Networking at home

I have an older Synology NAS at home, and I am planning to replace it with a custom built NAS. To decide which system to put on it, I have setup 5 different NAS solution in a virtual environment and measured how fast they are. There were two prerequisites to the candidates: they should support WSD and SMB Multichannel.

Recently I have migrated from my home made NAS server (no-name desktop PC with Ubuntu 1404 Server) to a sweet Synology DiskStation 414 . I this post I will write about the migration process, about how I have migrated from a 10 TB LVM configuration to a 12 TB Raid5 configuration and how I have checked, using md5 hashes, if all files were copied without any error.

The Intel SS4200 is a, now already discontinued, NAS product, with the advantage that it is an x86 computer, designed to hold 4 SATA HDD drives, which makes it ideal candidate  to install Ubuntu Server on it. After the unsuccessful installation to a bulit in  CF card in my previous blog , finally I decided to install the operating system to an external pendrive. Here is how to install it: Install Ubuntu Server 1404 on the pendrive The easiest way is to set up a virtual machine on your PC (I have used VMWare Player), where you connect the pendrive to the virtual machine, connect the Ubuntu Server Install CD image as the CD rom and simply install the Server to the pendrive. In the SW selection select OpenSSH, Samba and LAMP, the later for the case if you would like to do some custom web interface to your box. When installing GRUB, install it to the MBR of the pendrive. After installation, try if it is working in the vitrual machine, but as VMWare Player do not boot im...

Some years ago I bought an Intel SS4200 NAS , specially for the purpose to install custom "firmware" on it. It has a standard PC hardware with an 1.6 Ghz Celeron processor, 4 bays for SATA drives and it has a community dedicated to HW and SW modifications. Originally I have installed Ubuntu Server 10.04 on it using an external flash drive, but recently I refreshed the system to Ubuntu Server 14.04 on a Compact Flash card connected to the internal IDE connector using adapter. Here I will describe how I have installed 10.04 and how I did it for 14.04. I did the installation only once, I have some toughs that were I could have done it more easy, but after the system became operational I did not go back and test if the simplifications working in theory would work in practice. EDIT: Unfortunately after a lot of experimenting, it turned out, that the pata_legacy driver is painfully slow and the normal drivers coming with Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't recognize the parallel ATA...

Now I am setting up a new NAS and to be able to decide if I should use Stripped LVM I did some measurements. Stripped LVM means the the data volume is spread across 2 physical disks and data reads and writes are executed in parallel to the two disks, so in theory this will duplicate the disks speed. However stripping has one disadvantage that if one of the disks fails then all data is lost, while with normal volumes, there are chances that from the functional disk it is possible to restore the data. The NAS has a Gigabit Ethernet LAN connection so in theory 125 MBytes/sec speeds can be achieved. To do the tests I have set up two 200 GByte logical volumes on the LVM containing two 4 Tbytes physical disks, one stripped across the two disks and the other without stripping. First I measured the speed within the NAS, using the linux DD command: On the normal volume: >dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/data/Adatok/test bs=1M count=2000      2000+0 records in 2000+0 records out...

I have a pretty old PC from 2003 which I have been using for some time as a NAS. It is a standard desktop PC (self built), but it has 8 IDE hard drives ranging from 200 Gbyte up to 500 Gbyte. The total capacity of the drives is around 2 T and I just decided to give a refresh to the system to back up my digital videos to it. I have been using FreeNAS 7.2, which is pretty nice, but it is BSD based and as I have more experience with linux and especially with Ubuntu Server so I decided to upgrade to that one. Here comes a short guide on how to setup Ubuntu Server on a machine to work as a simple NAS. Installing Ubuntu Server from pendrive (Flash memory) Today this should be a strait forward thing, you take the installation ISO image, with some tool you copy it to a pendrive you plug it into the machine and install it, but in my case I run into plenty of problems. By the end I have solved all of them, but here is a list of how to solve them one by one. 1) Copy the ISO to a pendri...

In my prevoius blog I wrote about my tests to increase the read/write speed on my Linux home server, now I will collect some links here: A very good comparition of Windows and Linux file system for using as a NAS. Test result for a consumer NAS device. Test results for Linux file systems (ext2, ext3, Reisser, XFS). IOZone test suite. NAS performance measurement comparations. A test measurement of comparing Solaris ZFS, Ext2 and XFS in NAS environment. It is using NFS intead of SAMBA, but the speed results are very convincing with read speeds over 76 Mbyte/sec and write speeds arround 35 Mbyte/sec. I started to do some own test in the server itself, and copying a file from one disk to an other was done with the speed of 23,4 Mbyte/sec, which shows, that it is possible to write to an ext3 filesystem with speeds above 20 Mbyte/sec. I will do some more testing later. I did some testing on my Windows Desktop computer and got a read and write speed of ~90 Mbyte/sec, and thi...

I have recently installed a gigabit card to my home fileserver and was very dissapointed, that the speed of network writes and reads did not increased as I expected. I found some Samba improvement tips, but they increased the speed only by ~10 percent, while I would expect to have network speed on the range of 50 Mbytes/sec. To make an experiment I wanted to use NFS instead of Samba, from one unix test it looked much faster than Samba. There is an official Microsoft client for this, it is named Unix Services for Windows, the actual version is 3.5 and it is quite outdated. Still after installing it and configuring both the server and the Windows XP it worked adn when attempting to read files it was quite stable. But as soon as I tried to copy a 4,3 Gbyte ISO image, my XP crashed completly :-( After a lot of search finally I could identify that you should apply the hotfix: KB904838 and this will solve your problem. Back to the original problem, I have measured the following sp...