How to set up a SMALL cloud-storage facility?

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If you are going forward with this idea to make money, I'm going to start charging for setting up your company.

11 year old unknown, untested hardware, MiFi connection, spending more than $100/mo is painful, no idea about OS/software/billing.

Yeah...you don't learn to swim by jumping out of a boat 500 miles from shore.
 
I ain't seen much help yet. Of the lot o' ya, best one of ya'll is jojo69. Rest of ya are too busy bein feckin doom prophets to even read what I'm writing.

As in: I told you that the mifi was gonna go before I get started. Said it at least twice. Also said I'd test everything before putting it to use. If it don't play nice, it goes on a boat back to China for recycling.

Hate on me if ya want, I can take it cuz I know I'm better than that. I know I can make it work, I just have to figure out how. If ya'll won't help me, that's fine, it'll just take me longer and I'll make more mistakes. I'd like to avoid that...
 
starhawk said:
I ain't seen much help yet. Of the lot o' ya, best one of ya'll is jojo69. Rest of ya are too busy bein feckin doom prophets to even read what I'm writing.

As in: I told you that the mifi was gonna go before I get started. Said it at least twice. Also said I'd test everything before putting it to use. If it don't play nice, it goes on a boat back to China for recycling.

Hate on me if ya want, I can take it cuz I know I'm better than that. I know I can make it work, I just have to figure out how. If ya'll won't help me, that's fine, it'll just take me longer and I'll make more mistakes. I'd like to avoid that...
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Required background music for reading this post
 
starhawk said:
I ain't seen much help yet. Of the lot o' ya, best one of ya'll is jojo69. Rest of ya are too busy bein feckin doom prophets to even read what I'm writing.

As in: I told you that the mifi was gonna go before I get started. Said it at least twice. Also said I'd test everything before putting it to use. If it don't play nice, it goes on a boat back to China for recycling.

Hate on me if ya want, I can take it cuz I know I'm better than that. I know I can make it work, I just have to figure out how. If ya'll won't help me, that's fine, it'll just take me longer and I'll make more mistakes. I'd like to avoid that...
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Typed out a long response, but again, I was doing a consultants job where I could charge $40/hr to give the same advice.
 
Windows Live Skydrive. 25 GB of FREE storage. You can't even begin to compete with that, especially with 10 year old hardware.
 
Even Microsoft started with hardly nothing, so you can't hate the guy for at least wanting to try.

That old hardware wont go very far but if he has intention to upgrade and keep on top of things it could work. Not going to be easy, and there are no milions to be made. In fact I would say, probably no profit for the first few years.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Even Microsoft started with hardly nothing, so you can't hate the guy for at least wanting to try.

That old hardware wont go very far but if he has intention to upgrade and keep on top of things it could work. Not going to be easy, and there are no milions to be made. In fact I would say, probably no profit for the first few years.
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Oh I'm all for learning on your own. I did and do things like he wants to all the time, the only difference is trying to make money off of it. I say go for it, but you aren't going to make any money using that equipment and what you have. I would do it just to learn and get a feel and have maybe a few friends test it to see how it works and get a good system going. Then once you have a good interface, good backend, etc and everything is smooth, THEN maybe try and sell it as a service.
 
I took the time to read through both threads and wow....


Okay so what if one of your storage drives fails? What's going to be your backup. I/O performance of those drives are going to suck. Partitioning your 120 gb hard drives into multiples of 10gb, if you have more than one customer downloading/uploading it won't matter how BIG the pipe is and your bottleneck will be the the very thing your storing data on.

Your strongest processor in that hunk of silicon is a 2.4 S939 Athlon64? I dont even want to ask the specs of your hard drives. Although reading revealed zero of the drives are sata, so you won't be able to use the raid 1 support given on that Via 266... " and I'll have to figure out IDE RAID for backup type stuff (I think)..." YOU THINK??? You're going to have some angry customers when one of those IDE drives fail and you lose their data.

