* linux newbie: Have several questions for a file server, pls advise - Thanks :)

[jimmyhaha]

I am planning to install linux and use it a file server and webserver, and have webmin add on top of it.

My objective is to create a simple NAS (Network attached storage), a web & FTP server (with secure SSH remote access), MySQL database, with easy management & minimal maintenacne.

I have try e-smith, but the web management is too slow and have few tweaking option

1. which distro u guys recommend ?

2. How much cpu/memory power I need, i.e. will PII 400 class machine suffix ?

3. What file system does linux system use, i.e. MS use FAT/NTFS ?

4. I heard some linux distro have a maximum file limitation of 2G per file ?

5. For scalability, how hard is to mount additional hard drive under linux ?

6. I am considering running software Raid 1 or 5, how hard is to mount additional drive, or rebuild the raid (if 1 drive fail)

7. Does most linux distro offer power managerment similar to MS OS, i.e. like the standby/suspend option ? (I don't want to run it 24/7)

8. Does linux has any problem handling long file name with space, i.e. My Vation Trip 1998 - picture 1.jpg

9. What packet writing cdr software linux use so I can backup the data to CD-RW disc to ?

Pls advise, thanks in advance.

 

[Iron Woode]

Originally posted by: jimmyhaha
I am planning to install linux and use it a file server and webserver, and have webmin add on top of it.

My objective is to create a simple NAS (Network attached storage), a web & FTP server, MySQL database, with easy management & minimal maintenacne.

I have try e-smith, but the web management is too slow and have few tweaking option

1. which distro u guys recommend ?

2. How much cpu/memory power I need ?

3. What file system does linux system use, i.e. MS use FAT/NTFS ?

4. I heard some linux distro have a maximum file limitation of 2G per file ?

5. For scalability, how hard is to mount additional hard drive

6. I am considering running software Raid 1 or 5, how hard is to mount additional drive, or rebuild the raid (if 1 drive fail)

7. Does most linux distro offer power managerment similar to MS OS, i.e. like the standby/suspend option ? (I don't want to run it 24/7)

8. Does linux has any problem handling long file name with space, i.e. My Vation Trip 1998 - picture 1.jpg

9. What packet writing cdr software linux use so I can backup the data to CD-RW disc to ?

Pls advise, thanks in advance.

Are you sure you want to be tackling this yourself?

try http://www.justlinux.org or start searching google.

a good box for this should include:

512 meg ram to start.

XP1800+ or better AMD.

Apache is usually an option when installing a Linux Distro.

I like Mandrake 9.1 personally.

I ran a linux web server/ftp server using an old k6-2 300 cpu system with 128 megs of ram and a 20 gig hdd. Believe me it ran very well considering. Linux works well on old hardware.

Too new of a MB might cause problems for linux. Use an older video card if you can for built in driver support. Compiling a new kernel because of driver updates is more work than most newbies are willing to do.

good luck.

 

[skyking]

I built one last night with a cyrix 166, 128 Mb of Ram, a 15 gig OS drive and a 40 gig data drive on a promise ata133 card. Freebsd does not need any more hardware than that to serve pages and files. It will compile faster, but the rest of that stuff is not processor intensive, till you get to massive Databases in Mysql.

IF you have a more powerful machine, you can go with a GUI distro, which might be easier for getting started.
Software RAID 5 in FreeBSD is done by Vinum. This is not for the faint of heart, rebuilding a degraded array can take some time and know-how.

 

[jimmyhaha]

thanks for the info.

There are still A LOT of questions that are NOT address, can anyone pls give me some idea ?

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: jimmyhaha
My objective is to create a simple NAS (Network attached storage), a web & FTP server (with secure SSH remote access), MySQL database, with easy management & minimal maintenacne.

Considering where you're at right now, I don't think you will find this an easy path, regardless of how you proceed. But since you asked...

I have try e-smith, but the web management is too slow and have few tweaking option

Webmin is webmin. It's not going to be any different anywhere else. Same for tweaks - if you know where to look, every distro is 95% the same.

1. which distro u guys recommend ?

Debian.

2. How much cpu/memory power I need, i.e. will PII 400 class machine suffix ?

Depends on your traffic. A P2 400 will be slow for any substantial SQL load or serving lots of dynamic page content, but you don't say exactly you plan on doing.

3. What file system does linux system use, i.e. MS use FAT/NTFS ?

There are many choices. If you don't know which one to pick, use Ext3.

4. I heard some linux distro have a maximum file limitation of 2G per file ?

That's changed a bit over the years. But for any modern distro, the limit will be far, far above that. Like, terabytes at least. I very much doubt you'll have any problems.

5. For scalability, how hard is to mount additional hard drive under linux ?

mount -t ext3 /dev/hdd /mnt/newdrive

6. I am considering running software Raid 1 or 5, how hard is to mount additional drive, or rebuild the raid (if 1 drive fail)

Not particularly hard to rebuild, provided you've practiced the recovery before you're freaking out about potential data loss. As for online expansion, I think you'd want to check out LVM for that, but I'm not certain.

