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Written by Kyle Mott
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Saturday, 08 May 2010 11:45 |
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I figured it's been well over a year since I last posted about my systems, so it's time to provide an update. I haven't really been using any new software, just sticking with VMWare, Gentoo Linux (for servers), Windows (for gaming and Amanda's laptop and general purpose VM) and Sabayon Linux (for my main desktop). Note that the below list only includes systems that are actually in-use. I do have other systems stored away as backups.
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Last Updated on Friday, 14 May 2010 21:56 |
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NAS Server and Hardware Upgrades |
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Written by Kyle Mott
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Monday, 09 June 2008 20:12 |
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I recently found out about a very sweet Open-Source (released under a BSD-style license) project called FreeNAS. It's currently based on FreeBSD 6.2, with plans on future versions moving to 6.3 and 7.0. It supports a very wide array of storage controllers and mediums, from simple software based RAID arrays (JBOD, 0, 1, 5) to hardware-based RAID controllers from Adaptec, 3Ware, etc. Of course, the hardware controllers must be supported by FreeBSD 6.2 before they will work in FreeNAS.
That being said, the NFS support that I am using works very well, though I did run into one problem. I had some terrible throughput issues on a direct 1GB link (connected via a crossover cable) between the FreeNAS server (Dual Pentium III 866MHz, 1.5GB RAM) and my other main server (Dual 2.8GHz HT Xeon, 1GB RAM). I would initially get about 10MB/sec of transfer speed, but then it would quickly dwindle down to only 900KB/sec. I posted help requests on Gentoo Forums and the FreeNAS mailing list, but could only get a resolution after increasing the number of NFSd servers to over 60. That doesn't entirely make sense to me, but oh well. It's working great now!
Using FreeNAS, I am able to setup various NFS Shares that will allow me to better utilize my disk capacity across my environment. One of these days, I will surpass the 1 TB mark.
| Share |
Purpose |
Size |
| vmware |
Where I store all of my VM images on the NAS server. This makes it much easier to manage my disk capacities more effectivley. I can grow, change, modify, add disks to the share, without too much downtime. The only real downtime involved is that of actually moving the VM Images (some as large as 15-20GB each) on to a different partition. |
80GB |
| files |
This is where all users 'home' directories (usually /home) get mounted to. This is a 80GB RAID-1 array (hardware RAID-1 provided by 3Ware Storage Controller with 2 WD Rapter SATA drives). Since I consider this data to be mission-critical, it's on a hardware RAID-1 partition.
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80GB |
| shared |
This is a simple IDE hard drive that I had laying around which I wanted to use as a simple mechansim/storage medium for easily sharing files/folders with multiple users in my environment.
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40GB |
backup
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This is a massive software RAID array (JBOD) that I use for backup purposes. I use bacula for backing up my entire network.
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433GB |
| Kyle_Mott |
Since I am the admin of my site/network, I gave myself a 200GB NFS Share just for me. This is where I still almost all of my personal (and otherwise) information.
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200GB |
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833GB |
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Last Updated on Monday, 03 August 2009 09:23 |
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g1bs0n Replacement Power Supply |
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Written by Kyle Mott
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Friday, 18 January 2008 20:03 |
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I had the power supply in one of my main file servers die on me. Sigh. I went out and got a really nice one from Fry's Electronics here in the Seattle area. It's a Antec 500W ATX power supply (the previous one was only 300W). It lasted me for a really long time, I bought the case and PSU from NewEgg (best site ever for hardware purchases, btw) when I was back in college (2001 - 2002 timeframe). 6 years for a PSU that runs 24x7 with a Dual P3 866 MHz, 6 hard drives, and only 1.5 GB of memory isn't too bad. After replacing the PSU, I found out I had some MySQL errors in one of my DB's. I had to run a myisamchk to get it fixed. Ahh, the beauty of power corrupting data. Unfortunatley, I also had a 160GB hard drive die on me right after I replaced the PSU. It was odd because gconcat(8) kept causing panics, it was as if the drive kept turning itself off when Bacula was running my nightly backups. I went ahead and took the drive out and took it apart. Each 80GB platter now sits as a trophy in my garage. g1bs0n specifications OS: FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p9 CPU: 2 x PIII 866 MHz RAM: 1.5GB Disk: 1 x 80GB (/); 1 x 40GB (/home/shared); 1 x 160GB, 1 x 200GB, 1 x 120GB (gconcat'd together for /home/backup). |
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Last Updated on Sunday, 20 January 2008 16:12 |
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