How to best set up a fileserver

[alevasseur14]

Ok, so I'm moving into a new place tomorrow and I'll have a roommate again. We both have a lot of stuff on our computers and i happen to have an extra one laying around. So... I'll soon be ordering the controller card and additional drives to make a big file server.

What I'm interested in asking about is how I should go about making this server available over the network. Currently, I plan on just hooking it up to the router and setting it up to share. This presents two problems though:

1.) I'm not really sure how to set it up so my roomie and i can both have a personal folder and then a shared folder in addition. I've only had this server setup for me in the past so it didn't matter who had permissions and whatnot.

2.) The more I think about it, the nicer it'd be to have this thing isolated from the net. That opens up a whole additional issue. We'll need a gigabit router for sharing the files and whatnot, but how would I set it up to keep this server from having internet access?

Thanks for any tips and suggestions!

 

[JohnDoe2]

You're using Windows, I assume? Turn off "use simple file sharing" in Explorer>Folder Options>View (all the way at the bottom of the list) and you will get a new "security" tab for setting folder permissions.

If you want to block the server from the net, you can block it's IP on the router. You could just block the NetBIOS ports (135-139) if you don't want to block it completely.

 

[nweaver]

To block it from the net, set it up with a static IP, and don't put in a default gateway.

As far as sharing goes, what OS? If you have any *nix experience, I find this easier to do with samba/swat (as you can have home directories that are private, and a shared directory). It also means not having to get a license for windows. The "simple file sharing" option mentioned above is good, but I don't think you can disable SFS in XP Home, only pro.

 

[JackMDS]

Yeah, to switch off Simple File Sharing you need WinXP Pro.

However, if it only a File server you can use Win2000, you probably can find lic. for very little money.

You can easily and totally isolate it from the Net.

Install NetBEUI in addition to TCP/IP.

In your XP computer bind both TCP/IP and NetBEUI to the file sharing, in the server bind only NetBEUI.

You would get faster traffic from and to the server, and since NetBUI is not Routable No Internet traffic through the Sharing.

http://www.ezlan.net/netbeui.html

 

[alevasseur14]

Thanks for the replies. I should have clarified that all three machines will be running Windows. My game computer is running Vista Ultimate and the server and my roommates computer will be running XP Pro for the time being, with my roommate upgrading to Vista at some point. I'd like to get into linux at some point but I'd just like to get this up and running soon. Maybe another day.

I just thought a bit more about it and it would be nice to give the file server the bittorrent duties. Would there be a way to give it access to the local network and just bittorrent or is that too much to ask? Thanks again!!!

 

[engineereeyore]

Sign up for the Windows Home Server Beta. I think it's still open and it works pretty well. If you like it, buy it when it comes out. Otherwise, just enjoy it for the time being.

If you'd prefer to stay with XP Pro, it's pretty simple to create 3 folders and just allow access to the owners. Then just set the owner of one folder to you, one to your friend, and let everyone access the third.

As for the bittorrent, can't help you. I've never used it. Sorry.

 

[Kelemvor]

Do you want to be storing ALL your data on the server or just stuff to share? You could just store all your personal stuff on your own PC and just use the shared folder for things you want your roomie to see. And he could do the same. Then you don't have to worry much about permissions on the server since that would just be the "public" data.

 

[alaricljs]

Perhaps he wants to use the Server as a backup location for personal stuff (and maybe he'll even RAID that storage). This is how I backup my desktop.

 

[alevasseur14]

Yeah, the plan is to have a place to backup my desktop to, but at the same time having a place to share a few things between the two of us.

The plan is to set up a RAID 5 array containing 4 500 GB drives.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: alevasseur14
The plan is to set up a RAID 5 array containing 4 500 GB drives.

RAID 5 is not easy to do "right". Some even claim that you need to spend hundreds of dollars at a minimum for a good RAID 5 controller. It's write performance that's tricky -- read performance is much easier to do well. If you don't really care about write speed, you can skip this note.

I've never seen Windows Server RAID 5 perform well (for writing).

On-board RAID 5 write performance is mostly miss, but a few implementations can do large sequential writes well. E.g. Intel ICH8R/ICH8DO/etc., probably ICH9R, and possibly ICH7R and older as well. Sometimes nVIDIA RAID 5 performs well; often it doesn't. Local write performance vs. network write performance can be another challenge (for mostly unknown reasons, but possibly due to internal chipset/driver complexities + reasons having to do with differences in the tuning of drive accesses when requests come locally vs. remotely).

Inexpensive add-on RAID 5 controllers are likely to be poor in performance. The minimum worth spending money on IMO would be something like a Highpoint 2300 series. (Not that I've tested every RAID 5 implementation, but I've seen enough poor results.) The Highpoint 23xx can give good sequential RAID 5 write performance in some cases at least.

