File Server: best options?

[adad]

I'm about to setting up a file server. The hardware config would be something like this:

- an AMD 64 Processor (socket 939)
- some mobo supporting hardware raid level 5 (say ASRock or Asus)
- 1 GB DDR
- 4 * SATA 200GB disks for the array
- 1 old ide drive for boot/system

The server will be used only for file storage. Now the question:

Do I go for samba? Or are there better options? FreeNAS? Openfiler?

The clients will be a few Windows XP machines and mainly FC 5 clients.

If you think there are better options, I'd like to know them.

Thank you for sharing!

[bouchecl]

If you plan to share the files with Windows clients then Samba is the option. But since you have a mixed (Win/Linux) network, you should also enable NFS shares, which is usually faster than SMB. There is no reason you can't do both!

Now if you want to get fancy, add LDAP to the equation, in order to manage authentication! Some would say this is overkill for a small SOHO network, but if you like an extra challenge...

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The server should support the following structure:

- a common storage area, with RO access to files for users
- one area for each user, for their personal files (RW permission)
- an option for the users to allow access to their files (RO and eventually RW)

How would you setup NFS shares? I think LDAP is a bit too much (there'll be less than 10 simult. clients).

If you set up both SMB and NFS shares, what would you serve with each app? What will be used for win clients and what for linux?

[bouchecl]

Originally Posted by adad

The server should support the following structure:

- a common storage area, with RO access to files for users
- one area for each user, for their personal files (RW permission)
- an option for the users to allow access to their files (RO and eventually RW)

How would you setup NFS shares? I think LDAP is a bit too much (there'll be less than 10 simult. clients).


If you set up both SMB and NFS shares, what would you serve with each app? What will be used for win clients and what for linux?

It can be done with Samba and NFS. In my own home (wired) LAN configuration, I have a MythTV backend serving huge video files (2.2 GB/hour) to computers around the house. I've found that NFS is much more reliable than Samba when I playback these files on one of my frontends. I was Samba only until my teenage son started complaining about the hockey game he was watching, last October (a 3-hour long, 6.5 GB file). He could not fast forward or rewind past the first hour of the game and the video was lagging sometimes.

A switch to NFS solved the problem. I still have Samba enabled for the same directories on my server since all our machines dual-boot (XP Pro and FC)

On the server side, sharing a directory or partition is quite simple with ssytem-config-nfs:
I enable sharing for my local LAN (192.168.1.0/24), read-write and that's it!

On the client side, the setup is quite simple too: For instance, I've shared my /mythtv partition in /etc/fstab in all machines like this.

1- I created a /mythtv directory
2- I changed the ownership to me and the group to users
3- I changed the permissions for the directory to 775

 [root@zeus /]# mkdir /mythtv
[root@zeus /]# chown claude:users /mythtv
[root@zeus /]# chmod 775 /mythtv

Then, I added an extra line in my client machines' /etc/fstab:

zeus:/mythtv    /mythtv     nfs     nfsvers=3,rw      0 0

If you don't have experience with NFS/NIS, go to this site. Check chapters 29 and 30. I like this guy's step by step approach.

[adad]

Thank you, Claude. The website you link to seems to be pretty well documented. Do you have any experience with pure NAS boxes?