What's going to be your GUI for the customer? Are you going to write software like Carbonite does? Or are you going to have your clients download filezilla lol....What are you going to charge? lol Microsofts Skydrive gives you 25gb and its free. I wont have to worry about one of their IDE drives failing and losing my stuff. You keep saying you aren't competing with the big guns, but you ARE.

Business license? LLC? Taxes etc... ?

You need much better equipment....

Other than being a back up for your buddies/family, that's all it could be.
 
I applaud your enthusiasm and motivation, but you are trying to provide a service that is provided by companies with 10000x the resources that you have.

Use the hardware you have to learn, don't try to provide paid services with it. Educate yourself, get into the industry, build some capital and then try to get a startup off the ground.
 
valve1138, I have a box of tacks for you to sit on if you'd like ;)

Red Squirrel, I do believe that you and jojo69 are the only ones so far who are providing help.

@Saxie: I will be prepared. I don't exactly plan on using my customers as beta-testers. VZW does that and it feels pretty damn crappy. No. Not doing that to someone else when I can't stand it myself. I'm planning on using all 80, 120, 200 gig drives (yes I have them) for this. Also, I'm going through a box of silicon right now that came today... it's almost half s478 stuff in a PSU box, 1" deep with procs. Now if only I had more than ONE s478 mobo I could use... grrrr...

Then again, if I'm only doing storage and retrieval on these boxes, the proc ain't the slow part ;) unless it's like Super Socket 7 or something... which they most certainly will NOT be.

No, I still don't know the software side of it. If ya'll would quit with the craptitude and help me figure out software, that would be progress.

If there's one thing I've learned with computers, it's that hardware is exactly half the picture... it matters at least as much as what one is doing with it. You can't get a complete idea of how a computer is gonna work without knowing both.
 
If you want to make some money, start a service where you log onto their computer remotely and back up all their data to a usb drive, check AV and logs.
Call, have them hook up the drive for the day, do the backup, have them put the drive in the closet until next month. $25 a month, they buy the usb drive. You set it up for free or at most $20. You can do 10-15 an hour by having more than one going at a time.
A little marketing and even in a small town you can make several hundred a month.
 
Not my thing. I know what I want to do, folks. Just help me get there, OK? Besides, if I screw up, that's MY problem, not ya'll's. I ain't got no reason ever to come crying to you folks sayin "YOU DIDN'T TELL ME" because you've already done that quite well. I hear ya, but ultimately it's my life and my decision... and I think it's worth the risk, if only because I'll never quite forgive myself if I don't at least try.

There ain't near enough breath in this world to convince me to give this up just yet. So might I (politely?) suggest that instead of trying to tell me why I'm full of $#!!, ya'll gimme some help so that my doom isn't nearly as severe. Can we do that?
 
We're telling you how to get there. Get a job, buy some hardware that was made after 2000, spend the next 6 months playing around with it on your own with your own data. Actually try and set it up on your own. If you hit a wall, ask. We'll answer specific questions. This whole zero experience this is my life's dream even though I have never actually had to use a computer past things a 10 year old does is getting old.

Once you set up quotas instead of having a single partition per user, and things that take 2 seconds of googling to figure out, then we might help you out. Of course this all comes after you get one of those boxes up and running, find out what works, and pick an OS and install it.

You are about .01% on your way to your dream this very moment. The next 99.99% isn't going to happen in the next 6 months, or even 12 months.

Ask specific questions, we'll answer them. I'll even start out with the first question you should ask:

Hey guys, should I use any of this hardware?

Our answer:
For spending time learning on it, sure. Set up one computer with 2-3 drives, and see how far you can get with trying to set it up and get it stable. DO NOT OFFER ANY SERVICES TO ANYONE, FOR FREE OR OTHERWISE. In 6-12 months, when you have learned what you need to learn, you should purchase new hardware, since by then you will understand what you need and what it is going to take to do what you want. Then you can start to do things for free to get word of mouth accounts, and set up an accounting and payment processing system to grow from there. At this point you would also get your business license and other legal requirements.
 
Well, about halfway. Ya'll keep saying that I need "better hardware" but that's as far as you get.

