[SLE] Home made NAS with SUSE - filesystem questions - openSUSE Users

[SLE] Home made NAS with SUSE - filesystem questions

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Re: [SLE] Wireless Network () -...

HG

18 Jul 2006 18 Jul '06

13:30

Hi! I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat. Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also). I have two questions 1) How to set up the disk system? What I'm thinking is that as I have pairs of old PATA disks (not identical, but with the same size) I could set up multiple mirrored sets and then combine these with LVM to one large volume. This way, if I loose one of the old disks, I do not loose data. BUT the thing that I'm worried about is... with LVM I can add more disks to the volume later on. But if I loose one of the old disks from one of the mirrors, I would not buy the same kind of disk again - instead, I would have to remove the other part of the mirror too so that the data is moved to the remaining good mirrors. After a while, I would be replacing the PATA mirrors with SATA drives in RAID-5. (Maybe after two years) Is it possible - also in practice - to remove disks from LVM group so that the data is kept on the remaining disks? Does this depend on the file system? Which file system should I use? 2) How to set up SUSE for that kind of use - but this is a longer story and if you have some small hints, I'm interested, but otherwise, let's get back to this some other time. (I always, hope they would define more predefined package groups for installation time, like Desktop with KDE, laptop with KDE, server with minimal KDE...) Best option would be to install the system on some kind of flash drive so that the disks for the data can be stopped when not in use. -- HG. -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

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Dave Howorth

18 Jul 18 Jul

14:44

HG wrote:

...

Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

Even gigabit ethernet is WAY slower than local disks. You may find it a pain for video editing. It might be OK to store video there, copy it to a local disk while you edit it and then copy it back. But the bottom line is experience - I suggest you set up the gigabit link and run some tests with it first :) Cheers, Dave -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Jon Nelson

15:04

On Tue, 18 Jul 2006, Dave Howorth wrote:

...

HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

Even gigabit ethernet is WAY slower than local disks. You may find it a pain for video editing. It might be OK to store video there, copy it to a local disk while you edit it and then copy it back. But the bottom line is experience - I suggest you set up the gigabit link and run some tests with it first :)

Do you mean to say that gigabit ethernet has less bandwidth than local disks or that the latency of gig-e is higher? Unless you have some pretty beefy local disks, gig-e has rather more bandwidth than most local disks. As for latency, that's not something I can answer, but the track-to-track on most disks these days is something like 8 ms (right?), which my local network easily beats. What is the round-trip-time on something like NFS versus local disks? I'm not flat-out saying you are wrong, but I'd like you to qualify your statements and help me understand exactly what you are saying. As an example, in a situation involving fast ethernet (not gig-e) and some mid-grade machines (just shy of 1GHz and basic consumer-grade IDE disks) my local disks top out around 11.45 MB/s (hdparm -t), averaging 8.9 MB/s (dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=4k count=10000). Contrast that with a recent test I performed using ATA over Ethernet, where the disks were a raid5 on a similar machine but faster disks (about 20MB/s local read speed on the backing store for the ata-over-ethernet block device) - the exact same client was able to sustain 11MB/s and with less load, and not-very-good ethernet cards. By this quick test, and measuring "bandwidth", ata-over-ethernet was just as fast as, and sometimes faster than, my local disks. (Granted, not the best test components or the best test, but it serves to illustrate.) With gig-e one could easily exceed my local disk speed on a regular basis. Question: what might be the best way to calculate "latency" in a way that could be used to compare (for example) ATA-Over-Ethernet to a Local Disk (both are block devices to the client). -- Carpe diem - Seize the day. Carp in denim - There's a fish in my pants! Jon Nelson -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Greg Freemyer

16:03

On 7/18/06, Jon Nelson wrote:

...

