Author Topic: eCS for home-made NAS / file server  (Read 11722 times)

Glenn

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eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« on: September 19, 2015, 05:18:23 am »
Hi all,

It has been quite some time I have not used eCS (after it refused to install properly on my current laptop, bought 4 years ago..), so I am a bit out of phase with what has happened in the meantime, whether in terms of improvements, new apps, or new sales circuit (I have seen the Arca Noae posts but without really understanding what happened to SSI or Mensys).

Now let's get to the point of my question... When I was shopping for a new NAS enclosure today, the seller tried to convince me that building my own file server would be cheaper and better than the fancy Sinology or Qnap I was looking at. It may very well be true. While these file servers have their own, usually quite intuitive software OS to manage them, the seller told me that a well-configured Linux could also work, and I wondered if someone has already tried making a NAS / file server with eCS that would run flawlessly on modern hardware while providing the same kind of interface as the commercial solutions. After all, WSeB was known to be a pretty good server OS (although as a non-IT professional, some of the options kept me confused...).
Would a WSeB or eCS solution support hot swap of hard drives? Creating RAID arrays? Are there already some easy-to-install software packages that would set-up the web interface used to configure the various types of access to the data?
Has someone already done that and could share the experience (in terms of hardware configuration requirements, steps to follow, etc)?

Maybe this topic has already been discussed in the past few years, in which case redirecting me to the good forum page would be the best answer!

Thanks in advance for the help!

Sincerely,

A.

Doug Bissett

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Re: eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« Reply #1 on: September 19, 2015, 06:33:20 am »
Quote
Would a WSeB or eCS solution support hot swap of hard drives? Creating RAID arrays? Are there already some easy-to-install software packages that would set-up the web interface used to configure the various types of access to the data?
Has someone already done that and could share the experience (in terms of hardware configuration requirements, steps to follow, etc)?

Well, no, no, and yes. Hot swap, and raid, is really not all that useful for home systems. They may be useful for large networks, where down time is really not on, but IMO they are not cost effective, or even desirable, in a home situation.

A few years ago, I built my own "NAS", using an older computer that I had sitting around (Asus A8N-SLI, in an old case). It had a gigabit network adapter, and a SATA drive, so I decided to give it a try. I added a 1 TB SATA drive (formatted JFS), and added:
ECS 2.1 (or 2.2 b2).
SAMBA server.
Peter Moylan's FTP server.
Peter Moylan's Weasel mail server (now with IMAP). I also use STunnel in front of them, for secure connections.
Peter Moylan's MajorMajor (not yet used, but it works).
WEB/2 (not really used, but it works).
RSYNC (used with backups).
PMVNC for remote control.

It works great with eCS, and windows (XP, 7, and now 10). I have also used it with Linux, but the Linux permissions thing is a pain.

A few months ago, that computer died, so I replaced it with a newer machine, which also works great (just replaced the motherboard, CPU, and memory). Initially, I had a problem with the new NIC, but the latest Arca Noae NIC update released the MMRE driver (for Realtek), and that works well. One major advantage, is that I can use that machine, if my main system quits.

You don't need a super powerful machine, all you need is a single processor (but multiple processors work too), and appropriate drive capacity for what you need. You probably want SATA drives (Max 2 TB), to keep the price down, and the performance up (IDE and SCSI drives are way too expensive for what you get).

HTH...

Michaelhz

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Re: eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« Reply #2 on: October 04, 2015, 09:52:41 pm »
After a few weeks, I would now like to give my input to encourage the use of an OS / 2-based NAS.

My Hardware: Msi C847ms - E33 Motherboard Celeron (C847) with low power consumption. Needs QSLDR to use 4G Memory

My Server-Services:
  • SAMBA as PDC  for Win7 and WinXP Clients. Use of a recent server for proper collaboration with win7  ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/server/test/
  • vbox run wind*ws terminal server
  • mediatomb for UPNP Services
  • Peter Moylan's FTP server
  • PMVNC for remote control
  • crond for job control

Cron runs Virus-Scan and Data Backup. My crontab is like:

30 23 * * * freshclam
00 00 * * 4 clamscan -r -l d:/infected/clam_d.log --move d:/infected d:/home
16 08 * * * clamscan -r -l d:/infected/clam_c.log --move d:/infected c:/home
00 02 * * * rsync_daily.cmd


rsync_daily.cmd:
/* REXX */
"rsync -aXb --stats --delete --backup-dir=e:/backup/"DATE(S)" d:/home e:/ > e:\backup\"DATE(S).log


Systemdrive is scanned on a daily base for viruses and data/homedrive once per week. Rsync keeps d-drive in sync with e-drive. Additionally all "old" data is stored on e-drive. So accidentally deleted data can be retrieved.

