Home Server Rebuild: Part 1 The Grunt Work

I've been avoiding this for a while now..... the grunt-work associated with a major change. But it had to happen sooner or later. As I've discussed before, there are a number of things about my WHS (Windows Home Server 2011) running file server that I've become unhappy with; although, much of it doesn't have anything to do with WHS itself, but rather the HighPoint Caching controller. 

After a lot of hours of watching YouTube I came to the following conclusions:

• I have to decide how I want to manage my storage.
• I have to decide what operating system I want to use.
• How safe do I want to be in terms of the files residing on the file server?
• How much money do I want to put into the server in terms of drives?
• How much time do I want to allocate to learning the OS?

Don't get me wrong: I love this stuff! But I have another full-time profession, a family that expects me to spend time with them. AND I do not have an unlimited amount of cash to expend on this solution.

So, here are my options. They start with reloading Windows Home Server 2011 which has the distinct advantage that I own it and have used it for close to a year now so there's a level of familiarity. My hardware is also set up for it, with a 160Gb SSD for the OS to live on, and a Highpoint caching controller that I know works with it. The downside is that I'm not very happy with how it's working and will have to expend an unknown amount of time figuring out how to make it work better..... if that's possible. Furthermore, it's a product that's been "orphaned" by Microsoft, so this is the "end of the trail" for it.

An obvious alternative is FreeNAS. It's well-known and quite popular today. It has that always favorable attribute of being a free product. As such is supported by the "open-source" community. It and it's off-shoot, NAS4Free (more on this later), have the advantage of having a robust software RAID file system that doesn't require the use of an expensive (and often annoyingly difficult to use) hardware controller. Plus underlying technology that allows it to play nicely with various other systems ranging from Windows (CIFS), Linux (SMB) to AFP (Mac Networking). They can also handle standalone authentication or work with Active Directory, although that's not particularly relevant in my case.

 

And of course, you can't talk about FreeNAS without getting into NAS4Free which is ixSystems' attempt to do FreeNAS with a better web interface and plugin system. As it turns out, based on lots of research, it seems to be somewhat less "bleeding edge" than FreeNAS and thus easier for laymen like me to grasp. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of what exactly pushed me in this direction. Suffice to say that the cleaner and easier interface was a better fit for me. 

....But what about the various Linux distros? Although, I'm certain that these are great for full production environments with a professional well versed in running command-line, these aren't for me. I will say that I was suitably impressed with CentOS during my time with it, but I just don't see myself investing the time necessary to become fully comfortable with it's use. Plus; I don't need a full server. I just need something to serve files, so really a "roll-your-own" NAS with greater flexibility.

What got done today? I loaded the OTP (Old ThinkPad) mobile file server up with NAS4Free 32-bit v. 9.3.0.2.1190 with it. Got it up and running. Copied a ripped movie file to it and played it back off. It's a good start! So stay tuned as this project proceeds and I decide whether this is in fact the server OS for me.