[geeks] Thoughts? (Cheap NAS with nice feature set)

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 04:16:14PM -0400, Alois Hammer wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 15:37:34 -0400, "Joshua Boyd" <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
> > 
> > I think that a built in bittorrent client has potential to be really
> > useful in a family setting.
> 
> Unless you're a Comcast customer, in which case, your first question
> should be, "Does this thing support encryption, and is it going to be
> upgradeable to the next round of arms-race protocol changes?"  Besides,
> my firewall/router is also an NTP proxy/DNS proxy/web proxy/Tor
> proxy/Freenet node/BitTorrent handler/other stuff as needed.  Hence the
> Intel E6550 and the four gig of RAM.  Eight gig of RAM later, when I get
> the time to upgrade to 64-bit Linux.

Comcast burned me enough already, before they started doing that.  I
certainly would go back to them if they were the only game in town
(which they were where I lived the last time), but I'm sticking with
Verizon DSL for now (although supposedly FIOS will be available to my
address later this year).

Anyway, I wouldn't stick so much on a firewall/NAT box.  I have a
dedicated NTP/DNS box (netbsd/sparc32), a dedicated FW/NAT/router box.
I don't use freenet or tor.  Currently I'm running bittorrent on my mac,
but I keep thinking I should find one that can be installed as a service
on another machine instead.

I could have sworn that 32bit linux could use PAE to take advantage of
more than 4 gigs of physical ram.  Sure, any given application is still
limited to 32 bit address space, but with that many applications...
 
> > I'd go for Solaris.  Actually, I did go with Solaris, although I
> > certainly don't have 2TB yet.
> 
> I've been toying with the idea of OpenSolaris or Nexenta or something,
> but a) Linux and BSD are both considerably more performant, especially
> for filesystems (clearly an important consideration for a NAS device)
> and b) using anything other than Sun Solaris 10 x86 isn't going to get
> me that tasty Solaris experience to go on my resume.  And, honestly?  I
> can't stand Sun Solaris.  The userland tools are terrible, and getting
> good GNU tools on seems to be an exercise in hair-pulling, cursing, and
> wondering why stuff doesn't get updated for months or longer.  (Or has
> someone produced an alternative to SunFreeware?)

I find ZFS to be extremely nice.  Perhaps it isn't the fastest, but it
does perform about as well as I would expect the hardware to deliver,
and it certainly is extremely easy to use.  Also, I think that it had a
much more reliable design compared to anything I am aware of on Linux.
Certainly ZFS on FreeBSD is a possibility.  I don't know anything about
how stable or fast that is yet.

Err, why can't you claim Solaris experience from using OpenSolaris or
Nexenta?  

Personally, I haven't found it at all hard to appropriately GNUify
Solaris 10, 11, or whatever I'm using.  I mostly grab those sorts of
packages from SunFreeware.  Bash is standard now, which I like.  I do
install screen, gnu make, gnu tar, and emacs.  Sun's tar is the only
part of the user land that drives me crazy, in general.  

Sun's OpenSSL has also been tormenting me for awhile, but that should be
permenantly fixed with nv85, which is in OpenSolaris now and should be
in Developers Express RSN, and Solaris 10 sometime late this year or
early next year. There is a fix for Solaris 10 anyway (install SUNWcry),
but the fix is very version specific, and I can't find the appropriate
file for the old solaris express I have installed on the two machines
that matter.

After Sun's SSL and Tar, I blaim any further difficulties on the
appropriate free software authors for not supporting anything other than
GCC (usually any difficulties I have are related to GCC being missing
rather than Solaris itself).