Where's the love for Linux?!

[nerr]

Here's a thread where those of us who run Linux-based systems can show off our setups and discuss how useful and versatile they can be! In a forum dominated by FreeBSD, FreeNAS, and Windows Home Server, I think it's about time for a thread dedicated to Linux-based systems. These other operating systems are not bad by any means, but I'm curious to see the Linux setups that others have. Perhaps I can find some more ideas to make my home server even more versatile! (As I surely can't be the only one with a Linux-based home server)

Name: Servnerr-1
Operating System: Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS x86
Hardware: Acer Aspire easyStore H340

• Intel Atom 230 @ 1.6GHz
• 2GB DDR2 RAM
• 5.14TB HDD space (1TB + 1TB + 1TB + 640GB + 1.5TB external)
• APC Back-UPS ES 750 UPS
• HP Deskjet 5650 Network Printer
• SansDigital TR4M-B RAID Enclosure

Services Provided:

• apcupsd (UPS daemon)
• bind9 (DNS)
• CUPS (Network Printing / IPP)
• dhcp3-server (DHCP)
• LAMP Server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
• Network File System (NFS)
• OpenSSH (SSH)
• PXE (DHCP+TFTP)
• rtorrent (BitTorrent)
• Samba (SMB)
• Subsonic Media Server (MP3 streaming)

Needless to say, Servnerr-1 certainly is a jack of all trades. The Intel Atom performs admirably, and handles all of these tasks with great ease. Average LAN transfer speeds range from 50 MB/s to 70 MB/s on gigabit networking, limited only by the fact that I am running Western Digital Caviar Green drives for all internal disks. My server also provides DHCP/DNS for our LAN, as well as a PXE server. While normally found in enterprise environments, a PXE server is unbelievably handy in a home environment with several machines! It is loaded with network-bootable images of Ubuntu (Desktop, Server, and Netbook), Gentoo, Debian, and tools such as GParted and memtest, and is accessible by any machine capable of booting via PXE. No more burning CDs!

Now it's your turn! Show off your Linux desktop/server storage systems. I'd love to see them!

 

[drescherjm]

Work ones? I have a dozen or so servers with about 30TB of raid5/6. Not sure if I would go through the effort of detailing each system when I think of that.. That would take a long time which I do not have..

 

[keenan]

Alright, I'll bite. This is my main home server:

Name: infinity
Operating System: Debian Stable (5.0)
Hardware: homebuilt

• Intel Q6600 @ 2.4GHz (stock)
• 2GB DDR2 (needs more!)
• 6x500GB in software RAID6 (2TB usable) + 120GB boot drive
• APC/IBM 1500VA UPS

Services provided:

• Samba
• NFS
• CUPS
• NUT upsd
• Apache for cacti and other misc
• Does using it as a development box count as a 'service'?
• Xen VM running asterisk for VoIP (which runs DHCP, TFTP and some others for the VoIP VLAN)
• Xen VM running Windows 2008 for future WDS use

I could take a picture of its arse-end stuffed in the closet, but it's not very interesting

 

[sub.mesa]

The way i see it: Linux lacks an advanced filesystem; it has no real support for ZFS and Btrfs is still far away from being at the level where ZFS is now. And even though its GPL - it's still owned by Oracle.

So of course Linux is very universal and can be used for almost any task. But you would be missing on technologies fancy to home storage.

And Linux might be transforming, as vendors are playing with alternative kernels such as the kFreeBSD project. We might well be seeing Ubuntu-FreeBSD releases in the future, including full ZFS support. But really do you need a GUI on a server system?

 

[ToddW2]

Oddly my ubuntu desktop felt slower than windows

 

[nerr]

So of course Linux is very universal and can be used for almost any task. But you would be missing on technologies fancy to home storage.

...

But really do you need a GUI on a server system?

But you see, not everybody needs incredibly advanced filesystems such as ZFS. Sure, it'd be interesting to play with, but completely necessary? In my case, absolutely not. I'm a college students with minimal cash, four computers to serve files to, and only need a single, universal box to take care of all services. It begin as an experiment, and ended up providing tons of useful services and a large amount of network storage for my home LAN. While I do respect your opinion, I am perfectly content with my Linux setup.