On Tue, 18 Jul 2006, Dave Howorth wrote:

...
HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

Even gigabit ethernet is WAY slower than local disks. You may find it a pain for video editing. It might be OK to store video there, copy it to a local disk while you edit it and then copy it back. But the bottom line is experience - I suggest you set up the gigabit link and run some tests with it first :)

Do you mean to say that gigabit ethernet has less bandwidth than local disks or that the latency of gig-e is higher? Unless you have some pretty beefy local disks, gig-e has rather more bandwidth than most local disks. As for latency, that's not something I can answer, but the track-to-track on most disks these days is something like 8 ms (right?), which my local network easily beats. What is the round-trip-time on something like NFS versus local disks?

I'm not flat-out saying you are wrong, but I'd like you to qualify your statements and help me understand exactly what you are saying.

As an example, in a situation involving fast ethernet (not gig-e) and some mid-grade machines (just shy of 1GHz and basic consumer-grade IDE disks) my local disks top out around 11.45 MB/s (hdparm -t), averaging 8.9 MB/s (dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=4k count=10000). Contrast that with a recent test I performed using ATA over Ethernet, where the disks were a raid5 on a similar machine but faster disks (about 20MB/s local read speed on the backing store for the ata-over-ethernet block device) - the exact same client was able to sustain 11MB/s and with less load, and not-very-good ethernet cards. By this quick test, and measuring "bandwidth", ata-over-ethernet was just as fast as, and sometimes faster than, my local disks. (Granted, not the best test components or the best test, but it serves to illustrate.) With gig-e one could easily exceed my local disk speed on a regular basis.

Question: what might be the best way to calculate "latency" in a way that could be used to compare (for example) ATA-Over-Ethernet to a Local Disk (both are block devices to the client).

-- Carpe diem - Seize the day. Carp in denim - There's a fish in my pants!

Jon Nelson

Jon, Your local speeds seem slow (i.e. unoptimized). I spent a lot of time a few years ago doing speed tests and getting good disk controllers in my machines. With those optimized machines I see very good dd speeds with the command dd if=/dev/hde of=/dev/hdg bs=4k conv=noerror,sync IIRC, the speeds I see are generally like: 1 GB/min if the source is a laptop drive 2 - 2.5 GB/min if the source is an standard non ATA-133 drive 3 GB/min with a ATA-133 source/dest 4 GB/min with SATA-150 drives I have not yet tested SATA-300 drives. All of the above are for simple drives, not high-speed raid10 setups. Your 11 MB/sec is only .6GB/min. If you care about performance you need to get that faster, especially in your NAS. One thing I have learned is to not use the MB IDE controller for anything performance related. A $50 PCI controller will be a lot faster. I get one with 2 IDE connectors and only use the Master drive. ie. one drive on each ide cable. Back to the OP's issues: Gig-e should be 50-75% of 100MB/sec = 50-75% of 6GB/min. As you say that should be fast enough to make remote access as fast as local. Not sure about the NFS etc. overhead. Note that in a high-speed data center environment where they are running large RAID 10 arrays, gig-e will not keep up. That is why they spend the money for 4 gb/sec fibre-channel, etc.. Also, if your going to be handling large video files think about using XFS for your data partitions. It was specifically designed to work extremely fast with large files. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Jon Nelson

16:16

On Tue, 18 Jul 2006, Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

On 7/18/06, Jon Nelson wrote:

...

...
As an example, in a situation involving fast ethernet (not gig-e) and some mid-grade machines (just shy of 1GHz and basic consumer-grade IDE disks) my local disks top out around 11.45 MB/s (hdparm -t), averaging 8.9 MB/s (dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=4k count=10000). Contrast that with a recent test I performed using ATA over Ethernet, where the disks were a raid5 on a similar machine but faster disks (about 20MB/s local read speed on the backing store for the ata-over-ethernet block device) - the exact same client was able to sustain 11MB/s and with less load, and not-very-good ethernet cards. By this quick test, and measuring "bandwidth", ata-over-ethernet was just as fast as, and sometimes faster than, my local disks. (Granted, not the best test components or the best test, but it serves to illustrate.) With gig-e one could easily exceed my local disk speed on a regular basis.

