NAS setup recommendations

[Matthias Play]

Hi Mehmet,

thanks for your quick reply and suggestions!

I would prefer to also always have a 1:1 copy of the OS part, because I 
also want to avoid exactly what you described i.e., do an extra install 
and configuration.

It would maybe be sufficient to only do a cpdup from time to time to 
keep the OS copy up to date. I think this could be a good compromise.

Regards
Matthias


Am 21.01.2015 um 19:17 schrieb Mehmet Erol Sanliturk:
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 9:22 AM, Matthias Play <matthias_play at gmx.net
> <mailto: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
>     <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
>
>
>
>
>