File Service and Storage for the Common Man

We're steadily moving our lives onto our computers. It's been happening for a while, now, and the trend will only accelerate. There's no stopping it. And with that move comes the problem of data loss and what to do about backups.

I spoke with Peter on the show, a few weeks ago, about Sony's newest home appliance at the time; a server/storage box. Such things are going to be more and more common and the $5000 Sony wants for theirs will come down dramatically, soon. We need such devices. The woman or man with huge stores of media files, personal files and like that simply cannot do a backup onto DVD (much less CDs) in any reasonable amount of time. Expense would prohibit the frequent backups that would be needed, too. If you have a terrabyte of data (not uncommon, these days) you'd need an awful lot of blank DVDs and time to accomplish it.

The solution is a file server with duplicate copies of every file stored on a different physical drive. A RAID array. (RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) With such an array, if one drive fails, it can be replaced and the affected data copied over from the duplicate files on it's opposite in the array. Such devices are widely used in enterprises and consumer units are coming soon at affordable prices. You won't avoid backups all together, but you can do them much less frequently with a setup like this on hand.

Of course, if you wish to "geek out" a little bit, you can have such a machine for almost no money beyond the price of the disk drives. You don't need the type of machine which is sold as a "server". You only need an old PC and some new, reliable hard drives. With the low price of hard drives, these days, it won't cost too much. Linux is the operating system of choice for this, though Windows and the various BSD distribution could be used. If you're serving Windows machines from Linux or the BSDs, you'll need Samba installed, too. All that will take up quite a bit less than 100 Megabytes of your space. Let's say you install an array of 4 250 Gigabyte drives. That will run you less than $400, if you shop carefully and wait for sales. $550 at the worst, if you don't.

You may already have the old PC lying around. If not, you can get one easily enough. Anything more than a 486 will do, though frankly something with a little more processor and a bus speed of 100 MHz or more will help. Even so, the requirements and price are low. With a KVM switch or using remote administration software like WebMin, you don't need a monitor, keyboard or mouse attached at all. There are software packages especially for the purpose, as this email I received after one show demonstrates. It's from E.J. Steinhilber;

"hi jack
on the feb 20 show ... you and peter were talking about running a simple server in the home ... i have been using NASLite ( http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php ) for about a month now and all seems to be working fine ... Naslite boots from a 3 1/2 floppy or cd ... you can use an old machine and put in up to four any size hard drives ... i am using a 120 pentium with 64M of ram and two 250G hard drives ... i was just wondering if you heard about this and would tell us what you think

enjoy the show every week on the mp3 player ... not able to listen live
--ej"

Thanks, E.J. And since you brought it to my attention, I've tested it just a little on a PII 233 that used to be my bedside machine. With four small drives, it worked extraordinarily well and was easy enough to set up that I think anyone willing to read some can do it. Any reasonably accomplished user willing to read the documents, that is. You don't have to be a geek to come off like one, in this case. I need to point out that NasLite is for sale. Though it contains elements of free software, it is not freeware. The prices are low and I think the product is worth the cost. If that doesn't suit you, it is quite possible to do this without cost.

Previously, I had always used a network install version of Debian GNU/Linux. The download is small, about 35 MB (you can even do it via a set of 20 floppy disks) and the rest of the installation can be done using apt-get, the Debian package management system. On top of the base installation, I put Samba and a firewall, setting it to only allow access from a few, trusted, addresses. File system utilities, of course, and a few networking monitoring tools, too. I chose different sorts of remote access software, often relying on plain old telnet. WebMin would be better and there might be something better than that. I hadn't explored this idea too closely, yet. I favor installing things to the hard drive, rather than using a fragile floppy or a cdrom. Suit yourself in this.

If you need to use more than 4 drives via a PCI IDE disk controller card, it might be wise to use more of a base PC as these cards need a lot of cpu to work at anything like their rated data transfer speed. Even a 500 MHz PII or K6 would strain if one of those cards was installed. Trust me; I've tried it. But that still allows over 500 GB of storage on a regular old PC, with duplicates of every file. On a machine that most folks would give away! More than one of those cards will require even more horsepower, of course, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. You could even just take the old PC and set it up without the drive array, just to see how it goes. Then if you like what you see and have convinced yourself you can do this, go out and get the hard drives.

If you give this a shot, drop into the #icug chat on our server (chat.oncomputers.info) and tell us how it is going. The same goes if you have a problem. We'll do our best to help you get going. As always, you can email me at jack@oncomputers.info.

Jack