As for needing a GUI on a server system: assuming you're referring to my post, Ubuntu Server does not install a GUI by default. The option is available,but In my case, I have not. It's a waste of resources and I'm perfectly capable of navigating and operating the system via the terminal.

 

[Zerosum]

I'm on ubuntu 9.10 running with most of the standard services as my main home PC. It's doubling as the current fileserver for the other windows and HTPC in my home.

It currently contains an ARC-1220 with 14.x TB of Raid 6 storage for my current file needs. This has been full for a bit and I'm 95% of the way to my new fileserver upgrade.

With so many hard drives going into my new machine, I can't just buy more RAID controllers for them. So this new machine will run ZFS on an 1680i/HP SAS attached to almost 60 2TB drives. I have everything cept the HP now so I'm guessing you can put me down as a linux user. So it's linux with my old FS and most likely OpenSolaris (as soon as I get my SAS) for the new FS.

Can add smoothwall as my router for basically everything in my place.

 

[sub.mesa]

But you see, not everybody needs incredibly advanced filesystems such as ZFS.

Because their data is less valuable and not that bad if it goes to waste?

Or is it because consumers are so known of their tendency to create high quality backups that are current, complete and reliable; causing them to never lose data in the first place. Right?

Well, no of course; basically everyone gambles with their data and every year some people receive the jackpot: gone is your data. To protect your data the user has to do alot of trouble, therefore causing many people to not have backups even though they have multiple HDDs, multiple computers and enough space to allow for a redundant setup.

Sure, it'd be interesting to play with, but completely necessary? In my case, absolutely not. I'm a college students with minimal cash

So you need to buy expensive RAID controllers, a battery backup unit, RAID edition harddrives and even more drives for backup. Somehow you're implying the Windows-route is cheaper.

Reality is, that due the saner I/O foundations in both Linux and FreeBSD, you do not need RAID edition harddrives, battery backup units, uninterruptable power supplies coupled with expensive RAID controllers. You can use much cheaper equipment while getting higher performance and higher reliability out of it.

So while something like ZFS may seem exotic and 'special' to most Windows users, it really does suit their needs much better than the options available on Windows:
- does not require expensive hardware like RAID edition harddrives, UPS/BBU or RAID controller
- provides a reliable filesystem with several layers of protection (checksums, redundant and authenticated metadata, intent log)
- allows for an easy backup mechanism that does not waste space
- is reasonably fast (thanks to it using multiple drives)

If you think Windows does not even have a filesystem that can use multiple storage devices, you can consider FAT/NTFS to be part of the 'first generation filesystems' which offer very little protection to the user. The user is not protected from corruption and metadata is not authenticated; so a bit-flip in a datablock that stored metadata may cause the filesystem to go awry and kill a lot of sub-folders in the process.

Concluding: i do think advanced filesystems could benefit the casual user who does not know about filesystems anyway; but it would mostly benefit them. They could protect and organize their files with ease while saving on hardware costs. Note that i'm comparing to Windows; i know you're running Ubuntu. But we were discussing the average user, not you directly.

As for Ubuntu: probably better already, but filesystems on Linux are not that great or stable either. Ext4 is unsafe as of yet, Btrfs not finished, ReiserFS is dead and the rest is either old or proprietary. Looking at it that way, there's not that much choice at all. So filesystems will likely see an evolution, and ZFS/Btrfs are the first of their kind, and they are still in development. And who knows, Microsoft may decide to implement a PROPER bootable software-RAID solution that frees Windows from the required hardware; but as this destroys market value, likely it won't happen.

 

[JeffBlair]

I'm running Gentoo Linux on my home server. I don't have a GUI hooked up at all on mine, I just telnet into it. Heck, I don't even have a monitor hooked up to it. As for zfs, you can get it for Linux. I'm not sure how easy it is on the other distro's, but for Gentoo it's nice and simple:
* net-zope/zfspath
Latest version available: 1.0.1
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 14 kB
Homepage: http://zope.org/Members/asterisk/ZFSPath/
Description: Zope product to allow access to the filesystem
License: GPL-2

* sys-fs/zfs-fuse
Latest version available: 0.6.9
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 1,351 kB
Homepage: http://zfs-fuse.net/
Description: An implementation of the ZFS filesystem for FUSE/Linux
License: CDDL

But, I'm not using that on mine. I've got 4 2T drives in a RAID5 via mdadm. I just upgraded to a new Core2Duo board from a dual Opteron board. Only down side is I had to get a PCI SATA card for my boot drive, but, no problem's at all on it. I have thought about putting Gnome on there with Wine so I can stream MP3's over the net a bit easer, I haven't had much luck doing it with built in Linux programs. But, I'm still trying.