Question: what might be the best way to calculate "latency" in a way that could be used to compare (for example) ATA-Over-Ethernet to a Local Disk (both are block devices to the client).

Jon,

Your local speeds seem slow (i.e. unoptimized). I spent a lot of time a few years ago doing speed tests and getting good disk controllers in my machines.

Like I said, these are old drives and not very fast machines. A Duron 750 with 2 3.2G (5400rpm, 6 years old) drives in it does not qualify as "fast". Both drives are old enough that they don't support SMART and smartctl (even with the hoop-jumping options turned on) can't tell me much about them. -- Carpe diem - Seize the day. Carp in denim - There's a fish in my pants! Jon Nelson -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

HG

18:52

Hi! On 7/18/06, Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

Also, if your going to be handling large video files think about using XFS for your data partitions. It was specifically designed to work extremely fast with large files.

I was thinking about XFS, but I read that it does not handle sudden power losses - I do not have a UPS (maybe, I'll have one in some distance future...) -- HG. -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Basil Chupin

15:10

Dave Howorth wrote:

...

HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

Even gigabit ethernet is WAY slower than local disks. You may find it a pain for video editing. It might be OK to store video there, copy it to a local disk while you edit it and then copy it back. But the bottom line is experience - I suggest you set up the gigabit link and run some tests with it first :)

Cheers, Dave

I haven't seen the original posting so this response is to HG. Forget about using the gigabit ethernet way of transferring video files let alone trying to do editing of video over such a link. Just transferring a small ~4GB mpeg file will take about 45 minutes (from memory, so don't quote me :-) ) and this using HDs with 16MB caches on both computers at the end of the gigabit connection. After falling asleep while one such transfer was taking place I gave the whole idea away and now only work on the one computer :-) . (I have a tv card on each computer and it is not realistic to watch anything sent from one machine to the other over this link unless you enjoy looking at garbage on your monitor :-) .) Cheers. -- "It is well known that among the blind, the one-eyed man is king". Desiderius Erasmus -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Jon Nelson

15:17

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Basil Chupin wrote:

...

Dave Howorth wrote:

...
HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

Even gigabit ethernet is WAY slower than local disks. You may find it a pain for video editing. It might be OK to store video there, copy it to a local disk while you edit it and then copy it back. But the bottom line is experience - I suggest you set up the gigabit link and run some tests with it first :)

Cheers, Dave

I haven't seen the original posting so this response is to HG.

Forget about using the gigabit ethernet way of transferring video files let alone trying to do editing of video over such a link. Just transferring a small ~4GB mpeg file will take about 45 minutes (from memory, so don't quote me :-) ) and this using HDs with 16MB caches on both computers at the end of the gigabit connection. After falling asleep while one such transfer was taking place I gave the whole idea away and now only work on the one computer :-) .

Let's see. 4GB. 4GB = 4096 MB. At 50MB/s that is 82 seconds. At 1/2 of gig-e's (more like 62.5% of to be conservative) speed. At (say) 75 MB/s a 4GB transfer would take under a minute. That's *way* faster than any local disk I've ever had. If it is taking that long to transfer the data you have something wrong with your network or the disks are too slow. If the disks are too slow than complaining about the network doesn't help.

...

(I have a tv card on each computer and it is not realistic to watch anything sent from one machine to the other over this link unless you enjoy looking at garbage on your monitor :-) .)

Again, something has to be wrong with your setup. Even fast ethernet is more than capable of handling even HDTV-sized video streams. Lots and lots of people use fast ethernet (not even gig-e) for their myth boxes and freevo boxes, etc... -- Carpe diem - Seize the day. Carp in denim - There's a fish in my pants! Jon Nelson -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Basil Chupin

19 Jul 19 Jul

07:38

Jon Nelson wrote:

...

