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Julian Hall wrote: > Hi All, > > A friend of mine has been looking into setting up a NAS drive for backup > and network share of his files. <SNIP> > 1. Would there be any problem with using an EXT3 (or 2) formatted drive > on a NAS drive accessed by a Windows PC? I'm thinking there wouldn't be > as the enclosure's Linux firmware would handle all the data throughput > and the enduser PC would just see a drive to read and write to, or is > that complete cobblers? > Nope, no problem at all. All you are presenting is a SMB/CIFS share (Samba), and the underlying filesystem type is irrelevant. You could also add http or (s)ftp access to the files. > 2. If (1) wouldn't work, is there any major issue with an NTFS drive > being used in a NAS enclosure? > (1) would work, but no - no other issues. Personally I would rather stick to a native Linux filesystem, such as ext3 or for particularly good support for large files i'd recommend XFS or ext4. (Some might say ext4 isn't quite stable [time tested]) > 3. He's also considering building a NAS server out of old bits and > installing FreeNAS. Any experience of this, pitfalls, idiosyncrasies? > FreeNAS is pretty good, makes it all straight forward. Another option is openfiler (.com) which is arguably more pleasing on the eye. Something else to consider is just a raw Linux install (Ubuntu perhaps ;), and using mdad raid directly (not that complicated). Although he won't see pretty graphs and such, some might argue this isn't required. It should be self-maintaining and easier for you to poke over SSH if needed. HTH Kind Regards, Dave Walker -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html