Quick rundown on the CPU and drive info
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 493G 7.4G 460G 2% /
/dev/root 493G 7.4G 460G 2% /
rc-svcdir 1.0M 124K 900K 13% /lib/rc/init.d
udev 10M 280K 9.8M 3% /dev
shm 994M 0 994M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sde4 1.4T 139G 1.2T 11% /home
/dev/md0 5.5T 2.0T 3.6T 36% /mnt/storage

[ 5.680563] raid5: device sda1 operational as raid disk 0
[ 5.680566] raid5: device sdd1 operational as raid disk 3
[ 5.680568] raid5: device sdc1 operational as raid disk 2
[ 5.680570] raid5: device sdb1 operational as raid disk 1

 

[sub.mesa]

Since ZFS-Fuse is unstable, it is no candidate to store real data on:
1) it uses the experimental/unstable ZFS version 6 still
2) the ZFS FUSE layer may add (and does add) additional bugs and stability issues, as well as performance issues.

So you're probably right running md-raid5 with traditional filesystem for the moment.

 

[Bash]

Since ZFS-Fuse is unstable, it is no candidate to store real data on:
1) it uses the experimental/unstable ZFS version 6 still
2) the ZFS FUSE layer may add (and does add) additional bugs and stability issues, as well as performance issues.

So you're probably right running md-raid5 with traditional filesystem for the moment.

i'll bite.

The whole point of running Gentoo is to operate in a experimental/unstable environment.

 

[drescherjm]

I run Gentoo at home and at work. I manage dozens of Gentoo boxes. For me its about stability, upgrade path and the ability to control what gets installed and what version of what package gets installed.

And when I mention stability that does not necissarily mean I run the "stable" "amd64" platform. I have an extensive list of keywords that I use for a working system.

 

[xnoodle]

The first two iterations of my storage set up ran Slackware and then Ubuntu server. Gentoo was OK, except it's somewhat of a pain to keep track of USE flags.

 

[keenan]

The way i see it: Linux lacks an advanced filesystem; it has no real support for ZFS and Btrfs is still far away from being at the level where ZFS is now. And even though its GPL - it's still owned by Oracle.

Come on man, don't shit on the thread. I would use FreeBSD and ZFS, but online expansion is a show-stopping missing feature for me, and I'm stuck until its time to replace my drives with bigger ones (probably soon), even if it appears. Its support as a virtualization host is also rather poor compared to Linux.

 

[GushpinBob]

I <3 mdadm. You can even RAID floppies and usb sticks with that shit!

I remember having Slackware installed on a home server a couple years ago. The thing was so stable and low maintenance that I kept forgetting the commands whenever SSHing into it.

 

[ZodaEX]

I think most of the love for linux is being shown on the Linux Subforum.

 

[lizardking009]

My primary storage box and backup storage box are both running Fedora Linux exporting iSCSI with tgtd. The former is running Areca hardware RAID w/8 WD20EADS drives and the latter is using mdadm RAID w/6 (soon to be 8) Seagate 2tb LP drives. The mdadm RAID is actually faster, so the Areca will be going away soon.

 

[JeffBlair]

Gentoo has 2 general settings, a stable side, and an experimental one. You can set it up so some programs use the newest non-stable version. I've never had an issue with running the non-stable versions, but I might just be lucky.
As for the USE flags, once you get them setup, you almost never have to change them. Yes, it might take a bit up front, but once you get it done, it's done.
As for mdadm, yeah, online expansion is really nice, and since I don't have a monitor hooked up, I can close out my telnet session, and not worry about it stopping. That's another reason I'm using XFS file system, plus it's better for larger files, like movies.

But, like everything Linux, to each his own.