Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

So, file storage has been a headache for us for ages, thought I'd finally do something about it, came across a NetApp S550 which looked real good. In fact the store didn't have it, they just advertised it, which is typical for China but that's another story.

Anyhow, it looked pretty good, except a little research made me nervous. Real nervous, in fact. You can't find out very much about these things. Every bit of information they print is pure horseshit about bringing enterprise-level scalability and long-term commitment (in the case of the S500 maybe they were being ironic ? Bend over, Buster, har har har !) and innvoation to the growing startup bla bla bla gag me with a spoon. I was unable to find any technical information. Plus unless you hack the firmware on the disks you have to buy replacement drives from them at quadra-uber-ridiculous prices.

But the fardling things do nfs and smb and they come stock with a scsi socket for people who just might want to back up their data, whoa ! What a plan, Einstein !

It got me looking. Sinovial, Western Digitalis, Seagrate, Thecuster, all those guys make NAS'es as well. None of them have a scsi socket. All of them run Linux, which means samba, ugh. Any of them that actually does anything costs a bundle.

Then tripped over the HP MicroSwerver. Shee-it. 4 drives plus dvd-rom or flash disk, remote management aka independent serial console, a pci slot for scsi connection to a tape drive, could run Solaris 11 with zfs nfs cfs and get some actual file and disk management tools, and it's cheap. Small. Also quiet and burns little to no electricity.

What am I missing ?

I don't know why someone would need a specially-designed "NAS" solution rather than standard server hardware, unless they were doing really high performance stuff and needed something tuned for that. Anyways, a lot of it depends on what you want a NAS for. Software features (e.g. filesystem tools), hardware features (SCSI support), super reliability (redundant everything)? But one thing I've learned is that companies use RAID to try to convince everyone of redundancy. If anything other than a hard drive fails, you're screwed, and all that "redundancy" goes out the window. I just assume systems will fail at some point, so the question is how to retain everything and keep going if the system completely goes up in smoke.

If I were setting up a NAS (without knowing any further info about the situation), I would have two systems for complete redundancy, and keep one as a full backup synchronized periodically with rsync. If possible, I would have two drives per system in RAID-1, just whatever "big" SATA drives are being sold these days. If I needed SCSI support, I would just throw in an old SCSI card. Unless you are in a corporate datacenter, that's a simple and practical plan. The good points about this type of commodity system are: (1) no proprietary HDD crap, (2) easy to replace components, (3) fully redundant -- not just HDDs. You could also set up the systems to send out regular email reports including disk usage, hardware status, etc.

For software, I really like the simple and sturdy tools like rsync and rsnapshot.

I have a Synology DS411j here. Does SMB for the PCs and NFS for the Octane2 just fine.

jwp wrote: I don't know why someone would need a specially-designed "NAS" solution rather than standard server hardware, ...

At least in this case, I don't want much cpu. I don't want much heat and electricity. The only thing the box will be doing is file-serving.

But I do want several disks internal, and would have liked a big bay for a tape drive. As far as I can find, that doesn't fit the 'standard server' profile. So that's why.

Geoman wrote: I have a Synology DS411j here. Does SMB for the PCs and NFS for the Octane2 just fine.

For myself, I'd probably get a little barebones two-disk thingy and Synology looks nice, but for work .... I have two complaints about all the mainstream home (and the so-called 'small office') NASes ...

1) none of them have a scsi connector for a tape drive so there ya go, more crap hanging out all over the place

2) in comparison with Mr HP, they are grossly overpriced. The HP is $500, the Seagates are $2000. Umm, yeah. Is that because they are pretty ?

3) a minor one is, many / most of them stick you with their own choice of operating system. In the case of NetApp, I guess I can defer to their greater experience but in the case of Windows Home Server, yeah right.

The HP micro is looking pretty good right now but if there's a better option I'm all ears. Until I found it I was contemplating getting a rust-free '39 4U case, channel it mold it flame it and stripe it, put big slow quiet fans in the back, install some sata cages and a mini-itx board but jeeze .. that's a lot of work. I'm having a hard time just getting my O2 to boot, much less redesigning the Universe.

Lots of people are having fun with the HP microservers out there. You're familiar enough with Solaris to go that route, but if you weren't I'd suggest FreeNAS since you'd get ZFS atop FreeBSD that way. But rather than managing a traditional FreeBSD server, you've got GUIs and wizards and whatnot.

NetApps were very cool when they first came out, and certainly are Serious Equipment - you can tell by the price tag and licensing costs...

smj wrote: Lots of people are having fun with the HP microservers out there.

Bit the bullet, went with one generation older model tho. Has two pci slots instead of one plus a full-height slot for either a DVD writer or an RDX device. Had not heard about rdx before (we're behind the times) but it sounds okay. A faster processor is not what I needed. The newer one has remote management but you have to pay extra ! Screw that shit.

You're familiar enough with Solaris to go that route, but if you weren't I'd suggest FreeNAS since you'd get ZFS atop FreeBSD that way. But rather than managing a traditional FreeBSD server, you've got GUIs and wizards and whatnot.

The guis and wizrds are what put me off I am getting pretty sick of "help-you" stuff that just limits what you can do.

If you actually want to do anything, point-and-click pretty much sucks.

NetApps were very cool when they first came out, and certainly are Serious Equipment - you can tell by the price tag and licensing costs...