7. Does most linux distro offer power managerment similar to MS OS, i.e. like the standby/suspend option ? (I don't want to run it 24/7)

It's offered but, like Windows, it's highly dependent on the hardware. There's a lot of desktop hardware, especially older stuff, that doesn't handle APM/ACPI events properly.

8. Does linux has any problem handling long file name with space, i.e. My Vation Trip 1998 - picture 1.jpg

No.

9. What packet writing cdr software linux use so I can backup the data to CD-RW disc to ?

Barf, packet writing? I think that's kinda supported somewhere (UDF?), but you're better off using a real backup program like tar or dump.

Pls advise, thanks in advance.

I advise you to tackle one small step at a time, and not think you're going to accomplish all of the above in weeks or probably months. For example, start by picking a distro, learning to install it, establishing basic network connectivity, and updating packages for security fixes. Then maybe think about setting up NFS or Samba for file services as a test case. Or figure out how LVM works. Or set up Apache. But plan for several fresh starts along the way, and don't put anything remotely critical on the box until you're confident about what you're doing.

 

[drag]

1:
any rpm-based distro (redhat, Suse, mandrake) will offer the most new user friendlyness, Distros like gentoo and debian offer more flexibility. I'd go for user friendlyness till you get use to administrating a linux box.

2.
Plenty. I used a 486 with 64 megs of ram (it had a scsi array though, a nice one for it's age)for many years as a file server. Peice of crap with X running on it though. Responsiveness will be slow for a 400 with a full fledged desktop enviroment, though (gnome or kde)

3.
A wide veriety. XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, Fat32, Ext3, Ext2, etc etc. For a file server I'd just stick with the default for whatever distro you are using as long as it has file journalling. Probably Ext3, ReiserFS, or XFS (SuSe mostly)

4.
I am not exactly sure and it depends on some other things like file system. Kernels series 2.2 had that limitation, but the current stable branch (2.4) has large file support built in.

SGI says that XFS support for linux it can handle individual file sizes up to 2TB's on 32bit machines, and up to 9 exobytes on 64bit machines.

I don't think that this would be a problem, unless you plan on emulating world wide weather patterns or something. 😛

5.
As long as you have support for the harddrive controller, then it would be easy. Turn off machine, plug in new harddrive, turn it on, then decide were you want to mount it. Say you want a share folder, so then you go:
mount -t (partition type) /dev/(partition dev file) /share

Most of the times it can autodetect the file system type just fine so you don't need the -t modifier. The /dev/ files are special files that represent hardware resources. IDE devices are represented by: hda, hdd, hdc, hdd etc etc. Then partitions are numbers added onto the IDE device like: /dev/hda1 or hdd3 or hdc2.

So that if you see the file: /dev/hdb3 you know that that would be the third partition on the primary slave IDE device (or second IDE device). etc etc.

SCSI devices usually are the same, but they are named /dev/sda or sdb.

So normally all you would have to do, if you have a brand new HD you just hooked as a secondary slave IDE device, then you would have to:
"cfdisk /dev/hdd", to partition it.
"mkfs.xfs /dev/hdd1" to format it as a xfs partition.
then
mount /dev/hdd1 /mount/point/

To make it perminate you can edit the /etc/fstab file, so that you can mount it automaticly at boot time, or make it so that you can mount it with a shorter "mount /mount/point" command.

As far as hotswappable devices, it depends on the driver support for the hardware.

6.
If your running a hardware raid device, it shouldn't depend on the OS the hardware takes care of the replication, I beleive... May depend on driver support, too

If it's a software RAID then I am not sure, don't have much experiance with that.

7.
Sure, Linux supports ACPI and APM power managment scemes(usually by default), although like windows it does cause problems time to time for some drivers and some devices. APM is more mature..

Again I don't have much experiance playing around with power management stuff, so i am not sure exactly what all is involved with that.

8.
Nothing more then annoying. In the command line you'd have to type out:
My\ Vacation\ Trip\ 1998\ -\ picture\ 1.jpg

The autocomplete (tab button) will be able to handle it just fine. Also it is case sensitive so that Dog, dog, and DOG would all be different filenames.

Linux never suffered from the laughable 8.3 type of file name limitatioins like MS did.

So that the shell knows your not looking for a bunch of differnent files devided by spaces. However in a Gui it would appear correctly.

Since I am a command line type of guy I would prefer dots or Camel type naming ie
my.vacation.trip.1998-picture.1.jpg
Which is perfectly legal and easier to type out. Or maybe
myVacationTrip1998-picture1.jpg
which is easier yet.

9.
There are a veriaty of software for this. One major one is cdrecord. It's a command line tool, but their are a few GUI tools that are front ends for it. Also you have other tools for creating the cd images.

Also you have some tools like tar and gzip/bzip2 that are used for archiving and compressing files. Much like windows zip files, but much more powerfull.

One tip though. In current kernels you have to setup SCSI emulation for CD burners to give the OS the nessicary control over it. It's realy easy to do, just got to add one line to your boot config... just file it away for later reference.

 

[jimmyhaha]

thanks for all advice 🙂