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OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Storage => Topic started by: Dariusz Piatkowski on November 01, 2014, 03:37:41 pm

Title: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on November 01, 2014, 03:37:41 pm
OK, so my kids (10 and 12 yo) have now begun to 'run rampant' with their tablets/cameras/etc...LOL...not that I'm complaining, but I need to figure out a way to manage their media data (photos, audio, and videos). Storing it on the main OS/2 machine is really not an option...I for one do NOT give my kids the access to the OS/2 box, number of reasons. They do have their own WinXP machine, however, to simplify access to the media from devices like a TV for example I'm looking more and more at the NAS type storage.

Soo...I took a peek at: Western Digital WDBCTL0020HWT My Cloud (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1140 (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1140)), reviews say it's not particularly awe inspiring...however, it's a starting point. Most importantly, I do need to understand how 'workable' daily interface to/from my OS/2 machine (where bulk of the data and media applications reside today) is.

Can anyone share their experience with the NAS devices?

I'm primarily focusing on the connectivity/protocol aspect here. So I would have this thing hard-wired to my router, no problem there. But I need to connect to the device afterwards. I see that this WD device in particular supports:

SMB/CIFS network filesystems
AFP ( for Apple Time Machine)
NFS (only to default Public mount)
FTP server

...the SMB/CIFS piece as best as I can tell is something that SAMBA port could interface with...something like NetDrive would probably work with this too (again, through the SAMBA plug-in I'm thinking).

If you tried this type of a setup, how have you done it?

Thanks!
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Matt Walsh on November 01, 2014, 03:55:42 pm
I've got one of the 2 TB MyCloud devices and have it plugged into my router by network cable.  It works fine on windows and my eCS2.1 boxes.  I use NetDrive on OS/2 to communicate, but I think you could use Samba.  On the Win7 boxes I use www.netdrive.com which is the same name, but different software.  You can use it free for one connection.
Matt Walsh
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: ivan on November 01, 2014, 11:36:46 pm
At work we have a combination of D-Link DNS-320, DNS-323, DNS-343 and DNS345 NAS boxes fitted with 1TB to 4TB drives set up as RAID1.  All are accessed from our OS/2 machines using SAMBA and the built in FTP servers.  We also supply them to our OS/2 using clients.

At home I have a DNS-320, and a DNS-232, one with a 1.5TB RAID1 and the other with a 2TB RAID1.  These are used to backup my various OS/2 machines again using SAMBA and their built in FTP servers.  They are, in turn, backed up to a DNS-343 that is set up with two 3TB RAID1 arrays.

All NAS boxes have a gigabit network interface and are connected to the network gigabit switch.

In the five or so years that we have been using them we have never had a problem connecting them to OS/2 machines but there have been a few glitches with windows machines mainly because of how windows acts on the network (the windows machines were from clients, not ours).
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Doug Bissett on November 02, 2014, 04:55:30 am
Quote
Can anyone share their experience with the NAS devices?

I'm primarily focusing on the connectivity/protocol aspect here. So I would have this thing hard-wired to my router, no problem there. But I need to connect to the device afterwards. I see that this WD device in particular supports:

SMB/CIFS network filesystems
AFP ( for Apple Time Machine)
NFS (only to default Public mount)
FTP server

...the SMB/CIFS piece as best as I can tell is something that SAMBA port could interface with...something like NetDrive would probably work with this too (again, through the SAMBA plug-in I'm thinking).

If you tried this type of a setup, how have you done it?

I was looking at getting one of those things, a few years ago. The first thing that struck me was that they are relatively expensive. The next thing that struck me was that they were not all OS/2 friendly. I had no real need for fancy things like RAID, so I went looking closer to home.

I had an old Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, that had been used as a gaming machine by a nephew. He got upgraded, so I ended up with a reasonably powerful machine (single core AMD Athlon processor, with 3 GB of memory). It started with a 320 GB SATA disk drive (doesn't have the AHCI option), built in 1 GB NVIDIA network adapter, and the usual array of hardware. I also had an old case to put it in, with adequate power supply. I added a 1 TB SATA drive (OS/2 supports up to 2 TB, apparently, and the box will hold a couple of them), and split the 320 GB drive into enough parts to install eCS 2.1 along side of WinXP (I wanted to keep that because the machine also has a TV adapter, and the software is in XP, but that is another story). Anyway, I added:

SAMBA (CIFS communication).
Peter Moylan's WEASEL e-mail server, which now includes IMAP server.  I use this for testing PMMail.
Peter Moylan's FTP server.
WEB/2 web server (Just because...).
RSYNC.
PMVNC server, for remote control.
The built in OS/2 firewall, set up according to the instructions at: http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0203H/vnewsf2.htm (http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0203H/vnewsf2.htm)
STunnel, for secure connections (I use this in front of Weasel, for testing PMMail, but it should work with any TCP/IP programs that don't have SSL type capabilities).