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Basil Chupin wrote:

...
Dave Howorth wrote:

...
HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also). Even gigabit ethernet is WAY slower than local disks. You may find it a pain for video editing. It might be OK to store video there, copy it to a local disk while you edit it and then copy it back. But the bottom line is experience - I suggest you set up the gigabit link and run some tests with it first :)

Cheers, Dave I haven't seen the original posting so this response is to HG.

Forget about using the gigabit ethernet way of transferring video files let alone trying to do editing of video over such a link. Just transferring a small ~4GB mpeg file will take about 45 minutes (from memory, so don't quote me :-) ) and this using HDs with 16MB caches on both computers at the end of the gigabit connection. After falling asleep while one such transfer was taking place I gave the whole idea away and now only work on the one computer :-) .

Let's see. 4GB. 4GB = 4096 MB. At 50MB/s that is 82 seconds. At 1/2 of gig-e's (more like 62.5% of to be conservative) speed. At (say) 75 MB/s a 4GB transfer would take under a minute. That's *way* faster than any local disk I've ever had.

I, too, did the sums and couldn't understand why it was taking so long to transfer the data. Last night, it took 90 (+/- 0.6) seconds timed on a stopwatch to transfer 4,55,728,568 bytes from one HD to the other in Windows and it took, surprisingly, 118 seconds for SuSE 10.1 to do the same but, nevertheless, it certainly wasn't the ~45 minutes between the machines on the gigabit ethernet connection I mentioned.

...

If it is taking that long to transfer the data you have something wrong with your network or the disks are too slow. If the disks are too slow than complaining about the network doesn't help.

Certainly sounds like there is something not quite right with the setup but as I no longer bother to transfer data between the computers using this method I am not worried about it. I mentioned my experience in response to the Q from HG to alert him to the potential problems of trying to do what he is trying to do over a gigabit connection. His mileage of course may vary so it is up to him to try it all out. [rest pruned] Cheers. -- "It is well known that among the blind, the one-eyed man is king". Desiderius Erasmus -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Sandy Drobic

18 Jul 18 Jul

15:23

Basil Chupin wrote:

...

Dave Howorth wrote:

...
HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

Even gigabit ethernet is WAY slower than local disks. You may find it a pain for video editing. It might be OK to store video there, copy it to a local disk while you edit it and then copy it back. But the bottom line is experience - I suggest you set up the gigabit link and run some tests with it first :)

Cheers, Dave

I haven't seen the original posting so this response is to HG.

Forget about using the gigabit ethernet way of transferring video files let alone trying to do editing of video over such a link. Just transferring a small ~4GB mpeg file will take about 45 minutes (from memory, so don't quote me :-) ) and this using HDs with 16MB caches on both computers at the end of the gigabit connection. After falling asleep while one such transfer was taking place I gave the whole idea away and now only work on the one computer :-) .

Your system ist probably not set up to truly utilize GBit throughput. If you really want to use transfer rate of a GBit connection to the limit you must have a matching system. Use an onboard nic not connected to the pci bus or a dedicated pci express nic and as a storage system something like a good pci express hardware raid with bbu and several disks in raid 0. This is definitely not cheap but it will ensure that you have a sustained transfer rate of about 100 MB/s. Currently I only have one system with that kind of power, so I can't test it. Even if I would just set another GBit nic in another computer, the second system just can't match the first. :-(( Sandy -- List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply2 (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Joseph Loo

19 Jul 19 Jul

00:57

Basil Chupin wrote:

...

Dave Howorth wrote:

...
HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

Even gigabit ethernet is WAY slower than local disks. You may find it a pain for video editing. It might be OK to store video there, copy it to a local disk while you edit it and then copy it back. But the bottom line is experience - I suggest you set up the gigabit link and run some tests with it first :)

Cheers, Dave

I haven't seen the original posting so this response is to HG.

Forget about using the gigabit ethernet way of transferring video files let alone trying to do editing of video over such a link. Just transferring a small ~4GB mpeg file will take about 45 minutes (from memory, so don't quote me :-) ) and this using HDs with 16MB caches on both computers at the end of the gigabit connection. After falling asleep while one such transfer was taking place I gave the whole idea away and now only work on the one computer :-) .

