I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

[PCBONEZ]

Finally have the gear and some spare time at the same time.

I wanna build a NAS using a standard PC motherboard.
- Nuthin too fancy.

Have the hardware figured out except:
- My first dumb question is how do I get around having to have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse?

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[gdement]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

I prefer command line linux for server applications, but that depends on being familiar with that environment. With that setup you'd use ssh/telnet to connect over the network. You don't need a monitor unless something dies, which shouldn't normally happen obviously.

If you want to run a Windows GUI through the network, that can be done with TightVNC (free download). Unfortunately I had problems with it. My client system would blue screen at random while connected.
WinXP has something similar to this, but not all versions have it.

Even Windows can theoretically get by with a telnet command line (telnet service is built-in). You need to install a bunch of command line tools for NT, which are available for download somewhere (it's been forever since I got them). I think they call it the Windows NT Server Administration Pack or something like that.


If you want a direct connection you could try a KVM. Not sure how far the wires can get before you have problems though. There's theoretical limits but who knows what the reality is.
I think there are KVM's designed for long distance connections over ethernet, but that's expensive stuff.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

Direct connection/GUI no. For a NAS I don't wanna connect anything except a power plug and a LAN line if I can get away with that.
(This link of my LAN is gigabit.)

My question now is how can I defeat the need to have a keyboard attached and to get the thing to boot without one connected.
-
Is it as simple as setting the BIOS to not halt on a keyboard error?
Or do I need some dongle gadget to fake a present keyboard?

~~~

I'll be putting together an LTS box along with this.
I might try integrating the NAS into the LTS by adding a FAT32 partition.
- Not sure if that will work yet.

I have boxes in 4 different rooms [one of which is actually in another building] and I'm getting sick of duplicate files or having to go boot a machine somewhere else to get to the latest version of whatever I'm working on.

Also setting up a PVR for the wif.
Record can all be in one place but playback will be needed in two.
Undecided if NAS is the way to go with that.
I don't want the LTS to get loaded up with recordings of freakin' soaps so her storage is going somewhere else than mine.

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[shadow]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

Is it as simple as setting the BIOS to not halt on a keyboard error?

Yes it is that simple!! I have done it on a few different PC's.

With regards to remote administration. A VNC based application works well. Be that TightVNC, UltraVNC or some other variant. The only thing I really don't like about VNC is that it really does take quite a bit of bandwidth to get going nicely. A wired connection (especially one gigabit) should be plenty, I am having some issues with VNC and a wireless connection.

Another very good option if you are in a Windows environment is Microsoft Terminal Services. It uses less bandwidth than VNC based applications. I believe Windows Server edition includes a two connection license for Terminal Services (maybe more?).

If all you require is access to a command line. SSH or Telnet would probably be best for you.

In the event of an absolute emergency (server goes down completely/network connection for some reason has dropped), unfortunately a monitor, keyboard and mouse will be required to get the problem fixed.

[kc8adu]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

many bios have an option to stop at specific or no errors.
simply set it for no.
many industrial x86 systems i repair get keyboard input through the custom i/o board rather than the keyboard port.they simply get set in bios to ignore the absence of the keyboard.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

If I'm going with Terminal Services it will be with Linux (LTS)
I want to be rid of Windows as much as possible in the next year or two.

What I'd LIKE to do is strip Centos down to just what I need for a NAS and a Terminal Server [on different machines] but I don't know enough about Linux yet to do that.

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[jpdoe]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

Usually there's a bios option named "Halt on" which can be set to "All errors", "All errors, but keyboard" and "None", or something like it. That's all you need as far as the BIOS is concerned.
IIRC, Windows XP will boot without keyboard and mouse present. Linux definitely will do it.

About the FAT32 partition... I'm not sure it is a good idea. NTFS and EXT2 / EXT3 are far more robust. And the other networked PCs don't care what kind of partition the NAS has as long as folder permissions and file sharing service are set up the right way.

[jpdoe]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

As you'll be using Linux, EXT2 or EXT3 would be the way to go. As far as I know, the main difference between them is that EXT3 has journaling capabilities. Since I usually don't care about it, I'd stick with EXT2.

It's been a while since I've played with a RedHat based distribution. In the RedHat v7 days, the installer had pre-set options that allowed you to install only what was needed for certain activities (workstation, file server, etc). But for easy administration, the graphic environment was still needed.

