Scott O'Brien

Note: This post is one in a series aimed to be a tutorial eventually, it’s not currently finalised and at the moment exists as a place for collating thought and collecting feedback

This will be my first blog post into a guide of setting up a fileserver using Solaris (well, OpenIndiana) and ZFS to create a fileserver that has a main purpose of being a reliable server (the focus on this build is more about reliability then throughput).

My build will probably be different then most. One of the deciding factors in me choosing my hardware would have to be physical space and energy requirements. With this server, I’ve got this relatively unused space sitting behind my 27” monitor that is reserved for the box and as the primary purpose of this box is to backup and store my data in an effort to become paperless, the power requirements are going to be trying aimed at being energy efficient.

I have found a nice tower that I’d like to use that is attractive for a few reasons. It will fit the space behind my monitor nicely but also comes with a very efficient power supply.

For the CPU, at the time of writing (March 2011), the new Sandy Bridge processors are looking like they give a big bang for your buck in terms of power usage. The only problem now is that I have to find a mini-itx motherboard that is compatible with the sandy bridge architecture (has to be mini-itx because of the form factor of the case) and has enough SATA ports (or the ability to expand to meet my requirements) and is compatible with OpenIndiana. So far, the best I’ve found is the the DH67CF. Unfortunately for a fileserver that’s going to be hosting important information, this build won’t support ECC memory, which is pretty important as you can see here (probably a better article required to link there) but hopefully not regrettably, I’ll chose to risk it.

I’ve chosen to go with RAIDZ-2 to give two redundant hard disks in my data pool (with a total of 4 hard drives.) The reason being that if they are coming from the same batch then as hard disks stand, it’s likely that two will fail at more or less a similar time. It’s also worth mentioning for the critical data on my fileserver I’m going to be implementing remote off-site backups so while a dead pool will be frustrating, the likelihood of recovering some data should not be compromised.

I’ve decided that 2TB of storage should be sufficient for my requirements. For my storage array I’ve chosen to go with 4 1TB drives [[ToDo: Choose hard disks and why]] set up in Raidz-2.

Other things that I might require to put in are I/O expansion cards for more SATA drives.

Other posts to come in the series:
1. Selecting the hardware
2. Installing the Operating System
3. Setting up Snapshots
4. Allowing access through NFS & SAMBA
5. Setting up encrypted off-site backups
6. Configuring Windows & Linux clients to dump backup info to the FileServer
7. My router setup, configuring IP tables & torrents on a low-powered server.