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A Caramel Breeze

An OpenSolaris Home Server
Thursday, July 31, 2008

OK, its time to replace my ancient home file server with something newer and faster. Although I run Windows, Ubuntu Linux and OS X on my PC, the significant other wants only a Windows workhorse and no hassles. Backups should just happen.

The Old
An old Dell PIII 800MHz running Gentoo Linux with
The New
Hardware yet to be finalised, but it doesn't have to be anything special. These days AMD Athlon X2 CPUs are dirt cheap, as is RAM. It will be in the basement, out of sight and hearing, so a butt-ugly shabbily made case is fine. All I want is at least 4 SATA connectors on the motherboard. A moderate speed dual-core with 2GB RAM and a couple of 500GB disks isn't going to cost too much.

Looking now at software. For a while I considered Windows Home Server. I like its storage pooling model and the automated backups. I thought I could run a virtualisation platform on it (such as VMware Server) so I could have a Linux plaything. Problem is that it costs way too much compared to the hardware. Any cracked version will eventually be blacklisted and stop getting updates.

Next candidate is the relativlely new OpenSolaris distro. This is hitting all the right chords.
There's a few things first to experiment with on another old box. I've tried the Solaris CIFS server. No need now for Samba. Works well, but if I make the .zfs directory visible the Windows client can't go into it. The problem appears to be that ACLs are in operation and the snapshot directories don't have 'em. And, they're read only - so you can't add 'em.

I stumbled something that suggestion that with Samba and a VFS plugin you can have Volume Shadow copies, and with use of symbolic links you can use ZFS snapshots as the foundation for the shadow copies. Sounds like something to aim for.

Stay tuned.

posted by bj @ 9:24 pm,




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