[TriLUG] FreeNAS vs DIY

[Igor Partola]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Bill Farrow <bill at arrowsreach.com> wrote:

> Any volunteers to run a hackday on setting up and maintaining a ZFS or
> BTRFS home file server ? Maybe a demo of FreeNAS ? This could
> culminate in a TriLUG talk ?
>

Even though I'm no longer in the area... This!

Almost everywhere I look I read about how "you must not reinvent the wheel
when it comes to security" since you will get it wrong. I want the same
thing for storage. After doing a bunch of reading I am horrified by the
fact that storage is treated as a DIY type of thing (by almost all casual
users, including me) and things like ZFS are not *the* standard everywhere.

>From my research, my drives silently corrupt about one file per day and
there is nothing I can do about it. ZFS and BTRFS seem to mitigate the
problem, though without ECC RAM you can still get all kinds of corruption.
Really wish I had known this about 10 years ago.

All in all, I really wish some expert somewhere said "this is how you run a
NAS, with backups, etc." FreeNAS is probably as close as it comes to this,
but you are still left with a bunch of decisions about it, and are locked
into a specific firmware which lets you install only a few plugins.

Igor