Archive for the ‘System Administration’ Category

Building a home Network Attached Storage server. Part 2: RAID Setup

January 25th, 2010 – System Administration (, , ) 1 Comment »

This is Part 2 in the Building a home Network Attached Storage server series. In this article I will talk about some of the options for the RAID arrays and the art of RAID configuration.

Now that we know what hardware this system is going to be built on we have to decide what technology is going to run it all. We still have several options for RAID controllers and software.

One item that really needs to be mentioned is that if you use Windows computers to access the NAS you will want to use Windows Vista, 7 or Server 2008 as the NAS operating system. This is for one simple reason, Windows Vista in 2006 introduced Server Message Block 2.0. SMB2 is a massive boost to network file transfer speeds. Where an XP machine may only be able to send 50MB/s over the network, the same machine running SMB2 will be pushing 80MB/s. So if you are going to be using Windows on your desktop, you probably want to be using Windows on your NAS.

The first step is deciding what RAID controller you are going to use for the system.

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Building a home Network Attached Storage server. Part 1: Hardware

December 27th, 2009 – System Administration (, ) No Comments »

Recently I built a home NAS file server to finally consolidate all of my data into one easily managed network location. I have worked with Network Attached Storage systems before, and  I’ve even played with SAN solutions before, but this was my first time building one from scratch.

The goal of this project is to have a massive, always-on, redundant, and wicked fast  network accessible storage drive where I can save all of the files massive media collection for permanent archive. This central location will be my grand file repository for basically everything. Ideally I should be able to loose my desktop and laptop drives without losing anything that I care about.

I’ve had plenty of time to define exactly what I needed in a file server, and requirements were actually pretty simple:

  • Separate system and storage arrays
  • RAID failure protection on both arrays
  • At least 7 terabytes of usable storage
  • At least 60 MB/s of real world network throughput
  • Expandable base that I can add storage to when it become necessary
  • Excellent hard drive cooling
  • Reasonably low power requirements
  • Less than $2,000 total

This is the story of my particular NAS build and some of the stuff I learned during the course of this project.

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Firewall script tool for iptables

September 26th, 2009 – System Administration (, , , , , ) No Comments »

If you run a public linux server of any kind then you should have a firewall running. Hopefully you already know that. I prefer iptables because it is so powerful, however the iptables language is a little less than intuitive.

If you’re just getting started with iptables and you want a good strong rule set to use or learn from then check out the Easy Firewall Generator for IPTables. This is a great little tool that will give you a shell script with a very nice rule set.

Just fill out the form and save the script to your server. Run the shell script and you have a great firewall with good logging. Though don’t auto-run the script on bootup until you are absolutely sure that you have the rules perfect, iptables can and will happily lock you out of your own server for good.