(I have a tv card on each computer and it is not realistic to watch anything sent from one machine to the other over this link unless you enjoy looking at garbage on your monitor :-) .)

Cheers.

I do not know how yur system is configured, but I use an nfs mount on one of my slower computer. It is able to transfer about 3.2 Gbytes in 10 minutes. This works out to be about 5.4 MB/sec. I have 100 mbit ethernet and a pretty slow machine to boot. I genrally find that my drives can sustain about 25-35 Mbytes / sec rransfer rate. They are SATA about 250 MB. -- Joseph Loo jloo@acm.org -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

suse_gasjr4wd＠mac.com

18 Jul 18 Jul

16:02

On Jul 18, 2006, at 9:30 AM, HG wrote:

...

Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

I think what you need to look at is freenas. http://www.freenas.org/ we have one running. runs very nice. You configure it with a web browser. Simple as it can get. Honest! as for as doing Video with it... can't say on that. we don't do video. Thanks, George -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

HG

18:50

Hi! On 7/18/06, suse_gasjr4wd@mac.com wrote:

...

On Jul 18, 2006, at 9:30 AM, HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

I think what you need to look at is freenas. http://www.freenas.org/

we have one running. runs very nice. You configure it with a web browser. Simple as it can get. Honest!

I believe... but I do wish to do other things with it also now and then. Freenas seems great but a little limited.

...

as for as doing Video with it... can't say on that. we don't do video.

I should not have mentioned video... I wish people could actually answer my questiong and not argue about transferring the video.... -- HG. -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Basil Chupin

19 Jul 19 Jul

07:47

HG wrote:

...

Hi!

On 7/18/06, suse_gasjr4wd@mac.com wrote:

...
On Jul 18, 2006, at 9:30 AM, HG wrote:

...
Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

I think what you need to look at is freenas. http://www.freenas.org/

we have one running. runs very nice. You configure it with a web browser. Simple as it can get. Honest!

I believe... but I do wish to do other things with it also now and then. Freenas seems great but a little limited.

...
as for as doing Video with it... can't say on that. we don't do video.

I should not have mentioned video... I wish people could actually answer my questiong and not argue about transferring the video....

I must be missing the point here, but you did say that you wanted to "do video editing over it also" and how are you going to do this without transferring over the link the images you are editing? If you are sitting in front of the monitor of one computer and try editing the file on the other computer the images/file must be sent to you in the process from the other computer, no? Cheers. -- "It is well known that among the blind, the one-eyed man is king". Desiderius Erasmus -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

HG

15:39

Hi! On 7/19/06, Basil Chupin wrote:

...

HG wrote:

...
...
...
gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

...

I must be missing the point here, but you did say that you wanted to "do video editing over it also" and how are you going to do this without

Yes, I said. But please, can we drop that. I'm currently doing it from Firewire disk, and I have definitely not done any tests, but somewhow I think gigabit ethernet should be able to rival 400Mb/s firewire. But if that doesn't work, then I'll edit small parts at a time, but I'll still be storing all the stuff on the server. And that's to point, how to build a server to hold all the stuff (videos, photographs, everything) that I have. -- HG. -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

j

18 Jul 18 Jul

18:52

On Tuesday 18 July 2006 9:30 am, HG wrote:

...

Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

No idea whether or not this would be suitable for video editing. Assuming you already possess the hardware in question, it's only going to cost you the time it takes to set it up and test it to find out if it works well enough for your purposes.

...

