NAS: Move Over FreeNAS, Here Comes Ubuntu
A couple of months ago, I embarked on building a NAS with 3 x 1 Terabyte drives in a RAID 5 configuration (see here). I used an old server that I had lying around. I thought I had it working, but after several hours of use, the drives would heat up and sometimes they would go offline. I would then have to reboot the server. So, obviously, this was not a very stable solution. I had put really silent fans inside of the server, since it was in my office, but that was probably not providing enough ventilation, thus the overheating hard-drives.
Now that I’ve run Cat 5e cable from my office into the basement, I can put the server into the utility room in the basement and voila sound is no longer a constraint. In the meantime, the stability of the system was deteriorating. I also didn’t like the inflexibility of using FreeNAS. Sure, it is nice to have it all pre-packaged, but I think FreeNAS is really for those who aren’t technical enough to roll their own NAS and enable the appropriate services. Don’t get me wrong, FreeNAS is good if you just want to get a NAS running with minimal technical know how. But one of the issues with FreeNAS is that it appears that it only has a sole developer behind it, so releases are infrequent. Also, the forums aren’t as active as they could be. All of this, along with the fact that one of my drives went kaputt, has led me to build a NAS based on Ubuntu. With very little effort, I was able to build an Ubuntu based NAS using RAID 10 with 2 x 1 Terabyte drives. I am just playing around with RAID 10 right now as I only have 2 drives and I’ll switch to RAID 5 when my 3rd drive gets shipped back to me. Using mdadm and some simple instructions, it was a cinch to get RAID 10 working. I used a separate 40 GB drive for the OS install. Once I got the system up and running, I installed the excellent web-based administration tool called Webmin. From the looks of Webmin, it appears that you can perform RAID configurations from within it, so there really isn’t much command line expertise even required.
Since I wanted to mimic a lot of the functionality of FreeNAS, I also installed Fuppes so that I could stream media from the NAS to my XBox 360. These instructions were invaluable for installing Fuppes.
I also wanted to configure the server allow AFP (Apple Filing Protocol), so that the Apple computers in the house could use that instead of NFS, which would be more inefficient. These excellent instructions for configuring AFP on Ubuntu worked flawlessly.
Once I get my replacement drive back, I’ll work on the following:
- Put all 3 x 1 Terabyte drives into a RAID 5 configuration
- Enable the server to act as an iSCSI target. This is important, because my personal Macbook can then read data from the iSCSI target, which will be treated as a local drive, which means that Mozy (the online backup service I use) will back up the data.
- Burn (once again) my complete CD collection to the NAS. Unfortunately, with the last disk failure I lost all of the MP3′s that I had burned. In any case, I want to now burn them in a lossless format.
- Configure the NAS to act as an iTunes/DAAP server so that music could be streamed to any device in the house.
- Move this server into the basement, because it sounds like a rocket engine in my office.
