On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:43 PM, Timothy J Massey <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I'm in the middle of building a "Super" Backup server. It will do the
> following:
>
> Run BackupPC for file-level backups
> Provide NFS share(s) for VMware snapshots
> Provide CIFS share(s) for Windows snapshots and Clonezilla
> Contains a removable SATA tray
> Manage all of this from a GUI
>
> I am currently doing each of these features on various different BackupPC
> servers already, but in each case it was done manually, by hand, and from
> the command line. For this iteration, I would like to wrap a GUI around it.
>
> In the case of BackupPC, it has a GUI and I will continue to use it.
> However, *many* of the functions I would like to have the user perform do
> not: NFS shares, CIFS shares, users, network settings, etc. However,
> these are *EXACTLY* the standard function that a NAS does, and there are
> 1E6 of these already built.
>
> So, my question: is there a NAS GUI out there that can be added on top of
> "standard" Linux (preferably RHEL, but very willing to consider others)
> that will add most of these functions? For example, something like the GUI
> for an Iomega NAS would be perfect. (I thought about using them as the
> hardware and software base and adding BackupPC to them, but there's no
> built-in removable drive, and USB is awkward and slow. Plus the Linux
> environment is... minimal.)
>
> I would prefer staying based on a generic Linux install, but I've also
> thought about using a NAS-based distro as the base (such as OpenFiler). In
> the specific case of OpenFiler, the current version in a bit of a bad place
> at the moment. There is much concern that the base OS, which is based on
> rPath, will not be available for free users for much longer; in addition
> the current beta version (2.99) has some known critical bugs in iSCSI
> (which I use), and there have been no updates since April. So, it's not my
> favorite base to build on... (Reference:
> https://forums.openfiler.com/viewtopic.php?pid=26228)
>
> And I'd vastly prefer to stay with Linux, which eliminates FreeNAS and
> Nexenta.
>
> Many of the Linux-based NAS systems are designed as firmware for dedicated
> (and often vastly inadequate) hardware: NSLU2 falls into this camp. I am
> not running this on an embedded device: It's a full-featured PC-based
> architecture.
>
> I'm also willing to consider generic Linux system management tools such as
> webmin, but I'd prefer something more focused on NAS-type functions if I
> can get it. It's been years since I've looked at Webmin, but a quick
> glance seems to show that it hasn't changed much: it's little more than
> textareas with chunks of the configuration files dumped into them. I'm
> hoping for something more polished if I can get it.
>
> Like I said, I'm looking for the general interface provided by every NAS
> I've ever seen. Of course, each of them is specific to their device. I'm
> hoping there's a version out there for "generic" Linux.
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions in this regard?
>
The two players in the 'generic server GUI' space are SME server and
ClearOS. Both are sort-of generic Centos under the covers but you barely
see it. SME server has a long history but has slowed down progress in the
last few years. It works by having a web interface build snippets of
config files and perl scripts that are processed with templates to rebuild
the real config files. If you want to make your own changes, you have to
edit the templates, not the normal configs. ClearOS has a much more modern
ajax-y interface but I'm not quite sure what does the real work. The
delay in the CentOS 6.0 release set them back badly so you have to choose
between a beta 6.x version or an outdated 5.x.
Unless you have a lot of users or changing needs, this doesn't really sound
like something that needs a web GUI to manage - or at least not worth
putting up with oddball/non-standard configurations to get. If your
hardware can handle a small amount of overhead and you can manage it from a
windows client, you might consider VMware ESXi (the free version). Then
you can run a full GUI console of any OS remotely - and if you felt like it
you could run one OS for file shares and a different one for backuppc. In
any case, having a VMware setup with some disk space is handy to try out
new things since you can map a downloaded iso image on an nfs share as the
DVD drive and install in a new VM without having to touch any real hardware.
--
Les Mikesell
[email protected]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Write once. Port to many.
Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create
new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the
Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join
http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev
_______________________________________________
BackupPC-users mailing list
[email protected]
List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net
Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