Assuming that I'm bloody stubborn enough to work with the hardware I've got... what would be the best thing in terms of software to be using on the storage end of things? What about routing/control and all of that? I do have several complete systems that I haven't properly examined... dell dimensions, coupla compaqs, and an antique IBM (not going to be using that one) come to mind immediately. IIRC I got far enough to figure out that the dimensions were all s478... also got a few empty cases and some spare drive bays. If all else fails, I can make "cases" out of a few boards I have lying around... nothin better than "open to the air" for cooling IMO. I don't give a crap how it looks, I care about how it works and how easy it is to fix when it gets the Monday Morning Blues.

EDIT: valve1138, I sent you a PM about that. Pix will come as soon as I can snap them, gimme an hour. I got a lotta crap to snap ;)
 
adi said:
We're telling you how to get there. Get a job, buy some hardware that was made after 2000, spend the next 6 months playing around with it on your own with your own data. Actually try and set it up on your own. If you hit a wall, ask. We'll answer specific questions. This whole zero experience this is my life's dream even though I have never actually had to use a computer past things a 10 year old does is getting old.

Once you set up quotas instead of having a single partition per user, and things that take 2 seconds of googling to figure out, then we might help you out. Of course this all comes after you get one of those boxes up and running, find out what works, and pick an OS and install it.

You are about .01% on your way to your dream this very moment. The next 99.99% isn't going to happen in the next 6 months, or even 12 months.

Ask specific questions, we'll answer them. I'll even start out with the first question you should ask:

Hey guys, should I use any of this hardware?

Our answer:
For spending time learning on it, sure. Set up one computer with 2-3 drives, and see how far you can get with trying to set it up and get it stable. DO NOT OFFER ANY SERVICES TO ANYONE, FOR FREE OR OTHERWISE. In 6-12 months, when you have learned what you need to learn, you should purchase new hardware, since by then you will understand what you need and what it is going to take to do what you want. Then you can start to do things for free to get word of mouth accounts, and set up an accounting and payment processing system to grow from there. At this point you would also get your business license and other legal requirements.
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This +1
 
starhawk said:
EDIT: valve1138, I sent you a PM about that. Pix will come as soon as I can snap them, gimme an hour. I got a lotta crap to snap ;)
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starhawk said:
Been thinkin'. You want pix? I'll send you pix. Check your pm's again in a little while ;) like about an hour.

Just make sure that you're sitting in something with a buckled seatbelt, cuz I ain't no troll.
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:rolleyes:

Post them in this thread.
 
OK, here's a specific question...

What OS works for the storage boxes? I know enough to say that linux would probably be useful here... but I don't know which linux, and there's a lot of them. They will ONLY really be doing storage and retrieval, logins will be handled by something else that can handle SSH/SSL...

EDIT: valve, I'll post 'em here, but I'ma start callin you squeeks because you sound like the brakes in my Dad's car.
 
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Linux would be the cheapest option. However since you have zero experience with it, its not something I would recommend until you get 6 months of general experience with it. Majority of linux distros are going to be the same for a stripped down, GUI only machine. However, since you are using old hardware, you will have to try a few out to see which ones work out of the box, or which ones might require custom compiled drivers for your storage controllers and network cards.

Windows could also do what you want, but of course it would be a few hundred dollars to get a basic Server 2008R2 license.

In reality though, you need to figure out how people will transfer files to your server, what kind of user accounting system you want to use, and what type of billing system you are going to use. This is because all of those will be tied together, and they might not run on the OS that you choose out of the box. You might have to write custom libraries or modules to get the billing system to talk to your user account system.

This is also assuming that you want to move past "stop by and give me cash when you can" as your billing system.

You also have to take into account your backup options, which will also range from free to a few thousand dollars per box, and also depend on what OS you run.

Linux can also "handle" SSH/SSL, depending on what your last sentence meant.
 
