[XCSSA] NAS the VIA EPIA way

[X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio]

Hey Tim,
Has anyone spoken up for the hardware yet?  I'm starting to get nervous
about my 320G drive acting up and want to see about getting the critical
stuff off of it.  I guess it could also be a memory problem but haven't been
able to do much troubleshooting (it is a win box that keeps blue screening
with odd stuff - ever hear of stop 6f session3_initialization_failed?)
coupled with the fact that when I restarted it, it decided to boot off a
different drive with a different version of win that can't be activated (for
obvious reasons, the hard drive was recovered from another pc).

Richard
http://www.kevinspitcrew.com

-----Original Message-----
From: xcssa-bounces at xcssa.org [mailto:xcssa-bounces at xcssa.org] On Behalf Of
X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 12:34 AM
To: xcssa at xcssa.org
Subject: [XCSSA] NAS the VIA EPIA way

I thought I'd update everyone with the ongoing saga of my NAS project.  
I opted to go with a fanless VIA EPIA (SN10000EG) motherboard. The one  
I got, while a bit expensive, has 4 SATA ports, a CF slot, and a full- 
size PCIe slot (although I believe that is shared with the GigE port).  
It took some work, and in fact, I had to re-install Ubuntu (a few  
times), but I finally got everything up and running on a 4GB CF card.  
I'm a bit worried about writes to the CF and I plan on doing some  
initrd trickery but for now I just have certain key directories (such  
as /var/log and /tmp) mounted on a tmpfs.

Anyhoo the important part is this:

root at filedawg:~# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5]  
[raid4] [raid10]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[2] sda1[0]
       976759936 blocks [2/1] [U_]
       [===>.................]  recovery = 19.2% (188427328/976759936)  
finish=185.7min speed=70732K/sec

unused devices: <none>

*MUCH* better than the 2MB/sec I was getting previously. The Seagate  
Barracuda LP drives are turning out to be pretty nice too. They are  
super quiet and, even with the RAID rebuild going on, are running at  
28C (assuming 'smartctl' is reporting that correctly).

Apart from the initrd stuff noted above, I still need to find a  
smaller PSU (for greater efficiency and lower noise - maybe even use a  
picoPSU), I need to figure out why the CPU scaling stuff isn't working  
as well, and re-setup all the shares along with mDNS etc.

I'm pretty happy with the setup though. There's no doubt that using  
something more off the shelf (such as something from qNap, Buffalo,  
etc.) would have taken a lot less time, but would have also been less  
fun :)

I can't remember who was looking for a hardware RAID controller, but  
it looks like I have no further use for mine. If anyone wants it  
lemmie know. I bought it for pretty cheap and I'm willing to part with  
it for cheaper so name your price. It's a bit older (LSI SATA-150) but  
it's a 6 port, and has a battery on board. I'll also have 2 or 3 extra  
160GB drives if anyone wants those. I am going to use one of them more  
than likely for my Windows PC so I can setup a RAID1 on it as well (it  
already has a 160GB drive that I'm hoping is close enough that I can  
clone to one of the others).

Werd,

Tim S.


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