Linux Equivalent to Windows Home Server

[Satyrist]

So far as being able to add storage dynamically later on, without a full rebuild off of backups, another possibility is UnRAID...Similar in some ways.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

With RAID/LVM:
- You can't read the content of each drive individually. With Greyhole, you can just take out any of the drive, plug it somewhere else, and you'll see the files stored on this HDD where you expect them to be.
- You can't decide what's important, what's not, and what's super-important. With Greyhole, you can decide to keep only one copy of each file you don't care that much about, 2 copies (on two different HDD) of the files you care about, and as many copies as you have hard drives of the files you really care about.
- It can be complicated to add more space, depending on your RAID setup. With Greyhole, just plug a new drive (format it if it's not already formatted), mount it, and add one line in the config file and you're done. You don't have to care about getting same sized disks or what-not.

I was using RAID before; and I was wasting ton of HDD space on uncompressed HD recordings I don't care that much about. My 60k+ digital pictures (that I really do care about!) were protected as much as those terabytes to recorded TV shows... And adding space to my RAID-5 array was unpleasant, especially with the limited numbers of IDE/SATA port in a conventional PC... And I couldn't add USB drives in my RAID array.

All those problems made me start using WHS Drive Extender, which does resolve most of those. Greyhole resolves the rest.

With RAID i am of the opinion that if it's not controlled by hardware it's not worth having.

It's cheap enough these days, safe enough and very easy to expand (proper solutions means you install another drive and it will be in use as soon as it's detected).

Either way, if you don't do proper backups of important data it doesn't really matter WHAT solution you have, RAID is not supposed to protect your data, it's for redundancy so you can keep working when the hardware fails you.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Just about every linux distribution will run headless just fine. All you need is sshd anyway. Linux is really command line 1st, GUI last (or not at all).

Besides, you can run a distributed x session if you want to, the GUI shell is really a network shell. It was intended distributing to serial terminals once upon a time.

SSH will need to be installed though.

 

[nyfirefly11]

I haven't played around with it enough, but Amahi looks like it can do most of what WHS can do.

 

[whoiswes]

The FreeNAS project is being forked...the original BSD based project will continue but a new Linux (Debian, IIRC) based project has been born.

Main page here: http://blog.openmediavault.org/

Looks to be very promising.

 

[Nothinman]

The FreeNAS project is being forked...the original BSD based project will continue but a new Linux (Debian, IIRC) based project has been born.

Main page here: http://blog.openmediavault.org/

Looks to be very promising.

Yea, I saw that a little while ago and it just reinforces my original thought that ZFS alone isn't a good enough reason to put yourself through dealing with Solaris or even FreeBSD.

 

[jaecrouc]

Before openmediavault will be released, the project managers are working on a temporary and intermediate project called CoreNAS, i.e. the porting over of FreeNAS features to the Debian base

• CoreNAS blog: www.corenas.org
• SF CoreNAS page

 

[whoiswes]

Before openmediavault will be released, the project managers are working on a temporary and intermediate project called CoreNAS, i.e. the porting over of FreeNAS features to the Debian base

• CoreNAS blog: www.corenas.org
• SF CoreNAS page

I think that CoreNAS has been superceded/replaced by OMV...they're the same project under different names.

 

[osage]

Amahi would be worth a look. I stumbled across a post in the OS forums and some1 linked to it.

"The Amahi Home Server is more than what you'd expect from a GNU/Linux home server. We call it "Home Digital Assistant" or HDA.

•Network backups Backup all your networked machines simply and easily
•Shared network storage Access, share and search your files from any machine on your network
•Secure VPN Automatically setup your own VPN so you can access your network from anywhere: safely and securely
•Shared Applications Calendaring, private wiki and other shared applications at your fingertips ... and"

I installed this on a spare box last night, and it looks very promising.

http://www.amahi.org/

 

[Nothinman]

With RAID i am of the opinion that if it's not controlled by hardware it's not worth having.

Personally, I'd much rather use Linux software RAID than some random vendor's "hardware" RAID. Much more flexible and reliable.

 

[whoiswes]

Personally, I'd much rather use Linux software RAID than some random vendor's "hardware" RAID. Much more flexible and reliable.

This. Being able to take my array from machine to machine and cleanly mount it, regardless of the hardware outweighs any performance benefits to a dedicated hardware controller. I can easily saturate the gigabit controller on my server anyway so the additional performance would be largely wasted.

 

[Khyron320]

Right now I know of nothing that will do the automatic drive spanning or backups. You can install Samba on any distro and setup some scheduled backups with things like rsync though.

I know this is a little off topic but you CAN SPAN in linux.

ZFS can do spanning. Unfortunately its not integrated into the kernel (due to its use of the CDDL instead of the GPL) so you have to use zfs-fuse.

The ubuntu repositories do not have this by default. There is a guide to add it here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS

Fedora you can do yum install zfs-fuse

ZFS takes a little bit of work to learn but once you do its by far the best file system to use for a linux file server.

I replaced ext3 with ZFS because occasionally i would lose power and the system would go down unclean. The drives would take HOURS of fsck to be usable again (i dont have a UPS, and dont plan to get one). With ZFS i have actually tested pulling the power on a drive without cleanly unmounting, plugging the drive back in and suffered no data loss at all and not having to wait hours for a fsck. This is due to the copy-on-write model used by the system.

Just a WARNING as soon as you do zpool create /dev/sdX your drive is FORMATED.

Some cool ZFS commands:
zpool iostat
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
LinuxISO 207G 71.4G 0 0 4.61K 20.2K
---------- ----- ----- -----

zfs get compressratio (compression is off by default)
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
LinuxISO compressratio 1.04x -

zpool add LinuxISO /dev/sdc (adds a 2nd drive to the pool i have created)

zfs snapshot LinuxISO/Distros/Ubuntu/ubuntu@friday (Takes a readonly snapshot of my ubuntu directory)


Please no comments about how i have 207gb of linux isos... I visit distrowatch too much. I know

 

[Nothinman]

I know this is a little off topic but you CAN SPAN in linux.

If you just mean either RAID0 or linear, I know. But that's not the same as the automatic drive pooling and selective redundancy that WHS does.

I replaced ext3 with ZFS because occasionally i would lose power and the system would go down unclean. The drives would take HOURS of fsck to be usable again (i dont have a UPS, and dont plan to get one). With ZFS i have actually tested pulling the power on a drive without cleanly unmounting, plugging the drive back in and suffered no data loss at all and not having to wait hours for a fsck. This is due to the copy-on-write model used by the system.

Ext3 shouldn't fsck on an unclean unmount either, either your distros startup scripts are overly paranoid or you did something funky. And you can even disable the periodic fscks with tune2fs.

I run XFS but I do have a UPS and wouldn't want to run any system without one.