I highly recommend OpenFiler. The code itself is open-source, but t's not
very diligently supported by the community. However I was a total newbie to
the world of Linux and have never needed any - it's been solid as a rock,
and has every possible NAS feature readily available from web-driven GUI,
obviously designed for the high-end corporate sector.
The previous version had an outdated stub of BPC installed, so they used to
work together, but this would now need to be added manually.
I would recommend running BPC in a VM so as to disturb OF's "appliance"
nature as little as possible.
Or in an ideal world, run your Filer standalone and BPC on a dedicated box.
Both projects run well on low-end/older hardware - but note this doesn't
mean I'm advocated consumer-grade hardware for mission-critical tasks. . .
On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 1:43 AM, Timothy J Massey <tmas...@obscorp.com>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?
>
> Thank you very much for your help!
>
> Timothy J. Massey
> *Out of the Box Solutions, Inc.* *
> Creative IT Solutions Made Simple!**
> **http://www.OutOfTheBoxSolutions.com*<http://www.outoftheboxsolutions.com/>
> *
> **tmas...@obscorp.com* <tmas...@obscorp.com> 22108 Harper Ave.
> St. Clair Shores, MI 48080
> Office: (800)750-4OBS (4627)
> Cell: (586)945-8796
>
>
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