The key to mastering any linux distribution install customization is to learn how the packaging system works. Redhat used to be built arount RPM. What I did back in the day, when hard disk space was a premium, was to install the bare system and add what I needed using the rpm manager (which name I don't even remember). The packaging system makes things much easier, since it knows what the dependencies between the different parts are.
That is: you choose to add a VNC application, and the packaging system automatically adds everything that's needed for it to run.

This was much easier to do with pre-made dvd images. Using a stable distribution downloaded from the web and burnt to optical disks, the system dependencies make sense most of the time.

[jpdoe]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

But with today's RAM and hard disk prices, I woundn't worry too much about it. Just install one of the installation pre-sets. Later on you can reduce the installation RAM footprint by disabling services, and reduce the hard disk footprint by unistalling unneeded packages (and the latter won't make much of a difference... the amount of packages you'll have to uninstall to make a difference would be HUGE).

[gdement]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

As you'll be using Linux, EXT2 or EXT3 would be the way to go. As far as I know, the main difference between them is that EXT3 has journaling capabilities. Since I usually don't care about it, I'd stick with EXT2.

I strongly suggest ext3, not ext2. Lack of journaling makes ext2 very fragile in my admittedly limited experience with it. My first linux install (might have been BSD actually) died pretty quickly because of ext2 corruption. It's not suitable for the real world and intolerable for a server.

I normally have no interest in shutting down my server, so it pretty much never gets a proper shutdown. Instead, the only way it ever goes down is when the power goes out or some other unplanned issue. If I didn't use ext3 I'd have to reinstall it every few months probably.

[zandrax]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

If you want a DIY NAS, then you've two choices: start from a server os, strip it down and add necessary programs (say SSH or VNC connection, HTTP configuration panel, file and printer sharing for OSes you use, ...) or get an oriented distro such as OpenFiler or FreeNAS.
The first path is harder, takes longer time to set everything as you want and it may scary a newbie or an unexperinced user but it's way more flexible: you can use any flavour of linux / BSD distro (they should have all software downloadable from repositories) or even Windows Server editions (they're expesive though); the second one is way more confortable but you're stuck with software provided by the manifacturer, with little or no easy way to change something.
OpenFiler is a CentOS based distro mostly oriented for file servers in an office/corporation environment, but it works even for NAS: it supports hardware and software RAID, almost all network protocols except AFP (mostly used by MacOS before OSX), access, quota and sharing administration through an http config panel and has SSH daemon in case you need a more direct access to the server; FreeNAS is a FreeBSD based NAS distro which functions are similar to OpenFiler one, moreover it's lighter, more "single user oriented" and supports AFP in case you need it. Last time I checked them, OpenFiler had a little but annoying bug with Samba (used for Windows sharing): the SMB/CIFS server refused to start until OpenFiler was authenticated from an LDAP server, usually present in domains, but not in small workgroups like my home network; solution (discovered only in the forum and not in the docs) was to enable the LDAP server supplied with OpenFiler and let authenticate itself. Go figure ...

Hardware: you should read the supported hardware list of the OS you choose before buying something. Monitor and keyboard shouldn't be connected: they're used only in emergencies when the network is down or the server is running but you can't connect to it from another pc; check in bios for the "Halt on" error description and select "All except keyboard". My only suggestion is about the network card: discard all cheap Realtek / Via / noname cards you can buy for $20 or less, they're cheap because the cpu does most of the work just like old software modems; get a Gigabit card with an Intel or a Broadcom chipset, which offloads most work on the lan chip (e.g. packet decompression and TCP header pre-digestion) and have usually stable drivers on any OS. This is not a joke: it may seems absurd, but handling a software RAID is a less intensive task for a modern cpu than a Gigabit connection (about 20-30% of cpu time at full speed).

Zandrax

[PCBONEZ]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

I have been looking at OpenFiler and FreeNAS as a temporary quick fix solution to make back-up copies of all my files while I work out the main system(s) configuration(s).

I already have all the hardware.
I'm using Intel based server boards to keep RAID cards in PCI-X slots.
For the NAS I'll probably use a Dual P3 board but with only 1 CPU.
Options for the RAID are Promise TX2000, TX4000, and 3Ware 7506-8.
[Have 4 or more of each on hand already.]
Gigabit LAN options are already Intel and Broadcom.
For now I'm using ATX cases but ultimately (probably) the NAS will go in a 4U with 9 IDE hot-swap caddies and LTS be in a 2U that takes 3 drives. [Been hanging onto the chassis' for this project but I need to recap PSUs to fit'em.]

Question:
If I want to access/store files on the NAS from a Windows system do I need a FAT32 or NTFS partition on the NAS drives?

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[stretch0069]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

Damn....when you say "NAS", i think of something totally different. :O

speaking of which..........

[PCBONEZ]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

Naval Air Station?