I have two questions 1) How to set up the disk system? What I'm thinking is that as I have pairs of old PATA disks (not identical, but with the same size) I could set up multiple mirrored sets and then combine these with LVM to one large volume. This way, if I loose one of the old disks, I do not loose data. BUT the thing that I'm worried about is... with LVM I can add more disks to the volume later on. But if I loose one of the old disks from one of the mirrors, I would not buy the same kind of disk again - instead, I would have to remove the other part of the mirror too so that the data is moved to the remaining good mirrors. After a while, I would be replacing the PATA mirrors with SATA drives in RAID-5. (Maybe after two years)

Check out www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/04/27/managing-disk-space-with-lvm.html for an example of how to move things around in LVM.

...

Is it possible - also in practice - to remove disks from LVM group so that the data is kept on the remaining disks?

Yep. in a nutshell, you'll use pvmove to evacuate the data off of the disk in question, then vgreduce it out of your volume group.

...

Does this depend on the file system? Which file system should I use?

1st part - No. Both MD and LVM2 sit below the filesystem and neither are filesystem-aware. 2nd part - Choose the filesystem that makes the most sense for you. XFS and JFS can both be safely grown online, which is nice. From a "least likely to self-destruct after a power failure" perspective, I've had the best luck with ext3. ext3 can also be grown online with the ext2online program, but be really really careful. If you try to grow it to where it needs a larger block size, it's possible for Bad Things(tm) to happen. Some people swear by reiserfs. After losing several entire filesystems, I won't trust it. Your call.

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2) How to set up SUSE for that kind of use - but this is a longer story and if you have some small hints, I'm interested, but otherwise, let's get back to this some other time. (I always, hope they would define more predefined package groups for installation time, like Desktop with KDE, laptop with KDE, server with minimal KDE...) Best option would be to install the system on some kind of flash drive so that the disks for the data can be stopped when not in use.

-- HG.

-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

HG

19 Jul 19 Jul

15:33

Hi! On 7/18/06, j wrote:

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No idea whether or not this would be suitable for video editing. Assuming you

I should not have mentioned the video...

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already possess the hardware in question, it's only going to cost you the time it takes to set it up and test it to find out if it works well enough for your purposes.

I do not have all the components yet (I do have two candidates for the PC though, one with single PIII about 733MHz and another with dual PIII 800MHz). Regardless of whether the video editing can be possible over this (I currently use Firewire disk), I'm still going to build this. So in time, I will test this.

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I have two questions 1) How to set up the disk system? What I'm thinking is that as I have

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Check out www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/04/27/managing-disk-space-with-lvm.html for an example of how to move things around in LVM.

This was excellent. I sort of knew all that, but I had only studied what SUSE offers through YaST. Thanks for the pointer.

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Is it possible - also in practice - to remove disks from LVM group so that the data is kept on the remaining disks?

Yep. in a nutshell, you'll use pvmove to evacuate the data off of the disk in question, then vgreduce it out of your volume group.

Thanks, so I'll go ahead with the plan of having mirrored disks combined with LVM. Later on, I think I'll change to RAID-5 with SATA-disks, but that's in a couple of years.

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Does this depend on the file system? Which file system should I use?

1st part - No. Both MD and LVM2 sit below the filesystem and neither are filesystem-aware. 2nd part - Choose the filesystem that makes the most sense for you. XFS and JFS can both be safely grown online, which is nice. From a "least likely to self-destruct after a power failure" perspective, I've had the best luck with ext3. ext3 can also be grown online with the ext2online program, but be really really careful. If you try to grow it to where it needs a larger block size, it's possible for Bad Things(tm) to happen. Some

I do not know about JFS, I will have to check that out. I've had some experience with XFS at work. Even without any sudden powerlosses and somekind of battery backup on the RAID-controller, I've seen corrupted files (filled with garbage or null). So, I'm hoping to find something else. Ext3 might be good, but I do now like it - even though I can not really say why :-)

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people swear by reiserfs. After losing several entire filesystems, I won't trust it. Your call.

I've used reiserfs on my desktops since SuSE 9.1. I've not had any problems, but then again, that doesn't mean that in the case of a problem, reiser could screw up badly... -- HG. -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

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Basil Chupin
Dave Howorth
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