RAID set and copy over my existing configurations.  This marks one of the things I like about Debian: relatively easy hardware migrations.
>
> It really is remarkably quiet even under load.  I can hear the disks seeking under load if there are no other sounds in the room to mask the noise.  Otherwise it's unnoticed.
>
> Here it is live and running:
> http://www.gweep.net/~ratinox/02-12-12_1244.jpg
>
> Not so impressive to look at, is it?  That's a G4 Mac mini on the left to provide some scale.  The USB disk on top is my video library, currently being rsynced over to the ZFS RAID.
Looks like a pretty decent system. Sharing can get complicated even in a
small shop if you are sharing both NFS and Samba (CIFS). I would have
loved to set up authentication on our NAS to use our company's AD, but
that proved unimplementable. And, NFS sharing is based on owner/group I
would have liked some way to map the Windows user names to the Linux
user names in the box, but my solution was to set up a separate
username/password for the NAS. I had planned to write a scipt to
coordinate the /etc/shado in the Linux systems (NIS based) to the
/etc/shadow in the WD/MyBook. But, fortunately most of the guys in the
office use the same passwords on Linux and the NAS and they don't change
frequently. This may change when IBM remediates us. But, the bottom line
is to enable sharing for all types of systems.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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