NAS setup recommendations

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 9:22 AM, Matthias Play <matthias_play at gmx.net>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> since I am about to setup a NAS box for private and business usage (it
> will also be providing additional services), I would like to ask for
> recommendations on what I might use. Maybe somebody already had similar
> intentions and realized that setup.
>
> The hardware is already in place and it basically contains HW proposed
> here (except for the HDD configuration and wih an additional 480G SSD for
> swapcache): http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/01/diy-nas-2015-edition.html.
>
> Ideally I would like to setup a RAID1 with a small boot partition and
> encrypting the rest just like it is demonstrated in encrypted_root.sh in
> the /usr/share/examples/rcconfig dir of a DragonFly installation.
>
> My high level requirements are:
> 1. encrypt as much as possible i.e., also / if possible
> 2. implement resilience to minimize down times
> 3. using hammer as the predominant file system to allow for fine grained
> fs snapshots
>
> In order to also support RAID1 I tried to set up vinum before encrypting
> the vinum volume with dm. But this has not worked out, maybe I did
> something wrong in configuring the loader variables for initrd. I read that
> it was planned to add mirror support in dm, but it has not been implemented
> so far. Maybe the reason is that with hammer there is already a descent
> mirror solution available. Although I think hammer mirror does not suit me
> 100% because of the expected down time in case of the master drive failing
> i.e., on would have to convert slave pfs to master pfs or cpdup the slave
> pfs contents to newly setup master pfs.
>
> Is there a configuration I might use to realize my three requirements
> above?
> Would using LVM be a viable alternative?
>
> Regards
> Matthas
>



My suggestion may be the following :

Use an independent disk for operating system .
Format other disks for storing data .
Mount them as independent drives ( drive names other than drive name of the
operating system disk ) .
Define an owner for the data disks ( the same user for all of them , not
root )

Later on , when it becomes necessary to install a new operating system
version , install it onto a new disk with the existing owner user name of
the data disks in another computer .
After verifying that the new operating system is working as expected ,
replace old operating system disk with the new one .

In that way , data disks are recognized as they are because owner name is
not changed .
Installation of new operating system does not affect data disks where it is
assumed that new version does not scratch existing data disks , i.e. disk
format is not changed .


With this practice , only down time required is to replace time of the new
operating system disk .
No loss of data , no complete copy onto other disks because operating
system is in an independent disk .


Thank you very much .


Mehmet Erol Sanliturk
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