A few weeks ago I started to think about to merge my old home server and my NAS (old ICYBOX IB-NAS4220 – don’t you want one?) into one piece of hardware. I was facing decisions what hardware and what OS should I choose for this new server. Even Linus Torvalds was solving a similar issue recently…
After some googling I have finally chosen CFI A-7879 case. It has four 3.5″ Hot-Plug SATA drive bays and 1 internal 2.5″ for the system (SSD in my case also used as a ZFS write cache device). I fell in love at first sight :-) With an appropriate motherboard and 8GB RAM it has turned into a really cool piece of furniture.
OK, that was a hardware side, what about SW?
ZFS is my bread and butter therefore I tended to choose some configuration allowing ZFS on this station. Debian with FUSE ZFS? Too slow. ZFS on linux? Not stable enough. Some kind of OpenSolaris forks (OpenIndiana, illumos, SchilliX)? I use many GNU tools I would like to keep. FreeBSD (nas4free, FreeNAS)? Dtto. Even it After some tests with FreeBSD I convinced myself it was not what I was looking for. I finally ended up with Debian/kFreeBSD. Wheezy. Yes, got a standard Debian GNU environment, Debian packages repository, FreeBSD kernel with the ZFS support in version 28. After some tweaking with NFS related daemons it works like a charm now! Running NSF, miniDLNA, MythTV, OwnCloud, Postfix, Dovecot IMAP, Apache, MySQL…
root@nas:# uname -a
GNU/kFreeBSD nas 9.0-2-amd64 #0 Sat Nov 24 04:44:27 UTC 2012 x86_64 amd64 Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 847 @ 1.10GHz GNU/kFreeBSD
root@nas:# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 8093 2805 5288 42 0 4
-/+ buffers/cache: 2800 5292
Swap: 16384 0 16384
root@nas:# zpool status -v
pool: data
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0 in 6h47m with 0 errors on Sun Apr 7 07:44:54 2013
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
data ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada0 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada4 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada1 ONLINE 0 0 0
logs
ada3s2 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
root@nas:# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
data 1004G 827G 31K none
data/fs 987G 827G 31K none
data/fs/backup 41.6G 827G 41.6G /data/backup
data/fs/home 7.93G 827G 7.93G /data/home
data/fs/local 228M 827G 228M /data/local
data/fs/mail 7.05G 827G 7.05G /data/mail
data/fs/mmedia 538G 827G 538G /data/mmedia
data/fs/mythtv 392G 827G 392G /data/mythtv
data/fs/var 57.1M 827G 57.1M /data/var
data/fs/www 188M 827G 188M /data/www
data/swap 16.5G 844G 16K -And what kind of HW & SW configuration do you use for your home NAS?