This is a reblog of my “building a home NAS server” series on my old blog. The server still exists, still works but I’m about to embark on an overhaul so I wanted to consolidate all the articles on the same blog.
I’ve blogged building my own NAS/home server before, see here, here, here and here.
After a few months, I think it might be time for an interim update.
In its original incarnation, the server wasn’t as stable as it should have been given my previous experience of FreeBSD. For some reason, it would crash every few weeks and sometimes even hang on reboot. Not good, especially as it happened a few times while I wasn’t home. I guess I should have heeded the warning about the zfs integration being experimental… Things got worse when I added a wireless card and retired my access point. Roughly around this point in time I got fed up with this enough to go back and start building an OpenSolaris VM to try out a mail server setup similar to the one I’m running on FreeBSD.
Before I got anywhere with this, FreeBSD 8.0 came out, so I upgraded. ZFS had be promoted from experimental, the wireless stack has been overhauled, etc pp. The stability problems disappeared and the machine has been utterly reliable since then. Where before, trying to use Time Machine from to back up my MacBook via the wireless network was a good way to a 50% chance to crash the server, it now “just works”. This is where I wanted to get and I’ve now got there. Performance also seems to have improved - copying large files from the server to my Windows 7 machine sees a reliable 78MB/s via my Gigabit network now.
I’ve still got a couple of small changes I want to make to the machine - for example, I’ve got 4GB of RAM that I want to put into the machine. This should enable zfs readahead which should give me further performance improvements. I also plan to add two more fans to blow cold air over the hard drives to keep them happy and working for longer. Edit: Actually it didn’t as 4GB RAM on the mainboard result in slightly less than 4GB available to the OS. I did enable the readahead manually, though.
If I built another home server, I would probably get another motherboard. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with the one in the machine, but the CPU fan speed control only goes down to 70%, so no wonder that the CPU fan is noisier than it should be.
Was it worth it? Overall I’d say yes, although I probably should have stuck to tried and tested technology (either using FreeBSD’s built-in RAID5 or use OpenSolaris with zfs). This caused unnecessary problems at the beginning and pushed up the cost as I was dithering between either. Next time I probably set up the server on OpenSolaris and run the mail server on FreeBSD in a VM running on OpenSolaris. Given that the current configuration is working, I leave it alone for the time being though.