Rebuild my SktA into a silient-ish NAS challenge

[StevenRaith]

Ey up my little chums.

following on from a discussion in the CPU forum about Socket A CPUs, I have an Athlon XP 2400 box that I would like to rebuild as a NAS box.

Plan would be to put it into a small chassis, with a silent-ish power supply, fans and case, and leave it on 24/7 as a NAS/Web/FTP/media server etc.

The software side I can manage meself - Openfiler most likely, or possibly Debian or Solaris if I fancy utilising ZFS.

The mobo is an A7N8X Deluxe, so thats AGP. Curently has a full hieght X1650 Po in it. Would need an eSATA card and an eSATA cage capable of holding 4x3.5" HDDs fo a nice RAID/ZFS array. Don't worry about HDDs just now, I have 4x160gb disks kicking about to test any setup with.

can the happy OCUK crew suggest me a hardware spec for this? Budget should be as low as possible ideally. I realise that OCUK might not have all the parts required - IE an external eSATA cage, as opposed to a prebuilt NAS box with eSATA on it, etc - so anything offsite simply suggest me wha to google and what price range to expect.

Having the old Athlon box sitting there doing nowt is annoying me, but it's too damned loud and hot to leave on 24/7 as it is.

Current PSU is about 400W as I recall so shouldn't need more than that.

Any suggestions gratefully recieved.

 

[Plec]

I have a similar mobo/cpu/card combo up in the loft somewhere destined, until now, for me to find it in 10 years time and think 'Why do i hoard all this crap!?'.

However, your post has made me reconsider the above and, if you don't mind, I would like to follow your progress and, perhaps, ask stupid questions along the way as this seems like a great use for a lot of the old hardware i have lying around?

With the above in mind, and making a big assumption, - do you know of any sites that have any guides/tutorials to setting up a 'Network-attached storage' rig and the software you mentioned? (The hardware side of things I have covered – it’s the software and configuring that is the bit that may confuse me.) I would rather read up on it thoroughly and ask pertinent questions along the way. I would primarily want to use mine as a storage and backup device – networked to 3, maybe 4, computers. (i have very limited networking skills.)

I do have one quick stupid question, however, i use Windows 7/XP Pro and have a spare copy of XP Pro – I’m guessing that this is more than suitable for my purposes but does the open source software, you mentioned, have any advantages? i.e. can they be pared down so that the install is solely geared towards running a NAS machine, so that it’s not held back by needless addons?

Apologies for the, semi-irrelevant, reply as it’s clearly not the intended purpose of your thread – but any pearls of wisdom tossed my way would be appreciated.

Plec

 

[StevenRaith]

Not irelevant at all.

Openfiler is a bare metal Linux appliance - you install it, and admin it through a web interface. it allows you to set up iSCSI, NFS and CIFS network drives. Completely free, works a treat, and iSCSI over 100+Mb LAN rocks for VMware goodness. Also lets you, say, map an iSCSI drive to a Windows box and have Windows think it's a real physicial drive - it treats it as a SCSI LUN so you get block level access, just like a real drive.

Openfiler is infinitely better than XP Pro for file sharing. Get the ISO and set it up as a VM on an existing box to get an idea of how it works first though, the web interface is pretty good but it can be a bit confusing. There's a forum for it though, which isn't too bad.

I use it at work to run a test NAS box with four 80gb drives in it -software RAID'd them in Openfiler, then set up a couple of iSCSI drives for the VMs. Works a treat, even on 100Mb LAN.

http://www.openfiler.com/ for info and downloads.

Solais is a bit more of a pain in the arse, and I have been meaning to experiment more with it, especially the ZFS side of it. ZFS is like software RAID in it's functionality, but it's kernel level so a bit quicker AFAIK, and it has a number of advantages over a boggo RAID card, such as real time snapshotting, cloning, redundancy etc.

This blog: http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

Is seriously comprehensive and starts from scratch, and has performance stats in there as well IIRC [can't be arsed going through it all again ] and is my general reference should I start playing with ZFS again. Should give you an idea of what to expect with the Sun kit.

As I say, my issue is the hardware setup - making something small, very quiet and power efficient. You need the software. We are both doing the same thing, from different approaches.

So then, I have provided some software info, who's going to be first to point me in the direction of some good hardware to house my kit?

 

[Plec]

Thanks for the informed and comprehensive reply, Steven, it’s much appreciated – and, fortunately for me, it is clearly your field of expertise.

Openfiler sounds ideal for my needs and i especially like its simplicity in emulating itself as a physical drive to windows. Once I’ve read some guides/forums I’ll download it and try setting it up as a VM as you recommended - thanks for the tip.