Easiest route, I would look at CentOS and mdraid. Here's a little writeout I did on how to set it up:

http://www.iceteks.com/articles.php/linuxmdadmraid/1

You'd probably want to code a back end for configurating the arrays and such. You can also use OpenFiler which actually uses mdraid, though it lacks some gui features such as expanding arrays.

I would not actually deploy this until you buy newer equipment though, but you can use your existing stuff for learning.


For the front end you'll also need to come up with something. FTP is the easiest, but very primitive. SFTP / SSH FTP is better, but still, noob type users will exact some kind of browser upload feature or something.
 
I'm thinking that people will use secured FTP to log in, and they would be directed, based on login credentials, to their specific partition. No access would be granted to another's partition without the correct credentials, which I would be able to change with ease. Down the line I could set up a way for them to do that automatically, but that sounds (to me) to be pretty complicated and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

FileZilla is pretty brainless to use (I've done it before), but I can look around and see if there's something even easier for the boneheads -- there's a lotta folks round these parts who have a good time emptying a can of Miller into their computer and then wondering why the crap a dripping computer doesn't work.

As for Linux... I'm pretty good at the simple stuff. I can use Ubuntu and Puppy (not that hard). Probably the most complex things I've done... I got a Pantech UM175VW 3g wireless modem to run on Xubuntu (that was a pain in the ass but I can deal with it) and I made a (flash-in-the-pan success of a) version of Puppy of my own. Never could get Conky to behave, which is why I stopped, but IIRC it had more to do with JWM then anything else... been a year or so. I can find my way around a filesystem if I poke at it long enough. I've used terminal and been pretty good at it. I like a gui better so that it's easier to figure out what's next (I have a shitty memory so looking up commands constantly is a real slowdown) but I'm not hopeless.

As for payment... I have paypal. I'll use that, it's easier (by far) than waiting for a check/money order/etc. to arrive in my mailbox. If I don't get my dough, I change the password to something random. When they call and complain, I remind 'em to pay. If they want to pitch a fit, well, I can deal with that. But they ain't gettin their access back till I see that money in my account. Once I see it, gimme a half hour (at the very extreme) and they'll be right back up.

Backup... I figure, since I've got really six drives (+ OS drive + optical drive for when it falls flat) per system, I can use three for storage and three for backup. Every day, at a certain time, the boxes all copy everything from the main drives to the backup drives. I'll be fine as long as the cat stays the heck away (which he will, he's scared of loud noises). My only real concern at that point AFAIK is if the PSU decides to go to hell in spectacular fashion and takes everything with it.

Actually, on that note... howzabout this:

Dell Inspiron -> PfSense (initial firewall)
Box #1 -> Logins/Control (user logins, directing users to their "bins", running everything else?, etc.)
Box #2 -> small partitions + backups
Box #3 -> small partitions + backups
Box #4 -> medium partitions + backups
Box #5 -> medium partitions + backups
Box #6 -> large partitions + backups
Box #7 -> secondary backup for boxes 2,3
Box #8 -> secondary backup for boxes 4,5
Box #9 -> secondary backup for box 6

Can connect everything with EITHER the Super Stack II or the Hawking (if I can get the damn power brick for it). Only major issues would be like a snowstorm where we don't have power for three days (happens about once or twice a decade) or if EVERYTHING takes a crap at once (not likely TBH) or if the ethernet on the Inspiron dies on me (because then I'll have to get a cardbus NIC for it, which will take a couple days... but I can set up another PfSense box as emergency backup for that if need be -- takes about half an hour to wipe old and install new ;) ).

valve, I know yer anxious, sit on it. You'll get yer pix asap.
 
This will be my last post in this thread.

1) Laptop as your firewall. Horrible idea.
2) Using a hub as your core network. Horrible idea.
3) Backup solution is timed copies to other drives in same chassis. Horrible idea
3a) backup solution isn't a backup solution. Best option would be to pay $5/mo to someone like Mozy to backup up to 50GB to. They have automated billing and accounting, massive amounts of bandwidth, professionally run datacenters, and applications that run in the background that automate your client backup.
4) Manual billing and account control. Horrible idea
5) non-automated, manual backup mechanism for end user. Horrible idea
6) box1 goes down, everything goes down. Horrible idea

Do everything you said differently.
 
i'll play along cause this is amusing.

how are you going to 'route the connection based on login to their partition'?
 
starhawk said:
OK, here's a specific question...

