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

[Alois Hammer]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 19:44:20 -0400, "Joshua Boyd" <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
said:
> 
> When I was in an apartment (which was until just last October, and it
> was a single bedroom apartment were the living room and bedroom were
> both about 120 sq feet), I still had a seperate FW/NAT and DNS server.
> It's not like I had buckets of money either.  I used fairly old machines
> for the servers (and for that matter for the desktops as well).  Stuff
> like a SS20, E250, U1, and a 1.4ghz P3.

Now that I've freed up some parts here and there, I *could* build a
couple new dedicated server machines.  Except... first I'd have to have
cases to put them in.  And I'd have to throw away the horrible old ECS
P3 and ASUS Athlon boards, because they're infested with design flaws,
to the point that I've disabled every onboard device feasible, and
filled the slots with replacements.  But, of course, that only works to
a point: an offboard USB keyboard can't be used to enter BIOS setup, and
they're uATX boards, so I've run out of room for replacement IDE (or
SATA) controllers.  And on the ECS board, there's no AGP slot, and no
way I'm putting in a crapulous old PCI video controller-- if I had one.

And, oh-- the only place I can get replacement motherboards is eBay, and
mostly what I can get is similarly terrible parts.  I don't believe
there was a single Intel-core (desktop) board ever made that could
support both a 1.4GHz Tualatin *and* a gig of RAM.  Actually, just
supporting the gig of RAM is difficult enough to do without resorting to
SiS (the current board, and gross), VIA (gross), or ULi (formerly ALi,
and much more gross).

And, really?  In a case where HA isn't a priority, I'm more worried
about power-suck than I am having dedicated boxes for NTP, DNS, and
other core services.

> Nope, as far as I know, OpenSolaris keeps SMF.  It isn't hard to fumble
> your way through.  Mostly you just place the files that you would have
> put in /etc/init.d in a new place, copy and paste a few lines in an XML
> file, then run a command that you've written in your notebook because
> you don't do it frequently enough to remeber.  Oh wait, that's me.

Okay.  I'll give it a shot when my virtualization host is up.

> You can't just load a few utilities of your liking?

Two words: government contract.