*cough* anyone? *cough*

So then, I have provided some software info, who's going to be first to point me in the direction of some good hardware to house my kit?

 

[StevenRaith]

Right, stuff the conversion, I have just ordered this:

AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 940 Black Edition 3.0GHz (Socket AM2+) - Retail £115.64 1 £115.64
Asus T3-M3N8200 Barebones System - AMD64 (Socket AM2+) £109.99 1 £109.99
Seagate Momentus 7200.4 320GB 7200RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST9320423AS) £43.47 1 £43.47
OCZ Platinum Series 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel (OCZ2P10664GK) £43.47 2 £86.94
Fansis PC Anti-Vibration Kit £6.08 1 £6.08
Akasa Hard Drive Dampener 3.5" - 5.25" Conversion (AK-HD-03) £6.08 1 £6.08

For delivery tomorrow [hopefully - literally ordered it just before five pm].

The plan is to make a small VM server, either using ESXi or Debian/Ubuntu+Virtualbox, depending on which has better compatability.

The next step, once this is built, is to get a DAS eSATA cage. I'll feed some of this to an OpenFiler VM and use that to host my music/videos, etc, with other VMs for Windows Server, playing with BSD etc.

I'll post up some build pics [I shall be building it on my bed, as per tradition started with my last PC, arf] and see how it goes.

I'm sure Plec, if no-one else, will appreciate that

 

[LordSplodge]

FreeNAS is easier to setup than OpenFiler and supports such goodies as SAMBA, NFS, iSCSI, iTunes (DAAP) server and more.

http://www.freenas.org/

Available as a Virtual Machine if you want to try it without having to nuke your Windows XP install.

 

[OrphanBoy]

I too would like to know how to do this...but the power consumption of some of these old parts bothers me - eg I've got a spare P4 kicking around but it takes a fair amount of juice and has to be actively cooled. It'd be cool (no pun intended) to make use of this older stuff but an Atom mini-ITX would be more suited to my needs...yet would cost at least £100!

 

[Plec]

AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 940 Black Edition 3.0GHz (Socket AM2+) - Retail £115.64 1 £115.64
Asus T3-M3N8200 Barebones System - AMD64 (Socket AM2+) £109.99 1 £109.99
Seagate Momentus 7200.4 320GB 7200RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST9320423AS) £43.47 1 £43.47
OCZ Platinum Series 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel (OCZ2P10664GK) £43.47 2 £86.94
Fansis PC Anti-Vibration Kit £6.08 1 £6.08
Akasa Hard Drive Dampener 3.5" - 5.25" Conversion (AK-HD-03) £6.08 1 £6.08

Ok, what happened to the budget, budget? (does that make sense without hearing the inflection?)

What happened to building a scrappy NAS system with left over Socket A parts? I’m here surrounded by 5 year+ parts and you’re soon to be sat there surrounded by spangly new cutting edge parts.

Aaaaaanyway, despite your lack of commitment to the ‘build a NAS out of redundant and crappy components’ I’m still very keen to see your results – especially regarding the software as I haven’t had time to have a play yet. (I’ve still yet to install Ubuntu – I’m still playing with the live disk which is very funky – thanks again JonJ.)

A build log/pics sounds great – and I appreciate you keeping me updated with your progress, thanks.

 

[StevenRaith]

To be honest, I need to do something with the AXP box, but a NAS isn't it - it's too noisy and hot [ie inefficient] for it to be left on 24/7.

I'm going to find something for it to do, though - even if it's just holding eight hard drives and taking an eSATA RAID adapter so I can use it as a DAS chassis, with careful PSU modding [possibly get a more efficient one] and some good sound insulation, etc.

The only difference for that would be the power supply, and I wouldn't have a problem throwing FreeNAS/OpenFiler on it to get some comparative benchmarks to the Phenom box.

how illustrated and detailed the build will be is dependant on how well I can touch type on my Aspire One, whether I can find the charger for my DLSR, how much of a tip my bedroom is, and how much beer I have

 

[Plec]

and how much beer I have

You, obviously, have the same build technique as myself – although, i prefer a solid wooden table to a bed. (ok, that just sounded odd.)

You don’t have to worry about photos I’m more interested in the application of the completed build and the software - a 10000 word build log should just about cover it

Good luck with the build.

 

[StevenRaith]

Quick update:
VMWare ESXi/ESX doesn't like the AMD T3s and falls over with an LVMdriver failure on attempting to install.

