Proud of myself: Got a Linux fileserver running!

[Cerpin Taxt]

And to think, about a month ago I had never used a Linux distro before in my life.

My sister had an old HP Pavillion 8760C laying around with Windows 95 installed on it. With it's measly PIII 600MHz CPU and 128MB PC100 RAM, I got Xubuntu up and running, and today I succeeded in setting up a Samba server, complete with a startup script to run the daemon every time it boots.

Now I need to acquire some storage space for this sucker. It's only got a 30GB HDD, with about 24GB available for storage. Should I look into getting a PCI RAID card? Is it difficult to setup a RAID array on a Linux box?

I can already see that I'm going to need a new case for this machine since the original case has only 1 internal bay for a HDD. I'm probably gonna pick up that Ultra Mid-Tower that's FAR on Frys.com along with the FAR Ultra 500W PSU.

Having never had a fileserver at my disposal before, I'm not sure what exactly to do to get the most use out of it. I'm thinking maybe next year I'll put together an HTPC for my living room and archive my digital video captures on this sucker. How much space is a good allotment for something like that? 1TB? Less? More? Can something like BeyondTV record directly to a network drive?

Ooooh the possiblities! Please give me some suggestions the best ways to make use of my new server. \😀/

UPDATE: So I took advantage of the really cheap drives on sale at Staples. I picked up 3 x 200GB Ultra ATA drives, and put 2 of them into my fileserver. I basically rebuilt the thing from scratch so that I could RAID the two drives together and install the system on the array. There weren't enough IDE connectors to add the two new drives and still keep the old one.

It was also a good opportunity to move to Edgy from my previous Dapper installation, along with the newest versions of Webmin and Torrentflux. Now I have about 350GB of network storage to use! 😀

 

[Forsythe]

Mailserver, installing fun problems. You should try gentoo, it's way more fun!

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: Garth
And to think, about a month ago I had never used a Linux distro before in my life.

My sister had an old HP Pavillion 8760C laying around with Windows 95 installed on it. With it's measly PIII 600MHz CPU and 128MB PC100 RAM, I got Xubuntu up and running, and today I succeeded in setting up a Samba server, complete with a startup script to run the daemon every time it boots.

Now I need to acquire some storage space for this sucker. It's only got a 30GB HDD, with about 24GB available for storage. Should I look into getting a PCI RAID card? Is it difficult to setup a RAID array on a Linux box?

I can already see that I'm going to need a new case for this machine since the original case has only 1 internal bay for a HDD. I'm probably gonna pick up that Ultra Mid-Tower that's FAR on Frys.com along with the FAR Ultra 500W PSU.

Having never had a fileserver at my disposal before, I'm not sure what exactly to do to get the most use out of it. I'm thinking maybe next year I'll put together an HTPC for my living room and archive my digital video captures on this sucker. How much space is a good allotment for something like that? 1TB? Less? More? Can something like BeyondTV record directly to a network drive?

Ooooh the possiblities! Please give me some suggestions the best ways to make use of my new server. \😀/

Congrats! 😀

I would definitely not recommend a PCI RAID card. I had a hellova time getting my Promise SX4000 card working in Fedora Core 4. The only place I found a driver for it was a Yahoo group devoted to that card and it only worked up to a certain kernel level (any kernel updates broke the driver). I also think you'll have more experienced Linux people recommend using Linux software RAID. I have never done it though.

Why would he want to run Gentoo over Xubuntu?

 

[Brazen]

Before going any further, I would suggest checking out Webmin. The steps for installing it are:

Enable the Univeres repository.

# sudo apt-get ?y install libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libio-pty-perl
# wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin_1.300_all.deb
# sudo dpkg ?i webmin_1.300_all.deb

Then, you can connect to https://servername:10000 and get some nice remote administration tools. It has a ton of tools by default, but I particularly like: Under Networking, the firewall module is the best I've found for configuring iptables, and under Hardware, their are modules for creating software Raid arrays, lvm, and partitions.

For a file server, I'll tell you what I did. I had an old Dell celeron system with 1 internal drive bay. I installed linux on it just like you did, on a single small drive (except I used CentOS, with no gui, but no matter). I then bought 2 120-gig harddrives, put one where the floppy drive goes and one where the cdrom goes. I then set those up as software Raid 1 drives, and put my shared folder on that Raid array. BTW: I do NOT like Webmin's Samba module, I prefer to edit the config files by hand, or with Swat.

The other thing I did was install Apache with php and put Torrentflux on it. Torrentflux is a php web program that lets you connect to a website on your server, upload a torrent file to it, and it will download the torrent directly to your file server.