Note that for file servers, "good" doesn't have to be outstanding. You'll be bottlenecked by 1 Gb/s networking in any case, and very likely somewhere around 30 MB/s due to OS/file system/file transfer protocol tuning/inefficiency reasons. I wouldn't want a RAID 5 implementation which definitely limit me to this sort of performance or lower -- I'd want something that can at least hit single drive performance of say around 60 MB/s (ideally at least around 150 MB/s though for some headroom beyond 1 Gb/s).

Poor RAID 5 implementations will give you around 1/2 the write speed of a single drive.

Linux RAID 5 write performance is good in some cases at least, and it's free and compatible with a number of different chipsets.

 

[alevasseur14]

I always believe in spending good money on parts that will perform. The load on this server won't be too intensive though. Just me and the roomie sharing a couple things and using it mainly for backup. It's all going to tie into a decent PCI controller. I'd go PCIe but it's an old nForce 3 board. I'm mainly just doing it to build another computer and get a little experience in RAID 5. So yeah, mainly for fun.

 

[Madwand1]

IMO, It'd be a waste to spend a significant amount on a storage controller while having it limited to PCI because of an old motherboard. Doubly worse if the motherboard doesn't have native GbE, or has a PCI-bridged GbE (e.g. Gigabyte/Marvell) because that would share bandwidth with the storage controller.

You can still get some newer motherboards inexpensively with other benefits (e.g. on-board video). I'd consider dropping the old motherboard to get a PCIe storage controller. PCI-X is another option, but that would tie you to a workstation/server class motherboard in the future -- again increasing the price, tying you to an older technology, and limiting the choices.

 

[kevnich2]

Personally, I'd skip the RAID 5 altogether. Go RAID 0 and then have a backup program running on your server that backs up your data daily, weekly, whatever works best for you. RAID is NOT a backup solution. IMO, raid is really only good in the business environment where uptime has to be 100%. With RAID, if a hard drive crashes your data is still accessible to users while you scramble to get another replacement in there to get the array back to good status. For a home environment, this isn't needed at all. Who cares if your drive crashes for a day or two while you get another drive in there. Even with RAID, if your controller fails, your motherboard fails, your data is accidentally deleted, etc, etc, raid isn't any good without a proper backup (to a usb drive or to a large drive on another machine). Personally, I have 3 500gb in a RAID0 and I back that data up to a 500gb drive located on another computer on my network. When I exceed 500gb, I'll simply pop in another drive, configure that as RAID0 as well and resume my weekly backups. I've had more experiences with data deletions rather than hard drive failure but I've had my drive fail twice and in both cases, my backups saved me from losing years of photos and documents.

 

[alaricljs]

Raid 0 with 3 drives is quite a risk, especially since it would seem you only have 1 drive worth of data to begin with. Why force yourself to rebuild/restore the array if you have a failure. Is the performance that big a deal for you?

I just recently upgraded my file server. I'd been running a 1Ghz Athlon, 384MB RAM and several 2 Channel IDE controllers with 200GB WD drives. Most I had running at once was 9 disks.

My current system is a Celeron D 326 (Waiting on Core 2 price cuts) running in a Supermicro PDSME+ with 4GB of ram (HP deal $16/GB) and a Sil3214 4port PCI-X SATA card (and 1 of the IDE controllers still). I have a pair of 500GB Seagates on the SATA and am waiting for another deal to upgrade the mirrored pair of IDE 200GBs to 500s. I've got a second 4 port controller that I'll use when I upgrade the mirror.

Through it all I've been running Linux and I've also tried out RAID-5 (with 3, 4 and 5 disks). The main reason I skipped out on RAID 5 is because I didn't want to have all those spindles turning at once if I didn't need them, so I broke my data into 2 parts. Part 1: reproducable from source (my kids DVD collection is ripped for ease of use, OGG files from my FLAC rips of my CDs). Part 2: originals, backups, stuff that takes too much time to reproduce (my FLAC rips of my CD collection, 15GB of digital photos of my family, all my docs backed up from my rig) Part 1 is on the 500GB drives, no RAID protection, smartmontools continuously monitoring the drives for pre-failure conditions. Part 2 is on a pair of 200GB drives, RAID 1, smartmontools here too.

Spent $580 on the server (including the unmentioned case, PSU, HDD racks), $270 on the 500GB disks so far, had the 200GBs from before. Now with the extra RAM and soon to be extra CPU power I'll be able to use my VMWare sessions for more.

Edit: Oh yeah, point being that even on the Athlon I never had a complaint about performance, even with RAID-5 writes. Things are definitely faster on the new box, but there was nothing I did constrained by the original performance. I can dump data to the system a whole lot quicker, but the old system could stream 4 DVDs at once just as well as the new one can.

 

[kevnich2]

No, no real need for RAID0 other than the fact that I had the drives laying around so I put them in there. If a drive crashed in it, oh well, I would simply stick with two drives and do a data restore, no big deal for me.