What OS works for the storage boxes? I know enough to say that linux would probably be useful here... but I don't know which linux, and there's a lot of them. They will ONLY really be doing storage and retrieval, logins will be handled by something else that can handle SSH/SSL...

EDIT: valve, I'll post 'em here, but I'ma start callin you squeeks because you sound like the brakes in my Dad's car.
Click to expand...

And I'll keep calling you a troll pookie ;)
 
You know, when I started this thread, I had some optimism and hope that ya'll would act like the helpful adults that most of you either usually are or damn well ought to be... I'd have a lot more blanks filled in if ya'll were helping instead of acting like high schoolers with the local nerd (I got more than enough of that in high school, thanks anyways).

If you would stop alternately laughing/teasing/taunting and telling me that I'm a dumbass for using old hardware (there's actually a few advantages to this old crap IMNSHO... not the least of which is that I'm hella familiar with it)... then I'd have more blanks filled in.

For example, madrebel, you want to know how the connections would be routed. I don't have any idea more than I said. Perhaps you could suggest something?

Laptop as the PfSense box was the idea of Danny Bui over in GenHW. His reasoning was that it already had a battery backup built in. I agree that an Inspiron 8100 doesn't make for the snazziest of firewall/router setups by a long shot, and that I've only got one working battery for it right now (other one was a lump of plastic that the BIOS refused to acknowledge) but it's a hell of a lot better than using an abacus. I'm not here to impress the public with nice and shiny computers, since most of them will probably never see the thing; I'm just wanting to provide a service. On that note: if I have 25-30 customers at any given time, I'll be happy as a clam in a meth lab.

BTW, madrebel, I couldn't implement token ring or sneakernet if I even wanted to >.< all of my network cards are either dialup modem (ACK!!) or ethernet RJ45 type. Also, I've got fewer than a dozen floppy drives, so I don't think sneakernet is a good option either ;)

Squeaks, I'm done takin' pix, my next post will contain all of 'em. Gimme about 10min at the most.
 
I'm not going to dignify the antique network protocol theme here with a response :rolleyes:

OK, Squeaks, here's some grease for ya. Hope you're sittin fer this, there's a lot to see. BTW, people who (through implication or otherwise) call me a liar really piss me off.

Did not take pix of the spare screws bin (it's a Wyler's can, who gives a shit?) or the stack of floppy drives (nobody cares). Here's everything else, in the order I took it. I think ya'll have been around computers long enough to know what this shit looks like, so I'm not gonna label pix.





















 
Roflcopters.

You opened a Goodwill for computers.

You should name your business shItCloud.

Edit: those Iomega Ditto will ensure data retention! Hahahahaaaha
 
Step 1: Learn about computers, how they work, how to fix them.
Step 2: Learn about the internet and how it works.
Step 3: Learn about networking hardware and how it works, how to configure it, and how to fix it.
Step 4: Learn to program
Step 5: Start thinking about maybe doing something with some of that knowledge.
Step 6: Profit
 
I'm not laughing, squeaks. Were you born like that or did you fall down too many stairs when you were young?

EDIT: mwarps... I've got the first step covered solid. Steps two and four I've got a healthy bit of info on (more two than four). I can do the rest of it pretty easily if I get some actual help instead of point&taunt.
 
I'm either closing this thread or moving it to genmay.

OP which do you prefer?
 
I don't have a genmay subscription (no spare dough for that) so I guess you can close it... it's not like there's any chance of me getting real help here anyway :rolleyes: victory for the real trolls I guess.

I wonder if Anandtech is more mature than this...? Maybe they can actually help me...

EDIT: squeaks, I'd threaten you, but I really don't think you're worth either a ban or the possible destruction of my two dollar hammer.
 
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