Has anybody here made a homebrew NAS unit?

I'm thinking something with a mini-ITX to keep the footprint and power
consumption low.   With a stripped-down version of linux, it could
provide storage on the LAN via samba.  RAID would be nice, but not a
necessity.

Or are there any commercially available units aimed at the home user?
I saw some reviews of the Ximeta Netdisk, which looks pretty close to
what I'd be interested in.   Except it requires some sort of proprietary
driver to access it, so that rules it out for me.

Does anybody here have any suggestions or tips?

Thanks!
-WD

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http://www.openfiler.org/about/ Not used it though.

"Will Dormann" <wdormann@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:HNmzc.95975$DG4.59685@fe2.columbus.rr.com...
> Has anybody here made a homebrew NAS unit?
>
> I'm thinking something with a mini-ITX to keep the footprint and power
> consumption low.   With a stripped-down version of linux, it could
> provide storage on the LAN via samba.  RAID would be nice, but not a
> necessity.
>
> Or are there any commercially available units aimed at the home user?
> I saw some reviews of the Ximeta Netdisk, which looks pretty close to
> what I'd be interested in.   Except it requires some sort of proprietary
> driver to access it, so that rules it out for me.
>
> Does anybody here have any suggestions or tips?
>
> Thanks!
> -WD

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Net Worker wrote:

> http://www.openfiler.org/about/ Not used it though.


Actually I have come across that project before.   I guess I wasn't as
clear as I could have been, but I'm actually more interested about the
hardware end of things.   Like a suggestion for a small, quiet,
inexpensive mini system to build the NAS out of.

(Or a prebuilt solution, if the price is right)



-WD

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In article <RQpzc.31457$ih7.14475@fe2.columbus.rr.com>,
Will Dormann  <wdormann@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:
>Net Worker wrote:
> 
>
>
>Actually I have come across that project before.   I guess I wasn't as
>clear as I could have been, but I'm actually more interested about the
>hardware end of things.   Like a suggestion for a small, quiet,
>inexpensive mini system to build the NAS out of.
>
>(Or a prebuilt solution, if the price is right)
>
>
>
>-WD

here's a couple out-of-the-box systems.  A little more expensive than
the cost of parts.


http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduct.asp?
submit=list&catalog=124&DEPA=0&order=price&sort=asc
--
Al Dykes
-----------
adykes  at p a n i x . c o m

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Al Dykes wrote:

> here's a couple out-of-the-box systems.  A little more expensive than
> the cost of parts.
>
>
> http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduct.asp?
> submit=list&catalog=124&DEPA=0&order=price&sort=asc

Those D-Link units look pretty slick.
I guess I'll have to look into how that "Rendezvous" thing will work
with Linux.


-WD

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Will Dormann wrote:

> Al Dykes wrote:
> 
>
>
> Those D-Link units look pretty slick.
> I guess I'll have to look into how that "Rendezvous" thing will work
> with Linux.

Here's a similar unit which is a bit more reasonably priced, and should
be easier to cooperate with Linux:
http://store.pcpowerzone.com/guneatstn12.html


-WD

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Will Dormann wrote:

> Has anybody here made a homebrew NAS unit?
>
> I'm thinking something with a mini-ITX to keep the footprint and power
> consumption low.   With a stripped-down version of linux, it could
> provide storage on the LAN via samba.  RAID would be nice, but not a
> necessity.

If anyybody's interested, I think I've got a gameplan for the NAS.
At this point I think I'm going to skip on the mini-ITX stuff to keep
the costs down.   It looks like I should be able to build the thing for
about $200, using a spare PC, 3 hard drives and an add-in PCI IDE card.

Using Gentoo (gentoo-dev-sources/2.6.5 kernel) and software RAID, the
cost is kept to a minimum.
BOOT partition ext3 on RAID1 with hot spare
SWAP partitions distributed across the 3 drives (not sure if this is the
best, but I've heard of potential issues with having SWAP on RAID)
ROOT partition xfs on RAID1 with hot spare
STORE partition xfs on RAID5

I have done a trial run of it using VMWare, and it looks like it should
work out well.


-WD

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