File Server Revisited
My fileserver is finally up many months after it was originally attempted. Previous problems included a harddrive failure and a power supply failure.
My latest incarnation is sitting in a little Shuttle SFF PC. It has two harddrives giving me 120 gigs of storage after being put in a software RAID1. This time a harddrive failure won’t set me back. But 120 gigs doesn’t go as far as it used to. For backups, I’ve got a DVD burner hooked up through USB (2.0 luckily). I just have to figure out a good backup solution. We’ve already used 22 gigs of space, but lots of it doesn’t really “need” to be backed up. That leaves roughly 8 gigs that “need” to be backed up. That’s 2 discs right there. Bleah. I need a cheap tape drive that supports 40 + gigs uncompressed.
Previously, I was running Debian stable but I was really sick of running really old stuff. I also didn’t want to be running on bleeding edge so I didn’t plan on installing Gentoo (which I run on my desktop). I opted to give White Box Linux a spin. It’s basically a third party build of RedHat Enterprise Linux. It’s RedHat without RedHat. Feels like RedHat, runs like RedHat, and hopefully with the long term support like RedHat. Support as in security patches, errata, etc. I had no problems installing it (installs like RedHat), and no problems setting it up. Seems to be stable, and I’ve got Samba 3 running on it, serving away happily. Thumbs up at this time.
Things that are still left to do:
- MySQL 4.x (the machine is going to do double duty as a DB server, since I figure there won’t be too much load due to file serving during the day).
- cvs - that mirrored and backed up partition would be a great place for my work.
- Hrmm.. I thought there was one more line item. Oh well, it’ll come to me.