What I really miss is
Best regards
Michael




Neil Waldhauer

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Re: eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« Reply #3 on: October 05, 2015, 04:33:53 am »
1. Which test version of SAMBA server are you using?


2. When I run PMVNC, I get a very large number of unknown attempts to log in. Do you see this also?

Expert consulting for ArcaOS, OS/2 and eComStation
http://www.blondeguy.com

Doug Bissett

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Re: eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« Reply #4 on: October 05, 2015, 05:32:05 pm »
Quote
1. Which test version of SAMBA server are you using?

I am currently using ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/server/samba-1-1-4-804.wpi with ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/server/rpmsubset4smb.zip. It works perfectly with XP, 7 and 10. I have also used it with Linux (but not much). One problem, that I do see, is that SMDB.EXE will spontaneously terminate, for no apparent reason. I got http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/util/system/procwd10.zip, and set it to run SAMBA restart when it detects the problem. So far, that has worked well.

EVFSGUI has some problems, but ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/client/evfsgui/evfsgui-25RC7-20141213.zip, with ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/client/ndpsmb-2_1_5-GA-20131003.wpi and ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/client/smbclut/smbclut-1-1-4-804.zip seems to work, as long as you wait for it to populate the file list, before doing anything else. If you don't wait for it, it will sometimes hang the system, and a forced reboot is necessary. I can't tell if this is an EVSGUI problem, or a ndpsmb problem, but later versions of ndpsmb seem to be worse.

Quote
2. When I run PMVNC, I get a very large number of unknown attempts to log in. Do you see this also?

I have never seen any attempts to log on, that I didn't do myself. You may be more exposed though, since you run servers for external access, while I don't.

Michaelhz

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Re: eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« Reply #5 on: October 05, 2015, 09:40:57 pm »
Quote
1. Which test version of SAMBA server are you using?

Currently I am running 3.6.24-eCS 1.3.0-874. Works well, but creates a line

   idmap config * : backend = tdb

in smb.conf, which leads to problems when using the gui-configuration tools. After deleting this line, everything works as expected.

Quote
2. When I run PMVNC, I get a very large number of unknown attempts to log in. Do you see this also?

No, don't see this. My server is not exposed to the internet.

Greggory Shaw

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Re: eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« Reply #6 on: October 12, 2015, 03:36:30 am »

EVFSGUI has some problems, but ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/client/evfsgui/evfsgui-25RC7-20141213.zip, with ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/client/ndpsmb-2_1_5-GA-20131003.wpi and ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/samba/client/smbclut/smbclut-1-1-4-804.zip seems to work, as long as you wait for it to populate the file list, before doing anything else. If you don't wait for it, it will sometimes hang the system, and a forced reboot is necessary. I can't tell if this is an EVSGUI problem, or a ndpsmb problem, but later versions of ndpsmb seem to be worse.


Has anyone got the EVSGUI connected to a Win 10 share yet ?


Doug Bissett

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Re: eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« Reply #7 on: October 12, 2015, 06:40:16 pm »
Quote
Has anyone got the EVSGUI connected to a Win 10 share yet ?

It gives me "Error returning browse list:NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED", unless I supply the full credentials for a user on the Win10 machine. Even then it refuses to allow access to the data, but I may have something else wrong in windows. Windows 10 does access the eCS machine, with no trouble, so I use it that way.

Greggory Shaw

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Re: eCS for home-made NAS / file server
« Reply #8 on: October 14, 2015, 03:59:54 am »
Quote
Has anyone got the EVSGUI connected to a Win 10 share yet ?

It gives me "Error returning browse list:NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED", unless I supply the full credentials for a user on the Win10 machine. Even then it refuses to allow access to the data, but I may have something else wrong in windows. Windows 10 does access the eCS machine, with no trouble, so I use it that way.

Thanks same here just check if anyone else had the same problem with Win 10 shares.