hardk0re,May 27 2009, 06:25 AM Wrote:But weren't you running 0.7? Why not give up on ZFS and just use 0.69 for now?
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yup, I am using 0.7.. so I knew the risks I was running.
I like ZFS -- really do. It demonstrates just how robust it is -- because even with the nas server crapping out regularily due to driver issues and whatnot, I still have not lost any data in the 700+Gb of data on the server.
I can change to any OS, and I never lose the RAID array... and that's not the case with other filesystem or RAID implementations.
the ease of use and robustness of ZFS is really worth it -- and I don't really get all the flak I see on the net -- a lot of linux geeks say that ext4 and LVMs are just as good, if not better -- but even if they're just as robust -- they're definitely not as easy to setup, use, migrate, upgrade, etc.
Since I'm using it mainly for SMB, UPnP, FTP, and Web, I could just as easily switch to ubuntu until freenas 0.7 matures more.
Another bonus to running ZFS on ubuntu via FUSE is that a filesystem panic error won't panic the kernel and crash the whole machine. Just restart the ZFS service and you're back in.
so I'll give that a whirl... and see how it works. Not the easiest setup, but likely the easiest to grow with in the future.
So far, using Ubuntu with ZFS-FUSE is working out better ... took longer to install, but the ZFS raid array imported with a single command and took 2 seconds to get all my raid data back up.
and you can install webmin and the gnome desktop on the server distro to give nice gooey windows and buttons to configure things --
so far
advantages - way more robust than freenas
disadvantages - more difficult to setup -- not the 5 minute setup of freenas
ok.. I lied... Ubuntu is not the way to go.
The problem being (as with anything linux it seems), there's no such thing as plug and play. You plug, you play, you pray, you cry, you bash your head against the wall, download gigs of crap, compile and try, wait, and pray some more... but if you have an intermittent problem, it's likely to stay intermittent.
So I went back to freenas... 12 hours to set up ubuntu and track down all the process/memory leaks (what kind of OS just shuts down apps to free up process handles without telling you??!)
The latest version of freenas 0.7 is a lot more stable -- and I figured out a way to install some extra packages on it's freeBSD install -- and even got SVN running on it.
The only problem being that you can't do a lot of package updates and installs since it doesn't have a compiler on it.
So I tried my best to install SVN with the Apache svn-dav module, but that just wasn't going to happen (gmake doesn't work with Makefile? wtf?) ...
So I guess freenas still wins in the end for ease of use , if not for maintainability.
I even got around to configuring the bit torrent server on it to get me some full episodes of Top Gear instead of the hacked crap they throw on BBC Can.
And even through swapping between OSes, hardware, etc... the zfs RAID still comes up unfazed through it all. That's the sort of stuff you don't hear of in the ext-LVM world.
Had my first harddrive failure today on the NAS server... slapped in a replacement and it's rebuilding the array just dandy (scrubbing and resilvering).
a quick update on events over the last year with my home-made NAS server:
- was swapping OSes to find something that would run stable with ZFS filesystem
- turns out stability issue was caused by cracked heatsink bracket -- so machine was overheating under heavy loads
- now running full freebsd instead of freenas, free bsd sata driver isn't hotswappable with my hardware (d'oh!).
- machine crashed with bad hdd... just slapped in new one, rebooted, and instantiated a zpool replace command...
zero data loss.
the only unfortunate thing is that the seagate drive is over a year old and out of manufacturer's warranty. I always keep one or two spares around just in case, and the new spares I'm ordering in now have a 3yr warranty..
So one year, and the ongoing maintenance costs of the NAS server is about $109/yr. Not bad for 4TB of fault-tolerant storage..
Seacrates are down to a one year warranty now?
Good to see you're back up and running so quick... reminds me to run a backup on the big box here.
NefCanuck
I think it has a 2 year warranty on the drive that failed... so I'm going to contact seagate and see if I can get warranty... I always keep one around for a spare to minimize possible datalosses too.
My plan is to replace any further HDD failures with 2TB drives, eventually upping my total NAS space to 6TB. Right now, I've used 2 out of the 3TB available...
the only reason I'm up so quickly is the fact that ZFS is very robust in it's parity implementation, and newer zfs versions offer one-step snapshots for backups too (a-la time capsule)...
I'm actually rather proud of myself
...
Yeah, I'm too cheap to actually pay for software as part of a backup solution under Windows so I found a solution from a company called "Macrium Reflect" it's a manual solution in its free version but if I set a reminder for myself in Outlook I can do weekly backups to the external HDD I have.
NefCanuck
I used sync toys in the past to synch up directories I wanted backed up, but they replaced it with Windows sync center with Vista/Win7.. so I can't say I've had much experience with other backup solutions
I bought a MAC
don't worry, macs break too... everything breaks eventually.
hey
don't say that I want to be the cool guy in the commericals, and well the "PC" guy pretty much describes this thread LOL
Oh so you want to be like my chiropracyor who asked me to look at his Macbook that utterly refused to boot up? All I could get it to do was three beeps and nothing else, no video, nada.
He had to take it in to the Apple Store after a web search turned up the fact that Apple seems pretty closed lipped about what their error codes mean (Best I could get for him was that there was a problem with the RAM
)
NefCanuck
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