[Malvern] Recommendations for File Servers

[Stuart Parkington]

Hi Ian,

Your planned file server project sounds very similar to the what I've 
done for my home network. I don't know if you'll find it useful but this 
is what I've done. It has been an ongoing project (and learning 
experience) for about 3 years, so some of the hardware and software is 
now a little dated, but still works a treat!

For hardware I acquired a pair of old PII (600MHz 128MB) Small Form 
Factor Compaq Deskpro's from Ebay for about £30. I used these chassis 
because from prior experience I knew I could use them 'headless'. I did 
in fact find out I had to download a ROMPAQ from the web to stop the 
machine hanging on reboots (they waited for a keypress by default). I'd 
definitely recommend these machine (I'd pick a faster processor today 
though!) because they are small, very quiet and are widely available 
secondhand.

The first machine I use as a firewall. I installed a couple of extra 
NICs and use Smoothwall Express (http://www.smoothwall.org/) for the OS. 
This gives me both an internal network and a DMZ (which to be honest is 
seldom used!). Smoothwall I can't recommend highly enough. I love 
software that 'just works' and Smoothwall does. The documentation is 
good and the support forums (when I've needed them) active and friendly. 
It has both a browser based and command line (SSH) management interface. 
It also automatically checks for updates.

The second machine is my 'server'. The base OS is Mandrake 10.1CE, which 
was my distro of choice at the time. If I was to rebuild I'd probably 
user Ubuntu Server 6.10, which would provide all the Ubuntu (Debian) 
goodness but without the overhead of a GUI.

For file storage, I installed an additional USB2 PCI card and hung two 
250GB USB drives off the back. One is my data drive which I back up (via 
  an Rsync cron job each night) to the other drive. I purposefully used 
external USB drives so I could easily move them to a new box should I 
need to. The drives I formatted to EXT3 and they get mounted at boot 
time via additional lines I manually added to fstab.

The only AV I run is F-Prot 
(http://www.f-prot.com/download/home_user/download_fplinux.html). This I 
both update and run scans nightly with another cron job. Seems to do the 
job! I also played with ClamAV at one point, which seemed ok.

I run Samba to share files to my works Windows laptop and NFS for 
everything else.

It also runs Apache and mySQL which publishes several little web apps 
that I use, Wiki, Gallery and TorrentFlux (http://www.torrentflux.com/) 
which makes a great torrent client for an always on fileserver.

I run it all headless and manage via either SSH or Webmin. I love Webmin 
- again software that just works! I've manged for find Webmin modules 
for everything I've needed to date. It also acts as my print server, 
using CUPS, to both Windows and Linux machines.

Together with my desktop machine and an old wireless access point they 
are both wired via a little 100MB switch. I then access the lot 
wirelessly from my laptop via HTTP, NFS or Samba. Using SSH certificate 
login and rsync I can also backup my laptop data (including Windows via 
Cygwin) to the file server.

I used to run a mail server, but it proved too much admin for home use. 
I now just use Thunderbird (with various extensions to access web based 
email accounts) and backup my Thunderbird profile up to the server 
(again with SSH and Rsync).

That's just about it I guess. Sorry for waffling on so much. Hope some 
of it was useful.

Regards
Stuart

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Linux #423936  Ubuntu #4500
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