I finally bought a NAS. The chirpy little Thecus N299 (Those marketing guys earnt their money the day they thought that name up) now hums away to itself under my stairs. I loaded it with 2x500GB Seagate disks and then unloaded them and shipped them back to Scan as they were duff. I now have 2x500GB Hitachi disks in it I bought from PC World. (It cost me an extra £5 but I don’t care as this time they got home safely.)
It has a rudimentary web GUI but is perfectly functional. I currently have it as a CIFS server called “Imp” on my home network. All our “Documents” and “Pictures” and similar shell folders now live on it. I had to build batch files for everyone’s login to connect to it with no persistence otherwise Vista moans at every logon. Files can also be accessed using the “webdisk” interface but it is not iphone friendly. So I have defaulted to the FTP variant for now.
It also supports NFS so I will finally fire-up that rack server I have been quietening down and give VMWare a shot at home.
I have also moved the Mercury mail queues and mail folders over to it along wth Windows Mail folders. IMAP mail has proved to be less friendly than I would like with trouble creating subfolders in RoundCube or WindowsMail. Shame really as I would prefer to just leave all hte mail on Mercury and read it from RoundCube. Future job now though.
My masterplan (mwhahaha) is to build a simple php front-end for mail and ftp. Ideally I want FTP to stay on the LAN and use a PHP interface to wrap around it. That way I can control the authentication and don’t have to expose any (as yet unseen) potential flaws with the ftp daemon.
By also loading my website data and (as stated above) Mercury folders on it, the active data on the web/mail server (Pixie) has reduced which helps in times of failure/recovery/upgrade and reduces the replication burden I had previously with the two server model. I’m not quite brave enough to move MySQL onto the NAS as the web server talks to the NAS over wireless and I don’t really know hoe IO intensive my websites are. Another future job. In the meantime, I’ll amend the backup/export scripts to dump to the NAS.
The Thecus also has an iTunes server. I moved all our music to it but am yet to use that feature. I told both Julie’s iTunes and then mine of the shift to a new location and iTune dutifully cloned a load of the music. Bugger. Capacity is not a problem currently but I need to put some time aside to trash my iTunes, delete the duplicates and rebuild it again. Thanks iTunes.
But in short, I am happy with the little fella. It just works. My files are available to my laptop, my server is not a worry so much for me now and my data is generally much safer. I will be investing in some more cat5e so that I can move him to live in the porch. It is north facing, so much cooler than the study and his little fan will go uheard there. It also puts him further away from the desktop and both less likely to get engulfed in a fire as well as more likely to be recoverable. It will need anchoring for security but will live in the corner away from sight anyway.
I actually bought a third Hitachi to sit in my USB caddy where a suitable desktop script pulls incremental data changes over to it when I remember to run it. The Thecus is RAID1 so hardware failure is covered well but the USB disk gives me a sense of reassurance. Especially when I go away for any period of time as it lives in my sister-in-law’s house away from the NAS.
So next job is to tell Apache to read the website data from imp directly. iTunes needs a cull and then it is time to play with NFS….
