Building NAS - software

nas  linux 

Operating system

I think my NAS box build is no longer in much flux, so I thought it’d be nice to describe it. I had some disks laying around, I had them installed and started playing with the software setup.

Disk /dev/sda:  60.0 GB,  60022480896 bytes
Disk /dev/sdb: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
Disk /dev/sdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
Disk /dev/sdd: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
Disk /dev/sde: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes

First one is an SSD drive, I used it for OS installation.  I went for Crunchbang as I was already familiar with it, however now I’m thinking of just getting newest Debian there, as it’s finally released. Nothing fancy about the OS, a regular install really.

storage# df -h
Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs                        53G  2.4G   48G   5% /
/dev/sda1                    461M   31M  407M   7% /boot

As you can see / filesystem takes little amount of space, hence the next thing I plan on doing is actually move / to USB3.0 pendrive and then free the SATA drive from it’s current duties. I’m reluctant to do so right now, as moving swap to pendrive might result in significant wear. I’m thinking of getting more RAM and then getting rid of the swap at all. These stats were acquired after reboot, there are some loads under which I saw swapping occur.

storage# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers
Mem:          1636        282       1354          0         53
-/+ buffers/cache:        166       1470
Swap:         1903          0       1903

Software + configuration

NAS means SAMBA, right ? That’s what I thougth. RAID5 + SAMBA for Win clients and NFS for others. After a while I got accustomed to this setup and started playing with my photo collection as it was laying on NAS. The problem ? I deleted one photo and wanted it back. It was nowhere to be found. RAID5, although having internal copies for resiliency, was visible as one drive only and happily deleted the data when asked to. What I really needed was a backup solution, not a NAS. My final answer to that:

storage# df -h
Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs                        53G  2.4G   48G   5% /
/dev/md0                     294G   36G  243G  13% /mnt/array_back
/dev/sde1                    459G   35G  401G   8% /mnt/array_front

storage# cat /etc/fstab
#
/dev/mapper/vg_storage-root                /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
UUID=b9d32208-edc0-4981-ab74-5da1e7348a1a  /boot           ext4    defaults          0       2
/dev/mapper/vg_storage-swap                none            swap    sw                0       0

/dev/md0                                  /mnt/array_back  ext4    defaults          0       2
/dev/sde1                                 /mnt/array_front ext4    defaults          0       2

storage# mdadm --detail /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
        Version : 1.2
    Creation Time : Sun Apr 21 22:47:38 2013
        Raid Level : raid5
        Array Size : 312318976 (297.85 GiB 319.81 GB)
    Used Dev Size : 156159488 (148.93 GiB 159.91 GB)

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
        0       8       17        0      active sync   /dev/sdb1
        1       8       33        1      active sync   /dev/sdc1
        3       8       49        2      active sync   /dev/sdd1

One disk [sde] serves as a front for all user operations. After a while, all changes except for deletions are being flushed onto [array_back] which is a RAID5 matrix.

storage# cat /etc/cron.daily/90_sync_front_to_back
#!/bin/bash
rsync -avr /mnt/array_front/ /mnt/array_back/back

Secret sauce

ownCloud. [array_front] is not directly exposed via SAMBA or NFS, it’s governed by ownCloud instance, and then only ownCloud sync client on the computer or phone gets to mess with the data. By having such setup I get 3 copies of each file. One on device, one on the front array and one on the back array. What is also cool about ownCloud is that it also handles contacts and calendar storage for me. One more step towards getting all my data off google ! Points for improvement:

  • [array_front] is not an array now. It’s just a disk. Make it an proper disk array.
  • encrypt the data from array_back and send it to S3 and then let it graduate to Glacier
nas  linux 

See also