S550 looked real good but we don't have any. There's a filled one on the Washington DC Craigslist for $300 if anyone is looking. I am surprised they were not more popular ? Overpriced Thecus versus NetApp, hmmm, let me think

Will report back on the reality when it arrives but at this point, the HP looks like a real slick product. Small, quiet, versatile. Maybe time to retire the V100 and delete Services for Unix

Okay, a little update in case anyone else is in the same position and maybe some of the time I wasted can be a help ...

The smart thing to do would have been to buy an el-cheapo Buffalo two-disk p.o.s. or something, stick two 500 gb disks in mirrored and put up with the shitty Windows Home Server file-sharing or whatever. Computers are a waste of time, I coulda taken up boxing or something worthwhile with the hours I spent on this.

The next smartest would have been to install Warp Server - OS/2 does NFS fine and of course Lan Server is an IBM product, Windows file-sharing is OS/2. But been there, done that, where's the fun ?

See ? I still have delusions that software has improved over the past twenty years. Mental illnes is very difficult to treat.

Grabbed a few Loonixes to give them a fair chance, yeah, well, no thanks. For one thing, Samba sucks dead donkey balls. Seriously. Between Services for Unix and Samba, have to go with SFU. Ugh. Was surprised at how many "distros" there now are, all of them exactly the same except for the icons, each trying to be "different" and failing miserably, every one of them attempting to be "easy to use for beginners". Talk about misguided. Not a single one attempting to correct the real flaws in Loonix as a desktop environment. Is the entire Loonixsphere composed of imbeciles these days ?

About 30% of the "distros" didn't even have functional download sites, and of the 70% that did download and burn to USB stick, maybe 50% worked. To be fair, the mainstream versions such as Scientific Loonix and Centos and Suse did work fine. It was just that even working, there was no reason to choose them over Windows 98. Like Oakland, there's no 'there' there.

NAS4Free, FreeNAS and a couple other nas'es (butcher boy plural; hands, el zamir, don't click to your horse) actually worked. Several of them looked nice, but too limiting. jwp has a point in this case, if you have a full server operating system, limiting yourself to click-the-button file serving is an artificial situation. NAS4Free looked real nice tho and the way it gathers statistics is attractive. It's all just Solaris stuff but presented well. I can see why some people like it.

FreeBSD actually installed to the usb stick, booted, worked. It was okay but still too Loonixish for me. Apache, MySQL, etc etc. Barf. Pissed me off a little tho - "in the name of the false god Security we are not going to let you ...." thanks soooooo much you little assholes, I am apparently smart enough to install and run your twit operating system but too stupid to turn off rlogin after I've set up the box so you are going to make it impossible to use. I really like sitting here on the floor with a 19" crt in my lap because you have decided I am too stupid to sit at my desk and set this thing up remotely. Gracias muchas and take a long walk off a short pier.

Did discover one tricky little thing in the research - the wicked stepmother Oracle put cinderella in the ashes at version 28 of zpools. You can import a zpool into any zfs-cognizant operating system but only up to version 28 . If you want to play around with different systems, make sure your zpools are at or below v 28. After that, you are stuck with whichever one made the pool. You can upgrade but can't downlevel.

Solaris 11. Oh boy. Been using 10 remotely with no gui for six years now, no complaints. Want 11 tho because the main point of this exercise is to share with Windows. 11 has "cifs" built in to the kernel, no arfing Sambo.

Went to Oracle, only 11.2 no 11.1. Thanks much, don't want "the Cloud" in my computer. No 11.1 to be found. Shee-it.

Hunted down 11.1 online. Installed. Oh goody, gnome. Install to USB means it copies over this entire mess. No thanks.

Hunted down the "Text-based Installer." With 10, this gave you several different levels - minimum, full, full + developer, and so on. Didn't see any of these choices with the new installer. Oh goody again. Life gets better every day in every way. Too bad I'm an antique asshole who can't deal with change. Take our chances, I can always delete the unnecessary shit later.

The installer was good. Clean and thorough, gave you the chance to set things up however you pleased. Oh yeah, I forgot, FreeBSD is stuck in dhcp-land. Goddamit you idiots.

Of course it failed instantly when trying to install to a USB stick - "cannot unmount c4t0d0" Nice. Does anyone anywhere do quality control these days ? Gave up and installed it to an old disk. Still have to dd the disk over to a USB stick.

So. Solaris 11. Larry kicked Meg's ass on this one. The drooling Quaker Oats lady got cut off by land and by sea. Return back East, you ignorant hag. HP totally lost the fight for the enterprise, pissing away a billion smackers on that ripoff buzzword-of-the-day crap while Larry snuck in and picked up a real product for pennies. I'd sell any HP stock I had. ZFS, containers, zones, current Solaris is another world beyond the current state of Unixxy computing. It's ridiculously complex for what I need to do - that Buffalo 2-disker would be fine, honest - but once you toss the gnome desktop shit, Solaris is da bomb for servers. And Carly thinks she can run for president ... what a brainless no-tit twat. The 'stockholders' should be storming her castle with torches.

The HP Microserver is decent. Small size, okay build (not what the gushing masses claim but better than most cheap-ass Taiwanian cases), room for plenty of disk and pretty quiet, low-electric-draw, enough cpu. The gen 7 has 2 pci-e slots and a full-height cd-rom, the gen 8 has socketed intel cpu's that can be upgraded, you pays your money takes your choice. Gen 8 is a little prettier but ours is in a rack so that's not important. Got the 7 cuz I want to burn dvd's and the extra pci can take a scsi card in case I go to tape. Both of them seem like a pretty nice product. Pretty happy with it, if they came out with something similar in a rackmount case that would be grrr-ate.

Next time I'm just gonna install OS/2. It's time to move on to Real Life.