Hot-swap disks are clearly important in a commecial environment, but for the home, I think I can tollerate the downtime once every N years when a disk fails and I have to take the thing apart. Still, that Buffalo thing has something like 40 screws you need to take out before you get a disk out.

Robotic-
What kernel do you have running (or rather what installs by default w/Sarge). I've also got an old PIII box, and I want to use SATA (better airflow), but that seems to be (better) supported with the 2.6 kernel. Before I pony up for drives & the controller I wanted to check. Thanks.

-Zeke

Thanks. I've installed Linux few times, none recently so I don't want to go out and get hardware w/o checking if it'll work first. I may forget the SATA, especially if I can root out a 133 PATA controller which I think I might have in the compu-junk crate (freebie with a drive a while back).

-Zeke

My Infrant NAS box is finally here and I'm pushing all of my data to it as we speak. The HTML configuration gizmo is pretty good, and the manual is great, so far as it goes. So far, my only real concerns are:

- They support per-user shares (i.e., \\YourServer\User1), but only under SMB. You can't see those shares via NFS and you can't really even configure those shares for things like when snapshots happen. As a result, I'm keeping the per-user authentication, but I'll be storing everything in a big, central share that I can mount once and be done with.

- They have a magic "media" share that is used for UPnP, SlimServer, and other such tasks. My MP3 collection is on its way over there. More tomorrow on how well it works. On their chat board, it seems a lot of people are trying to integrate with these various network video playing gizmos (e.g., the Roku HD1000). The consensus seems to be that you can get these boxes to work, but that they all suck in one way or another. There doesn't appear to yet exist a category killer for these things.

- I plugged my USB printer (an HP Deskjet 970Cxi) in and it was recognized and properly exported. However, any jobs I send to it are silently gobbled up and ignored. Hopefully they've got some kind of workaround.

I finally got rid of my Terastation, and built my own NAS box. Frys had fully complete sempron minitower systems on sale for $170, so I bought one, put 3 400 gig hard drives in it, built them as a raid 5 array and exported them to my network via NFS and samba. As a bonus, I moved my streaming music server and my mysql database to the same box and radically simplified my HTPC which was running all of that previously.

-- Gary F.

Yee-haw!
Finally got all the ducks in a row and the install (the last of *several* attempts) went extremely smoothly- I guess practice makes perfect!
Big THANK YOU to TigerJimmy for expert guidance!
I now have 'gobsOspace' running happily- unfortunately, the newer machine got jealous of the attention and the 80GB drive that is currently holding all of my gold is threatening me with problems.
When the 80GB drive is not acting up, I can transfer about 50MB/min to the Debian machine.
Total ca$h invested <$300 (including new router!)
The basic setup is outlined in my above post- further additions/lessons:
- Netgear router (on sale! $30 no rebate! Woot! Network Empeg access!)
- PCI NIC -old ISA card was a no-go for Linux (on sale! $10 no rebate! Woot!)
- motherboard video and the Debian installer don't get along- had to go back to the PCI video card that was in there before.
- Next step: UPS
- Yet to be resolved: Debian is continually accessing the drives- even when no data is being transferred. With Jim's help we determined that SWAP was not involved. Does anyone have an idea of what could be causing this?
I would think that the drives should spin down if nothing is going on...

In the end, how much cheaper was the X-Raid via the powerbuy? Want to determine whether it's worth holding off until the next one, or jump on it now.

Thanks,

- Gary

To display the contents of the file, at the prompt, just type "cat /etc/fstab".

If it needs editing, then "vi /etc/fstab"
hit "a" to enter insert mode, then make your changes.
hit "esc" to exit insert mode, then type ":wq" to save and exit.

Thanks for the lesson!
I managed to easily edit the file and added the ",noatime" behind "defaults".
Wasn't quite sure what was meant by 'real' filesystems, but I tried various combinations, including everything except swap.
Also didn't know whether to expect the changes to take immediate effect or whether a reboot was needed.
No matter- tested everything and did not get a quiet 'disk access' LED.
Did I miss something? Might there be something else I could check on?
- really appreciate the help, guys!
Say, if I get a hang of this Linux stuff, these home-grown NAS systems could be fun to build for friends!

Edit:
Hmm, found this disk spin-down primer that I'll have to read this week.
I guess it's normal for the disks to be spinning all the time with Linux. Weird.
Looks like noflushd is a strong option for me.
Anyone want to argue in favor of disks spinning all day and night?

One last update for my homebrew NAS-
The drive issue (constant accessing) magically disappeared last night after a message popped up relating the completion of the RAID5 sync following the OS install. Go figure- it was working on something the whole time.
However, trying to install the drive spin-down package failed and pointed to problems with my 'locales' that I'll attack soon.
Happiness ensues!

and- since the RAID5 sync finished the transfer speed has nearly doubled to ~90MB/min!

Got any more thoughts on your NAS?

Dredging up an old thread because a thought popped into my head.
(the rhyme is totally unintended)

I was just thinking about booting up Linux from a USB jump drive.
If the BIOS allows such a thing, would it be possible to forego a CD drive on a home-built NAS and use the standard terminals for 4 HDs instead of what I've done (3HDs+1CD)?
Moot point for my particular case- the BIOS does not support USB boot. That and I'm not gonna muck about fixing something that's not broke.
One can put all the OS and supporting stuff on a cheap USB flash drive, no? Umm- ok Swap on the flash would be a no-no, but otherwise...
Just thinking to myself about the implications of flash memory-based OS.

While we've resurrected this thread...

My Infrant X6 is now some nine months old and humming along nicely. Actually, it's humming noticably louder than the day I bought it (the fan now runs at 4300rpm rather than its original 3700-3900rpm) and Infrant is sending me a replacement fan, under warranty, to see if that addresses the problem. I have "rev A" box, and they've since gone to a completely different fan structure in the newer "rev B" boxes, although there's still quite a bit of agitation on the Infrant chat board, particularly with the "rev B" boxes.

Still, it's working like a champ, now happily storing my entire CD collection as Apple Lossless. With the latest SlimServer software, it even does the transcoding to WAV to support my SqueezeBox. Performance was marginal when I was using 100Mbit Ethernet and no battery backup. Notably, it was unable to deal with capturing video from my video camera through iMovie (DV video is something like 25Mbits). Now I've got GigE and battery backup and the performance is quite snappy. iMovie is now entirely happy to have all of its data on the file server.