[jpdoe]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

The choice of the filesystem the NAS will use to store the files has nothing to do with the OS the clients run. When you network two computers, what's important is that they support the same networking protocol (TCP/IP) and that the server is set up to answer the file-sharing protocol the client uses (SMB via SAMBA).

If you use NTFS or FAT32 on a linux server you'll complicate things. EXT2 or EXT3 have been supported natively by linux for ages now. FAT32 complicates things because it doesn't support the unix-style file permissions (they dealt with that via a nasty kludge). I hear NTFS is fully supported now, but I would avoid it and use what's standard in a linux system.

The client never knows what filesystem the server uses. They comunicate with each other via the SMB protocol, using TCP/IP as a medium.

The server is the one dealing with the file system. When asked for a file by the client through SMB, the server accesses the file system to retrieve the file. But before handling the file to the client, it verifies the file permissions to see if the client is allowed to access the file. That's where FAT32 fails. All FAT32 allows the server to know is wether the file is hidden, read-only, or a system file. The unix-style permissions just are not there. Afther all, FAT32 belongs to a DOS OS. That's why YOU will have to tell the server what you want the permissions to be when you mount the file system (and that's the ugly kludge)

[jpdoe]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

The only real reason to have a FAT32 partition in a linux system is dual-booting linux and DOS or Windows. But even then FAT32 complicates things because the way it handles internationalization support. Let's say you have a hard disk with three partitions: a FAT32 filesystem, a EXT2 with a linux installation, and a NTFS filesystem winth windows installed. You want to use the FAT32 filesystem to share data between both OSs, between reboots.

But there's one problem: linux needs to be aware of what code-page windows is using to store the file names in the FAT32 partition. Otherwise, accents and similar characters will not be handled well by linux. That's another parameter you'll have to give linux each time you mount the FAT32 partition.

I'm not aware if that's a big deal for you US folks. But in Latin America we use a different DOS code-page, and it morphs quite nicely our file names.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

Now I'm lost.

If I have a NAS (say with EXT3) with both Linux and Windows clients and I need to save a ".doc" file for Windows clients then how will the Windows clients see it (or even write it) on a EXT3 partition since Windows doesn't do EXT3 file system?

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[PCBONEZ]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

I re-read. - I'm still lost but the light bulb is a little brighter.
I need to read-up on SBM.

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[jpdoe]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

Sorry for the lack of clarity of my posts
I would advice you to begin your research with other subjects before tackling SMB. Besides, you'll find a networking primer would be much more interesting.
SMB is a Microsoft protocol, and the guys developing SAMBA had to reverse engineer it to implement the linux support. They are the most accurate source of information, but it is frustrating reading about it because there has been quite a few changes with microsoft networking as years passed, and it has made the matter confusing.
In contrast, there's a lot of easy to digest TCP/IP documentation.
Networking two systems is complicated. That's why they divided the problem in sections. The guys behind TCP/IP did it in one way. The idea is to divide the solution to the problem in layers, each one in charge of part of the problem.

So you have the most inferior layer in charge of phisical conectivity. The upper layer is in charge of user applications (MS Word, for example). And the layers in between each are in charge of part of the intermediary problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP_...TCP.2FIP_model

An application (say MS Word) trying to open a file located in another computer is at the top of the protocol stack. Word won't ask the linux system for the file. It will ask Windows for the file. Windows will use its TCP/IP stack for it. The transport layer will do his thing. The internet and link layer will do his, and finally the request will go from the windows system to the linux server.
Once the request gets to the linux server, the layers will work in reverse order. The link layer will do its thing and pass the ball to the internet layer, who will pass it to the transmission layer, who will ask the SAMBA service to do his thing. FINALLY, the samba service will ask the linux kernel for the file.

The answer to the request will go down the linux tcp/ip stack, hit the physical cable, and go down to the windows system, where it will go up the windows tcp/ip stack, arriving to Word.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: I wanna build a NAS - Peanuts in the gallery invited to comment.

I read up on OpenFiler again and apparently it is no longer Centos based but based on some linux I've never heard of. [rPath] Also seems they are going porky/overkill with system requirements. 'Min' is 1GHz x86 and 512MB, 'Recommended' is a 1.6GHz x64 and 1GB RAM.
- Seems a little much for a NAS.
From what I can tell it does support all the RAID controllers I'm working with.

I read somewhere that FreeNAS supports Recycle Bin with a Windows client and that OpenFiler does not.
Going to read up on FreeNAS tonight.

Looks like I will need a new/better DNS Server.
Current one is in a router and it's bitchy about anything unusual.
Can I incorporate DNS Server into the NAS?

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