NAS Storage Server

Interesting read on progress of the LessFS and Btrfs file systems:

LessFS Pairs De-Duplication With Snappy Compression

Btrfs Picks Up Snappy Compression Support

Jim Metcalf has put together a 3-part series of articles reviewing unRAID.

He goes through unRAID‘s installation and configuring. He also explains the tradeoffs and install details of unRAID storage alternative to Windows Home Server (WHS).

• unRAID Server – Part 1 The Journey to unRAID
• unRAID Server – Part 2 Installing unRAID
• unRAID Server – Part 3 Configuring and Using unRAID

Linux kernel 3.2 will be out early next year, and included will be some exciting changes for the btrfs file system:

“Among the noteworthy changes to Btrfs in Linux 3.2 compared to Linux 3.1 are many clean-ups and optimizations, scrubber improvements (including performance improvements), error handling fixes, and improved recovery support. There were also some log tree improvements to Btrfs, but they were backed out at the last minute and now a likely candidate for the Linux 3.3 kernel. ”

Phoronix has more details: Btrfs brings “Pretty Beefy” Changes in Linux 3.2

Though the main development of FreeNAS (8) has been taken over by iXsystems, there are still improving and updating the previous 0.7 series. This due to some “home user features” that are missing from the FreeNAS 8 series (torrent downloading, streaming media, small footprint etc).

The latest release is FreeNAS 0.7.2.8191. Some of the changes included are:

• Add DHX2 support. (AFP service)
• Fix broken build. (iSCSI initiator module)
• Improve ESXi5 compatibility. (iSCSI service)
• Fix broken library. (UPnP service)
• Add online version check. (Firmware)
• Update translation files.
• Default QueueDepth is 32. (iSCSI service)
• Add zdb utility. (ZFS debugger)
• Upgrade to FreeBSD 7.3-p7.
• Upgrade istgt to 20111008. (ESXi5, 10GbE ready iSCSI target)
• Upgrade mDNSResponder to 320.5.1. (Zeroconf/Bonjour)
• Upgrade netatalk to 2.2.1. (AFP, TimeMachine for OS X Lion)
• Increase image size.
• Ignore an error in firmware check function.

Download or upgrade FreeNAS 0.7 from SF: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-7-Stable/0.7.2.8191/

If you follow the steps as described on extremetech.com you can set up your own personal cloud using free programs and an old PC.

What you need is:

• An old PC
• A copy of Openfiler, an open Linux-based OS that focuses on creating a user- and group-based server system that works by creating network shares much in the same way that Windows does
• A Usenet subscription
• sabNZBD
• SickBeard
• Subsonic

How to make your own personal media cloud using free programs and an old PC