Then, I formatted the 1 TB drive as JFS, and started to figure out how to use it. It has worked very well, for what I need. Windows clients (XP and 7) use it, mostly through SAMBA, but the rest also work. I did play with Linux Mint Cinnamon 64 client, for a while, which also worked, but the permissions thing was a PITA. For eCS clients, I mostly use RSYNC to do nightly backups, but the rest work too.

You need to remember that this setup presents a network interface, and the internal storage devices don't mean anything to the client machines (meaning NFS means nothing). Apple Time machine is a backup tool (apparently). Of course, that won't run on my setup, but client machines should be able to use it. I am using the Seagate version of Acronis (free, but you need to have a seagate drive present, or it won't run) in windows for backups (uses SAMBA). I don't know much about Apple, but I suspect that there is an RSYNC implementation for it, and you should be able to mount a SAMBA share as a network drive for any Apple software to use (although I have heard some disparaging words about Apple, and network shares). The rest should work fine.

I suppose my setup is almost a server, but I don't use server software, and it is all OS/2 (eCS 2.1). The machine can also act as a backup machine, for my other machines, should the need arise. The cost was minimal, and the performance is excellent. The main drawback is that the case is big, and the fans are a bit noisy, but those problems are easily fixed, if I cared.

Oh yeah, it is also on my ancient Tripplite UPS, interfaced with UPSMONC through a serial port.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Paul Smedley on November 02, 2014, 09:39:30 am
It depends whether or not you need EA's on the samba share. If you do, using an 'off the shelf' NAS may not give you the customisation you need.

If you need EA support, you might be better buying something like a HP N40L or N54L Microserver, and installing Ubuntu Server on it - by installing webmin, you end up with something not hard to configure, but still have the power of a full server OS.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Sigurd Fastenrath on November 02, 2014, 10:06:48 am
Here you will find a wonderfull, detailed example created by Klaus:

https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.os2.org%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D6%26t%3D301&edit-text= (https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.os2.org%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D6%26t%3D301&edit-text=)

(Online translator acitvated)

Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Alex Taylor on November 02, 2014, 12:22:51 pm
I've been using a ZyXel NSA320 for over a year and a half now, it works very well.  You do need to use the included Windows software for first-time setup, but otherwise it works fine from OS/2 with EVFS/NetDrive and the Samba plugin.  I use it to run backups onto, as well as save some of my iTunes videos.  The NAS itself has no hard drives out of the box - you get a pair of SATA hard disks to put in it, and you can choose to configure them as one big volume, separate volumes, or RAID of various types.  It's small, fits easily under a desk or on a shelf, and is very quiet (a definite advantage when it lives in the bedroom!)

IIRC I submitted a detailed review to ecomstation.ru shortly after I got it, but they never bothered to post it on their site.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Eugene Gorbunoff on November 03, 2014, 12:02:55 am
More reports about NAS devices: http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=category&section=disk

* yes, not all reports were published, 100 reports in the queue, it requires efforts
* ZyXel NSA320 -- http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=item&id=2205
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Alex Taylor on November 04, 2014, 01:20:38 pm
More reports about NAS devices: http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=category&section=disk

* yes, not all reports were published, 100 reports in the queue, it requires efforts
* ZyXel NSA320 -- http://ecomstation.ru/hardware.php?action=item&id=2205

Ah yes, there it is.  Thanks, Eugene.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: mwizard on January 31, 2015, 01:02:28 am
I have heard stories that the RAID versions of NAS system require matching drives to work.  So you could not use two 1T drives from two different manufacturers.  And perhaps not even a mix of WD Caviar Blue & Green, etc.  For those who have been using them, can you confirm or deny the stories I've been hearing?

It puts a damper on my enthusiasm to find out that if one of my raid drives go out, I may have a very rough time trying to find a matching replacement drive if there were such a requirement.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Paul Smedley on January 31, 2015, 09:58:38 am
I have heard stories that the RAID versions of NAS system require matching drives to work.  So you could not use two 1T drives from two different manufacturers.  And perhaps not even a mix of WD Caviar Blue & Green, etc.  For those who have been using them, can you confirm or deny the stories I've been hearing?

It puts a damper on my enthusiasm to find out that if one of my raid drives go out, I may have a very rough time trying to find a matching replacement drive if there were such a requirement.

Every NAS I've seen runs linux, and use mdadm to create the array. You don't need identical drives.... http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408461 has some details.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: ivan on January 31, 2015, 10:12:58 am
Mark, I can only speak from the experience of using D-Link NAS boxes but we have never found them requiring matched drives or even drives of the same capacity for use in a RAID array (make sure you know just why you want to use a RAID array and what type of array - RAID is not a backup system).

