[geeks] NAS storage opinions and bitching wanted

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 @ 12:37 -0500, Phil Brutsche said:

> FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/)
> 
> OpenFiler (http://www.openfiler.com/)
> 
> I wasn't impressed with FreeNAS the last time I used it but that was
> over a year ago, haven't played with OpenFiler.

I'll keep them in mind.

> The fifth and sixth bullet points will either require you to build it
> yourself or buy a hackable unit, 99.9999% of the boxes in your price
> range only support SMB/CIFS, FTP and HTTP.
> 
> When the manufacturer says "works with Linux and Mac" they *don't* mean
> NFS or AFP ;)

Yeah, but the Hammer unit does do nearly everything out of the box: SMB,
NFS, CIFS, ftp, and a couple more.

However, it doesn't have the hacker following of the DNS-323.  

> > Iomega makes a 4-drive RAID5 box running Linux that appears to do what I
> > want. I know zip about them. They also have units that run Windows 2003,
> > and I want to avoid those.  Anyone run a 150D or anything like that?
> 
> The ones that run 2003 are outside of your price range and are just
> glorified PCs anyways.

The 150D looks interesting, I just wish I knew more about it.  Have to
do more digging.

Computer stores should have things like this up and running for you to
see. I hate buying blindly.

> Did you mean the DNS-323?

Yeah.

> If you don't mind a little extra work you can run Debian on it in a chroot:
> 
> http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:chroot_debian

There are also some binaries you can upload to the machines, like rsync
and newer versions of busybox.

Some people have hacked serial console support too.

The main disadvantage is that it doesn't handle external USB drives.

If it just had 2 more USB ports and the external drive option, I'd
already have ordered one.

> > Hammer: this is another two-drive unit that supports more network
> > filesystems out of the box than the D-Link.  I know one person who has
> > one that likes it.
> 
> Haven't heard of those before, I'll have to keep those in mind; they
> look like sweet boxes.
> 
> As sweet as they may be, if you can't hack it to provide subversion or
> rsync...

Yeah... it might happen in time since they seem similar to the DNS-323,
with a few more features.

I could wait a bit I suppose, and see what happens.

> It happens a lot to people who need a feature set well beyond what the
> majority of low-end NAS users require, which is SMB/CIFS and FTP.

Yeah, don't I know.

> > Building the PC server would probably cost more, but would of course be
> > more flexible.
> 
> It's either that or get a hackable system like the Dlink DNS-323...

Have to find out if it can have more USB ports hacked in... :)

At least we are finally starting to see some interesting stuff come out
that doesn't cost as much as a Netapp box.

-- 
shannon           | An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto 
                  | one blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth.