I built one of these a few years ago, back when the N40L was the current model, and it's worked like a charm. I configured FreeNAS to use ZFS mirroring with 2 drives.
Best NAS I've ever used at home. On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 3:52 PM, Mark Komarinski <mkomarin...@wayga.org>wrote: > (I've had this in my draft mailbox for quite a while after I promised > sending this. It's getting rather long, so I'll send this and then open > up for questions. tl;dr: I like it.) > > So there's really two parts to this review. First the hardware. > > I started with the HP ProLiant G7 N54L Microserver, 2x Kingston 4GB RAM, > and 2x WD RED 4TB drives. > > I'll admit to a bit of a bias against HP - I never really liked the > server or consumer hardware. But this box is pretty nice. It's a > fairly small cube with a locking front door that gives access to the 4 > drive bays (which clearly say 'not hot swap') and the motherboard. > There's a panel on top that gives access to a 5.25" bay if you want to > put in an optical drive. The rear has two short PCI expansion slots, a > few USB ports, power, and GigE port. I'm not looking at it right now > but I also think it has an external SATA connector. > > The HP comes with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB SATA drive in the first bay. > Given I'm intending to install FreeNAS on a USB drive and using ZFS says > you need a minimum of 8GB of RAM, both of these have to go. Getting > access to the RAM was a bit tricky at first as the motherboard is laying > on the bottom of the case with various cables plugged in and two 'tool > less' screws to allow you to slide the motherboard out. I say 'tool > less' as they were torqued on enough that I needed a screwdriver to > loosen it enough to remove it by hand. I had to also disconnect most of > the cables (power, case, SATA) so it could slide out. With that done, I > noticed there's an internal USB connector which was small enough for the > FreeNAS drive I made previously (more on that later). Stuck that in and > the only items plugged in externally are now power and Ethernet. > Removing the drive from the sled showed it was using a star-head screw > and so getting it out made me reach for my set of computer tools until I > noticed that the interior of the door has a small wrench and a set of > screws - enough for all of the sleds. That made short work of removing > the 250GB and dropping in the 4TB. > > My only complaint about the HP box is that the power switch is located > on the upper right edge of the case, along the curve that goes from the > front to the top. It's not recessed or otherwise protected, so I hit it > by accident a few times while moving it around. Now that it's in my > basement I don't expect that to happen often, but putting your hand on > the area is enough to cause it to think you wanted to turn it off. > > Enough about the hardware. On to FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/) > > Installation to a standard 8GB USB drive was simple enough. I'm using > 9.2, the current release version. The console screen at boot time is > just plain text and only gives a few options. The main way to configure > is via the web interface. It helpfully snags a DHCP address at boot > time and the console shows the IP address it has. > > First login on the web interface has you set the password and you get > in. Using ZFS does make things easier in that I just selected the two > drives and it automatically set them up as a mirror and created the > volume for me. Unlike LVM which I'm more accustomed to, that entire > volume is the filesystem. With the volume created, you can create > either a dataset (used for sharing via NFS/CIFS/AFP) or a zvol (for > exporting via iSCSI). Everything I'm doing currently uses datasets, > though I might tinker with iSCSI again later in the year. > > Creating a dataset by default makes a space that shares the same amount > of space as the volume. You can then set a quota to limit the amount of > space per volume[*]. You can also select compression or deduplication. > Compression runs it through a variety of protocols, with lz4 being > recommended. Dedup is a lot more effort and there's lots of warnings > about enabling dedup if you don't have sufficient RAM. While I'm > storing lots of compressed media files for now (video and music files), > it will tell you how compressed the dataset is. In my case it winds up > being 1.02x. > > ZFS can set up routine snapshots, which is a good incentive to move my > home directory there. When you enable a new snapshot, you can set it up > so there's a 1 hour snapshot during business hours going back two > weeks. You can change this by just about any amount - select days, time > to start and end, how often a snapshot is taken, and how far back they > go. You can also select a manual snapshot. To access a snapshot, you > can either clone it and have it appear as a new volume that can be > remotely mounted, or roll the volume back to that snapshot (obviously > dangerous if there's been other changes to the filesystem since the > snapshot in question). > > Exporting filesystems by NFS and AFP are pretty straightforward and you > can share filesystems using multiple methods. NFS speed is really > good. Copying data over a 1GBE link was writing at about 40MB/s. With > a bunch of 10 and 20GB mkv files in place, reading them gave me just shy > of 100MB/s: > > $ dd if=mybigfile.mkv of=/dev/null > 40558708+1 records in > 40558708+1 records out > 20766058991 bytes (21 GB) copied, 209.346 s, 99.2 MB/s > > Zoom. > > CIFS access gets into Domain accounts and other nonsense that I won't go > into here. Suffice to say I can export datasets via CIFS and get to > them from my Windows box. > > I've done two upgrades since I installed in early January. Each time > was a bit more difficult than I was expecting. Not as smooth as I'd > expect from an appliance, but better than upgrading Windows. Both times > I tried to upgrade within the 9.2 series, I got errors about limited > disk space in /var to perform the upgrade. After rebooting and trying > the upgrade again, it succeeded. Not a huge deal, but did add to the > time it took to upgrade. The HP isn't the fastest booting system out > there. Total time was probably half an hour. > > Lastly, there's plugins and jails. I haven't made much use of this yet, > but probably will as I get more comfortable with it. Plugins give you > access to various other applications, like owncloud, sickbeard, > subsonic, crashplan, and bacula-sd. Installing a plugin puts it into > its own separate jail with its own IP address and network > configuration. You can then have each jail get access to specific > datasets. > > -Mark > > [*] Ok, this is really odd. The only browser I have reliably working to > get to set quotas is Firefox. Chrome and IE don't show the icons. The > FreeNAS support forum has a few threads on this with the response being > the equivalent of "LOL Why U use IE". This is the one thing so far that > has given me pause about FreeNAS. <- This was written before the recent > IE exploits were announced. > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ > -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8
_______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
