Other Looking at OS choices for USB boot file server

S

standard_nerd68k

Hi.

Not happy with the way stuff is going with systemd, so looking at moving away from Debian. It seems my choices are BSD of some form or Gentoo. At the moment I'm just playing about with both in VM.

I'm thinking to use Gentoo for my laptop, as it looks like I will still be able to run Steam on that, and BSD on my file server.

The current setup is that it loads from USB flash, then copies anything that gets frequent writes to a ramdisk, and copies back at shutdown. It works, but is a bit unreliable, and was a real pain to set up. Files are stored on a pile of separate ext3 disks, backup is handled manually, with anything irreplaceable copied to other computers, USB flash drives, online storage etc, more copies the more important it is.

I have looked at the available NAS distributions, none of them seem suitable, are either too limited, or needs a computer far more powerful than the one I am using. (1Gb RAM, Athlon 64 CPU)

I am thinking of using either embedded BSD (nanoBSD?), but this looks like a pain to add software to for someone with near zero BSD experience, or a full BSD install, and finding some way to stop it hammering the flash with writes.

Mainly I just want it to serve up files, but would like to be able to also use it for whatever other random ideas I get, as a firewall, print server, that sort of thing.
I'm sure I've missed some important info, but it would take me all day if I tried to include every detail. Any thoughts or recommendations?
 
Yes. It is pretty much exactly what I want. But I don't have 8Gb of RAM, and don't need or want ZFS. If it could run in less, with a different file system, it would be great. Might try it in a VM, see what happens.
 
You don't have to use ZFS, we have a couple of FreeNAS servers using the traditional UFS filesystems. If you don't use ZFS it's not going to need a lot of memory. But even with ZFS it should be able to run just fine with 1 GB, just don't expect good performance. It'll work nonetheless.
 
If you are used to dDebian I think you will be happy with freebsdFreeBSD. It functions similar. It installs very small and runs well on small memory. Also with a ZFS root'ed environment, you can easily install with multiple USB's sticks with default install.
 
FreeNAS rocks as a file server. They're easy to setup and optimized very well for limited computer resources. I've used them before switching completely over to FreeBSD as file server.
 
After looking at the options I think I am just going to go with normal BSD onto USB. Will minimize writes as best I can, and just replace the flash when it wears out. That way I can keep the disks as EXT, instead of having to switch to UFS, and if I am having problems configuring the BSD system, I can just plug the old flash back in and keep on as normal. Also, it bugs me that these NAS systems are so heavy on RAM, when 1Gb is way more than I need in the system when running Linux.

Hopefully the disks are not EXT4, I cant remember...

I know it is me, not the OS, but it all seems needlessly complicated right now. Exactly the same as when I first used Linux :)
 
ZFS can be used with only 1GBs of memory provided that the platform is AMD64 and not i386. You just need to limit ARC cache to some sensible amount like 384-512MBs to avoid running out of kernel memory. It will not be superfast but it won't be dog slow either.
 
Kpa, that is kind of my whole point. With my current setup, 1Gb of RAM is silly overkill. It does not make sense to me to switch to a system where the same hardware goes from "silly overkill" to just barely good enough. I was running the same setup on a Pentium 2, with not much RAM, the only reason I changed was that the newer board had SATA ports.

I guess people have different priorities, but the FreeNAS guys are running machines far superior to my gaming machine, as file servers. My budget is zero. My motorbike got stolen, every spare penny go towards buying a new one.
 
Well essentially you imposed serious constrain on yourself by insisting that file server runs from USB. That basically means you will have to run embedded OS. If you don't want to monkey with NanoBSD your only FreeBSD based turnkey option given the hardware constrains (which eliminates FreeNAS) is NAS4Free. Running firewall on the file server is rather strange unless it is designed to enhance file server's own security. NFS is not designed to work behind the firewall although it is definitely possible to force traffic to particular 5 ports. If you want turnkey firewall based on FreeBSD my favourite is becoming OPNsense. I was one of the people who quickly dismissed their fork of PFSense as only politically motivated but I will be the first to admit that I was terribly wrong. That project is thriving.

Now going back to file server. Using FreeBSD for a file server and not using ZFS and benefits provided by this file system is rather silly. I am running FreeBSD on one of the file servers and use UFS on the top of hardware RAID due to abysmal spec of the machine. Machine is used to back up some data sets. I think it is silly but the guy who saved $2500 for the new machine things I am a cool dude.

Anyhow if I had such a low spec machine and needed file server at home I would be looking at the DragonFly and HAMMER. Even then you will have to figure out how to run it safely from USB. I personally would spend $20-$30 and run OS from SSD. Ask on their mailing list how to properly install DF to limit reads and writes.
 
Stock FreeBSD will run from a USB memory stick, but it's not pleasant. Write speed on USB flash is terrible. The USB appears to be motivated by the lack of disk connections in a notebook. For that, you might see about getting a replacement DVD drive case that holds a hard drive. A machine with only 1G of memory probably has an IDE DVD controller, though. Notebooks are compromise designs and not very well suited for NAS or firewall use.

Or just put the operating system on the single hard disk. Data can still be separated from the operating system by putting it on a separate partition.
 
I don't know why you're being told you'll need tons of RAM @ FreeBSD. ZFS is the only thing I can think of that 'could' eat up a lot. But I'm fairly sure that by default if the system has less than 2Gb of RAM most of the RAM eating features of ZFS are off.

My media center rig, which is also my NAS, runs a desktop environment x11/mate + xbmc (multimedia/kodi) + 4x 1TB drives and 1 500Gb OS drive all using encrypted ZFS with only 2GB of ram on a 10W cpu @ q1900m ASRock mobo + a little NVIDIA card. When it was originally built it only had 1GB of ram. But another machine died and I tossed the extra stick in the media center rig.

It won't win any races but its stable and plays my Blu-ray backups easily.


@USB bootable.
The only thing I have running from USB is OpenBSD on my router/firewall. It loads most everything into mfs and most of the drive partitions left are ro / read only. I've never tried to replicate the setup with FreeBSD. But something similar is most likely possible.
 
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