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Re: [LUG] First plunge into ZFS/FreeNAS

 

I wrote, "All I really want is to access the network disk hosted on the microserver as though it was a local disk on the windows computers. "

Set this up, working just how I wanted, think FreeNAS is here to stay, yay! :)

On 17 April 2017 at 23:52, M. J. Everitt via list <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
-1 for Top-Posting .. but +1 on content .. and LOL thanks for the chuckle!

Sometime if you're about for a beer/other-beverage, we'll have to meet
up sometime mr meowski :D

Cheers,
MJE

On 17/04/17 23:11, mr meowski via list wrote:
> On 17/04/17 21:32, Daniel Robinson via list wrote:
>> Hello folks,
>>
>> Just wondering if somebody would be so kind as to tell me my RAID
>> options for my current hardware setup.
>>
>> I have 2x identical 1TB and 2x identical 500GB stuffed inside a newly
>> acquired HP N40L microserver.
>>
>> In am looking for redundancy and don't require more than 1TB of total
>> storage at this present time.
>>
>> I will be using FreeNAS unless anyone wants to point me back in the
>> direction of Linux/Debian.
>>
>> My guess is I'll need two RAID 1. 2x1tb=1tb 2x500gb=500gb total storage
>> of 1.5TB. However, I am very new to ZFS and I might be looking at this
>> as though it was the year 2004. (not played with RAID since around that
>> time).
>>
>> Any pointers please?
> Hi Daniel - I was just going to take a break from answering DCGLUG
> questions for a bit and then you had to pop up and mention the "Z"
> thing, which unfortunately I just can't resist... ZFS is my favourite
> thing in computing since Linux probably.
>
> MJE's already given you some great pointers on FreeNAS and he's pretty
> spot on, especially regarding the GUI. It nearly completely spoils an
> otherwise turnkey appliance unfortunately as I inevitably find myself
> configuring things more efficiently and a lot faster at the prompt in
> BSD style, only to find out it's completely out-of-sync with all the GUI
> stuff. At which point I usually wish I'd just rolled my own with actual
> BSD which is what I usually end up doing. FreeNAS is flawed in my
> opinion, although if you don't stray outside the GUI much or try and do
> anything relatively complicated, it's still not a bad product.
>
> You should first check this out though:
>
> https://www.servethehome.com/freenas-corral-canned-development-essentially-halted-now/
>
> As ever, nothing is simple as it first seems :[
>
> FreeNAS is developed by a company called "iX" and they don't have a
> stellar reputation: like the "Electric Fence" company that develops
> pfsense, another famous BSD-derived turnkey appliance that functions as
> an all-in-one network system they make some questionable calls sometimes
> - people have said considerably less charitable things about them
> elsewhere too, which I'll leave as an exercise for you to google. BSD of
> course is very permissively licensed as compared to the famous GPL which
> kind of opens the doors for various abuses. Both iX and Electric Fence
> have been panned mercilessly for playing fast and loose with licensing,
> copyright assignments and stiffing user communities over the years -
> ultimately they are for-profit companies that want you to upgrade from
> their free versions to paid flagship products. Make of that what you
> will: neither pfsense or FreeNAS are useless by any means but all that
> glitters is not gold. I personally keep retesting both again and again
> over the years, only to remember why I either roll my own, pay
> considerably more for enterprise products from different vendors when
> appropriate or look for other free equivalents that aren't run by scumbags.
>
> This probably isn't the kind of information you wanted to be fair, but I
> feel it would be a bit remiss not to warn you. I know I'm an annoying as
> hell know-it-all sometimes but I really have a *lot* of painful
> experience in this specific area. On that note, I'm going to annoy you
> even more by saying that I really, *really* don't like HP Microservers
> one little bit either and I've dealt with god knows how many of them. I
> used to work for a couple of companies that actually resold them
> packaged with amongst other things FreeNAS and pfsense so I really do
> have the scars to show for it. But now I feel really bad so time to be a
> bit more positive.
>
> There's no reason why your Microserver N40L can't and won't be a really
> fun little toy to play with and even a perfectly functional little NAS
> box for actual fileserving duties - don't let my sour grapes put you off!
>
> Things to bear in mind: they aren't strong systems (there are newer ones
> with full UEFIs, multicore Xeons and add-in proper RAID cards that are
> surprisingly potent but unfortunately you don't have one of those) so
> will never manage much in the way of throughput. The built in RAID
> system sucks and you'll be much, much better off disabling it completely
> and using either softraid or ZFS functionality to handle the whole
> storage stack. The lack of expansion slots isn't helpful either, as is
> their tendency to disable or degrade some SATA ports if you fully load
> the box and/or use the internal headers to connect devices up - this
> varies by model unfortunately so I recommend really reading around to
> get the full info. There is a TON of info online about these things
> luckily, so read as much as you can on your specific unit.