After muchos messing about with Xenserver [including setting up a flipping FTP server to hold the install files - thankfully Filezilla makes this easy peasy] I have that working now and am setting up some VMs.

I'll strip it all back [bar the Xenserver install - I can remember most of it anyway] and start again, and post it up at some point in the near-ish future. I'm having to actually work at work you see

 

[terrybowst]

Built mine using old socket (A) Athlon and 512mb PC133 ram,found this helped.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Set-up-your-very-own-Web-server/

 

[StevenRaith]

Currently updating Win2k3 on Xenserver.

Ubuntu is a pain in Xenserver [can't get paravirtualisation to work on it, needs a kernel module that I can't get to work, bah] but may have a play with RHEL/SUSE later on for full on joyous Open Sauce fun.

Think I need a quieter cooler though - or just to swap the TIM out for some Arctic Silver. Anyone got any recommendations for an AM2+ socket cooler that is near silent and will fit in the same area as the stock HSF [dont' have the measurements, but space is limited - no TRUE/Fenrirs ]. Not that it's too loud, at least it won't be when I move it to the corner of the room - I'd just like it quieter....

 

[Plec]

How's it going Steven?

From your last post you seem to have everything under control and all that was required was a small amount of tweaking - although you were toying with the idea of using RHEL/SUSE - of which, the only knowledge i have is the blurb on their respective websites. (i'm still very much an Ubuntu newb.)

 

[StevenRaith]

It's in limbo at the moment; i's currently sitting here doing not a vast amount other than hosting a couple of tihngs, a Win2k8 server, a Sun Solaris 10 install and Untangle, although I have yet to set Untangle as the primary gateway and Sun and Win2k8 aren't doing much, although eventually I'll have the Win2k8 box as a local DC so that I can roam my profile about over the various machines I have here.

At the moment I'm saving up the pennies for an eSATA DAS box and four disks - possibly 1.5tb Spinpoints, or maybe similar capacity Caviar Greens - which I'll make available as either iSCSI or CIFS in a large array for my media with openfiler, providing I can get it working in Xen. Then I can plonk it in the corner of the room out of the way; it's quiet enough to be in the open, rather than in a cupboard, which is nice.

Then I'll pull the whole lot apart again and document it.

Work is being a major drag which isn't helping, and neither is apparently having swine flu - three days of fever suggests that's what it is, anyway.

I have also realised that I really need to empty all the crud out of this flat and start from scratch - that comes first. That'll make documenting it all a damned site easier, too!

As for Suse/RHEL, I still haven't bothered trying that yet; I'm sure there must be an easier way to get the Xen kernel in a Linux install, I just haven't had time to look at it yet; that will be anice LAMP box. I also have a BSD based mailserver I want to set up so I can stop relying on third party mail providers and set up my own mail domain, with MX records and all that.

By the time I am finished I should basically have:
Muti-terabyte SAN shared out over CIFS/iSCSI
Email server
LAMP stack
secondary LAMP stack sandbox
IIS sandbox
and have plenty of resources left over to fiddle with other stuff that crops up.

Not bad for £500 [£400 for this machine+£100-ish for DAS box] + disks.

1080 screenie of the XenServer VMs, remote desktops, and the XenCentre itself, accessed through my Q6600 box, but just as usable if I remote desktop to the Q6600 box to get to Xenserver from my Acer Aspire one, or in the case of Win2k8, RDP into it direct [where it runs hardware-speed fast] or VNC into the Sun box. Untange is best administered through it's web interface...

 

[LordSplodge]

What eSATA DAS box have you gone for?

 

[StevenRaith]

Bumpity - my contract not being renewed, and having some mental issues* [cause of the non-renewal], means I'm moving out in a couple of weeks time from my flat and moving up to my Bros - and the variety of laptops, netbooks and whatnot I have collected over the years mean I'll have a geniune reason to set up the NAS/streaming media part of the Xen build.

Haven't got the DAS yet My Lord, but it's probably going to be the EdgeStore 501t - the £170-ish 5 bay job that comes with the SATA port multiplier in the box - I have a free PCI-e x16 slot in the Asus system that I can pop that in.

I'll start documenting it properly once I have moved!

*small nervous breakdowns are fun...

 

[StevenRaith]

Just a quick bump to add that I do genuinely intend to actually do this, but a variety of things going Very Very Wrong have stalled it. No job, no money, and the layout of this place means I'll need a MIMO router to get decent streaming speeds for HD content, and also some more disk. Not having any money is a problem.

Other than that though, I'm better than I was when I had the breakdown thingy, which always helps - Scarboroughs pretty nice, and a very chilled out place - liking it