Re: Re: Planning a Debian NAS
On 1/25/20 20:21, Aidan Gauland wrote:
On 26/01/20 3:17 pm, Paul Johnson wrote:
ext4 is the best way to go unless you have extremely specific needs or
you really want to overcomplicate things for a hobby.
I love over-complicating my hobbies.
I can't tell whether or not this response is facetious. If it is, and
you are not determined for other reasons to use Linux, I recommend FreeNAS
(https://www.freenas.org/)
for this. It is free, actively maintained, commercial grade, and comes
with well written and fairly comprehensive documentation. It also has an
active community (including specific hardware advice) and allows access
to its bug reporting system. Oracle's extensive ZFS documentation also
is freely available and useful for matters not peculiar to the later
commercial versions of ZFS.
The underlying OS is FreeBSD, but in normal operation does not require
direct OS interaction. All normal system and storage administration can
be done using a pretty decent graphical interface.
The hardware you suggest seems reasonable; they recommend a minimum of 8
GB memory, and my experience suggests their recommendations are quite
conservative for a home network. The only obvious issue is that FreeNAS
requires the OS on a device separate from the storage pool(s). I have
used a USB key in one case, but would recommend a "real" disk, which
could be USB attached; I don't quite trust USB keys for this, though the
best of them probably are decently reliable.
ZFS on Linux is entirely doable, and the suggestion, in another
response, of system on ext4 and and managed storage on ZFS also is quite
reasonable. On the other hand, root on ZFS is not by any means a horror
despite a hands-on install somewhat reminiscent of Debian in the early
1990s. The instructions at
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Debian-Buster-Root-on-ZFS
is good. I have (so far) two laptops, a desktop, and a couple of VMs set
up that way, with ZFS native encryption on the laptops. Over periods of
a few months to a year I have no ZFS-related issues with any of them.
Full disclosure: I have no connection with IXsystems other than as a
satisfied user, and have used Linux (nearly all Debian) almost
exclusively for over 25 years.
Regards,
Tom Dial
tdial@acm.org
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