>
> What you want to do with it is the most important factor - if you just
> want to experiment with it and try loads of different options it's
> actually a great little test box but be wary of the common mistake. You
> start off with a test instance, it goes well and so you start using it
> and then before you know it, suddenly the machine has accidentally been
> promoted from testing to production and you can't really tweak or muck
> about with it much 'cos it's now your main backup target and fileserver.
> Keep all your important stuff elsewhere until you've really, really
> settled on your final system for it and then to be fair, you can
> probably shove it in a closet and forget about it for a few years and it
> will Just Work(TM). The Microservers are genuinely good for that, I
> won't knock 'em too hard.
>
> As to your actual original question, you mostly know what you're doing
> and I prefer your approach to MJE's advice to be honest! It's currently
> a spare box after all so screw reading the manual (sorry Michael) and
> just install whatever you want and play with it until it breaks. Then
> wipe it and reinstall again.
>
> Bearing in mind the limitations I mentioned of degrading SATA
> connections with a fully populated box, if you rip out the optical drive
> as well as use the internal header you can actually cram two more SATA
> disks in there (not full size obviously). The N40L is frankly just too
> weak for serious ZFS use - forget 8Gb RAM if you want to use anything
> above the most basic features. Flicking on native ZFS compression will
> batter performance and the killer feature - dedupe - will instantly
> cripple it completely. For more gentle use like a home fileserver if you
> do want to use ZFS and I definitely recommend playing with it, it'll be
> much, much more usable if you grab one of the spare internal SATAs,
> attach a SSD and configure it as a ZIL/L2ARC cache for the zpools. That
> unfortunately is somewhat of a dark art that will require a lot benching
> and tuning to really bring it to life. This is exactly the sort of thing
> your N40L might be pretty fun to muck about with I guess - but I
> categorically would NOT use FreeNAS for this. You'd be better off with
> straight FreeBSD or even Linux. Most of the better Linux distros have
> quite robust ZFS systems available now, including Debian and CentOS. And
> Arch, Ubuntu, SuSE...
>
> Initially you would indeed want to configure 2 x zpools, one out of the
> 500Gb disks and one out of the 1Tb disks. You have multiple options even
> there, and many, many gotchas to watch out for: ZFS intensely dislikes
> the lazy setups that you tend to get "out of the box". You need to watch
> for partition sector alignments, ashift values, stride size and types...
> all of which can be relentlessly tuned. You can go RAIDZ across two of
> the disks to create a RAID1 style mirror, or just make one non-fault
> tolerant JBOD style array out of both disks, and then tell ZFS
> specifically to keep multiple redundant copies on both platter sets.
> Again, all can be mercilessly tweaked and tuned and even slight
> misconfigurations can cripple performance instantly. ZFS will also eat
> any and all RAM it can get its hands on, and then some.
>
> Ermm, I'm not exactly selling ZFS here am I? :|
>
> On that specific hardware I think I'd be tempted to play with everything
> and just muck about if I were you. A lot of this stuff is overthinking
> it and way too "enterprisey" to care about for a dinky little home
> server box. An actual, solid recommendation? I'd stick with Linux to be
> honest if I wanted it to be an actual working system rather than just a
> test box.
>
> Specifically, I'd go with Arch (or Debian stable, or CentOS - the
> boring, ultra-stable ones) and mdraid, the Linux software
> implementation. Don't do the predictable nasty RAID 0 or 1 default
> options though, they suck. What you probably want is a RAID10 far2
> layout type across each of your 2x2 disk sets and run the OS from USB
> (ugh) or an internal SATA port. Follow Michael's advice to add a second,
> bonded network card and whilst you still won't saturate a gigabit link
> from non-SSD SATA drives, RAID10-FAR2 will give you normal array write
> speeds and very nearly double the usual read speeds of a traditional
> RAID setup. That'll happily serve multiple large HD films or similar
> workloads which considering the hardware platform it's running on, is
> the highest utilisation you're realistically going to get out of it.
> Unfortunately that will still be *considerably* slower than a half
> decent modern laptop with m2 SSD storage and USB3.1 Gen2/Thunderbolt
> connectivity but hey, your N40L is also cheaper than a MacBook Pro or
> Dell XPS 13 anyway. Plus you probably don't have a 10G switch to hand
> anyway to carry that sort of throughput so whatever.
>
> Damn it, I really got carried away this time. This was the proverbial
> red flag to the bull question I guess, lots of my favourite subjects all
> crammed into one! Sorry Daniel, hope some of that will be of some use
> and not too... negative in places. Don't get me wrong, a fun toy is a
> fun toy and I've got some original RPis still running as production
> fileservers here and there off of SD cards for god's sake, and they work
> perfectly. It's in my nature to overthink things and type much too long
> emails apparently.
>
> Cheers
>
>



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