[TriLUG] NAS box

[Magnus Hedemark]

Brian McCullough wrote:

>REALLY not wanting to start a religious war, but I have a question of
>Linux vs BSD.
>
>
>I have a client that needs a "disk server" and I was thinking that this
>might be an opportunity to ask for recommendations.
>  
>

As much as I love OpenBSD for the things that it is good at, I avoid it 
for the things that it is not good at.  When it comes to disk 
management, Linux wins hands-down.  Check out LVM.  To get this kind of 
functionality anywhere else you'd have to give a lot of money to 
Veritas.  And I'm doubtful that it's even available for OpenBSD.

>LOTS of disk space ( SATA? RAID! )
>  
>

I see from a later response that you were talking hundreds of gigs, as 
opposed to getting into the TB range.  This really isn't a lot of disk 
space.  But if you go the Linux/LVM route, please do plan ahead and look 
at your PE size.  Going too small here can really put a damper on 
scalability of your Volume Group in the future.

>At least one Gigabit Network connection
>Second network connection, at least 100 MBit.
>  
>

Another neat Linux trick - bonding.  You can bond multiple NICs together 
and load balance between them.  Slap two Gigabit NICs in there and 
address them as one. :)

>This machine would be plugged into an existing network ( actually two
>loops, one 100 MBit, one Gigabit, but this box is to a large extent for
>the Gigabit side ) consisting of a Linux general purpose server ( IMAP,
>SMTP, DNS, SAMBA, etc. ), a Linux firewall box, and a conglomeration of
>Win 95, 98, 2K machines. ( also a soon to be dead ( or replaced ) WinMe
>machine )
>  
>

The firewall box is actually the shoe-in for OpenBSD.  Linux has a neat 
little firewall but it's a royal PITA to master compared to pf, and if 
it is compromised the OpenBSD box is going to be a lot harder to rootkit 
than the Linux box if you do it right (there is a lot of hardening you 
can do on an OpenBSD box to make it much more secure than it is out of 
the box).