 

[Robor]

Thanks for that info Brazen... I've got an Ubuntu 'server' running at home now and I'm definitely going to do this! 😀

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Forsythe
Mailserver, installing fun problems. You should try gentoo, it's way more fun!

more fun...

yeah, because waiting 4 hours for Samba to compile form source is more fun then typing "apt-get install samba" and waiting 2 minutes or so.

 

[ebaycj]

Linux software raid + supported SATA-II adapter + Big SATA-II drives = Teh SeX0r home file server.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Robor
Thanks for that info Brazen... I've got an Ubuntu 'server' running at home now and I'm definitely going to do this! 😀

Well, beyond that even, there are two vfs modules for Samba that I particularly like: 'recycle' and 'shadow_copy'. Recycle is pretty easy to add in, but for shadow_copy you must have set up the shared folder on a partition that is on lvm (you can have a partition on top of lvm, and lvm on top of software Raid), and you must have reserved space on the logical volume for snapshots.

Personally, I don't see any need for these on a home server, but I do have these on the new file server that I'm setting up at work.

 

[InlineFive]

If you have Samba installed may as well enable the WINS server component. 🙂

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Thanks to everyone for your great responses! 🙂

I remember now that I've read about Linux software RAID, so it seems that is the way to go. Thanks Robor and ebaycj for steering me clear of that problem.

Brazen, I will definitely look into getting Webmin installed, and Torrentflux sounds like an awesome program. Is it ok if I PM you with a few questions if I hit a snag or two?

Originally posted by: InlineFive
If you have Samba installed may as well enable the WINS server component. 🙂

I got that configured as part of the setup already. It was simply part of the how-to that I followed along to get it running. Heck, I'm not even completely clear on what it does that is advantageous, but it works!

Thanks again, all. Feel free to keep adding suggestions if anyone has more!

 

[Nothinman]

Should I look into getting a PCI RAID card? Is it difficult to setup a RAID array on a Linux box?

Before buying you should make sure that the card's chipset is supported by Linux, in general they 'just work' but it's a good idea to be sure. If it's hardware RAID you'll setup the array in the firmware on the card and it'll show up as one drive to Linux, if you want to use software that's a little more involved but not that difficult.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Wow this is awesome.

Just today I managed to get Webmin installed, a LAMP stack running and Torrentflux configured so that I can run it from anywhere on my LAN.

I can't seem to configure Apache/Torrentflux to accept connections from outside my LAN, though. For example, I can connect to my Linux box at http://192.168.1.4/ and even though I have my router set to forward port 8080 to that IP, I can't seem to connect to it when I try http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8080/ using the IP I get from whatismyip.org.

I added "Listen 8080" to my apache2.conf file... is there anything else I need to do?

 

[Brazen]

8080 is blocked by some ISPs. Try 8081. A lot of daemons also have an option for what network to listen on, which Ubuntu and Debian often set to be very restrictive by default, but I don't _think_ Apache has such a directive.

Have you tried connecting to http://localipaddress:8080? Get that to work first, and then worry about getting it to work outside the local network. Also, if you are on your local network, you will not be able to connect in through your public IP - you will have to test it from an outside location.

Is it ok if I PM you with a few questions if I hit a snag or two?

PMs are a-ok, but it sounds like you don't need it now!

I got that configured as part of the setup already. It was simply part of the how-to that I followed along to get it running. Heck, I'm not even completely clear on what it does that is advantageous, but it works!

WINS. It's pretty much a waste these days, unless you have old Win95 or WfW workstations.

 

[drag]

restart apache to re-read the configuration maybe?

Personally with my stuff I am lazy. On my router I can take port 8080 on the outside and forward it to port 80 on the internal lan.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: drag
restart apache to re-read the configuration maybe?

Personally with my stuff I am lazy. On my router I can take port 8080 on the outside and forward it to port 80 on the internal lan.

I'm almost positive you can do that with iptables, too, on the server itself (configurable through webmin, but not sure how).

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: drag
restart apache to re-read the configuration maybe?

Personally with my stuff I am lazy. On my router I can take port 8080 on the outside and forward it to port 80 on the internal lan.

I'm almost positive you can do that with iptables, too, on the server itself (configurable through webmin, but not sure how).

Ok, go to the Firewall config in Webmin. Choose the nat table and add a rule to the PREROUTING chain. At the top is a redirect option, put in port 80. Down below there is conditions, select destination port of 8081. Save the new rule and apply the new firewall config. This will route anything to port 8081 to port 80 on the server itself.

This is pretty succinct instructions. Feel free to post if you need better details (or PM).

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Updated 2/25/07