With the D-Link, if you use different size disks and RAID 1 you will get a RAID array the size of the smallest disk and a standard disk for the remainder of the space.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: mwizard on February 03, 2015, 12:39:18 am
Paul/Ivan

Thanks very much for sharing your experience.  In this case, I have an interest in a low power consuming NAS (gigabit & 2T useable storage) that would have RAID mirror so that if I lost a disk, I could replace the bad disk and be back up to speed without losing data.  I have offline USB drives I can use for backups.

Would prefer one that doesn't require Win to setup since I don't own one of those machines.  I've been thinking of FreeNAS but getting it into a low power consuming system didn't seem all that easy to me.  I'm able to build my own systems, but I'm not an expert.

Thanks again.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Paul Smedley on February 03, 2015, 06:11:28 am
Hey Mark,

Thanks very much for sharing your experience.  In this case, I have an interest in a low power consuming NAS (gigabit & 2T useable storage) that would have RAID mirror so that if I lost a disk, I could replace the bad disk and be back up to speed without losing data.  I have offline USB drives I can use for backups.

Would prefer one that doesn't require Win to setup since I don't own one of those machines.  I've been thinking of FreeNAS but getting it into a low power consuming system didn't seem all that easy to me.  I'm able to build my own systems, but I'm not an expert.

HP Microserver N40L or N54L are reasonably priced, and reasonably low power. I run Ubuntu Server on mine. Started with a N40L and upgraded last year to a N54L.

Cheers,

Paul
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: ivan on February 03, 2015, 01:51:16 pm
Mark, you have two choices. 
1)  Buy a 2 or 4 bay NAS and disks and you are ready to go.

2)  Build your own which requires getting the hardware and some way of putting it all together plus setting up the software.

Adding to what I said in choice 1. All of the NAS boxes I have seen and used have a web interface that is accessed via a browser - all the win based program does is find the IP of the unit and then access the web interface. The D-Link units we use to supplement our HP storage array have a gigabit network interface and are fully configurable.  They also incorporate an FTP server and other services that we don't use.  Some date from 2006 and have been running 24/7 since then.  The one instance we had when a disk went down it was just a matter of pulling it and pushing in the replacement - the RAID 1 rebuilt itself in the background without any problem.
   
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: mwizard on February 04, 2015, 02:57:28 pm
Any opinions on choice of disks for these systems?

Green drives for saving money?
Black drives for performance?
Red NAS drives for some other reason?

What makes a good drive for a NAS application?

Security:
Does everyone think those NAS enclosures have or maintain good security?  I would think that NAS systems based on a linux distribution would have regular security updates & fixes.  How does that compare/contrast to the NAS enclosures approach?
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: ivan on February 04, 2015, 04:55:23 pm
Again speaking from my experience with D-Link NAS boxes.  We have mostly used standard SATA 2TB disks in all our NAS boxes mainly because we got the boxes well before 'special' drives were made available.  It is very much a case of you pay your money for the choice you make.

Regarding security, most of the 'off the shelf' boxes use ARM processors with the operating system being based on Linux and can be setup reasonably secure from the start.  You do have to use common sense when setting them up but since they are usually behind a firewall there isn't much to worry about.  Yes, some people use them to stream torrents which can leave the box open to outside access but then again everything else can, and should, be password protected.  Password can be given to individual users or groups of users to limit exactly what they can access and what they can do with it (read only or read/write).

If the NAS box is onlt available on the local network you have the added security of the modem/router setup, as does the rest of the internal network.  If you want the NAS to be available from the WAN then you need to take more care with how the modem/router is setup and exactly what services you open to the public.

In all the years that we have been using the NAS boxes we have not had one case of them being breached and that is not for the want of trying as our firewall logs show.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on February 06, 2015, 03:30:50 am
Any opinions on choice of disks for these systems?

Green drives for saving money?
Black drives for performance?
Red NAS drives for some other reason?

What makes a good drive for a NAS application?
...

Great question Mark.

I've got the NSA325 V2 box coming to me...$100 is getting me a brand new one, which I think is a pretty good buy.

As I'm getting ready to stuff some hard-drives into this thing I've been thinking of doing a 2x2T setup, for a total of 4T storage. This should last plenty of time, just a straight forward JBOD setup, no RAID.

I like the WD stuff, have had great luck with their VelociRaptor drives. Bought a BLACK unit for kid's PC and given the on-line tech reviews I'm seeing in general drives with more cache are being recommended for NAS boxes. I've decided to splurge the extra for a 7200 RPM drive.

At the end of the day, it all really depends on how many concurrent clients are hitting the NAS and how much of that is continuous data streaming.

What have you been looking at?
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Doug Bissett on February 06, 2015, 05:49:34 am
Quote
I'm seeing in general drives with more cache are being recommended for NAS boxes. I've decided to splurge the extra for a 7200 RPM drive.

It seems to me, that disk speed (including cache) is a non issue. The 1 Gbps network interface is very much slower than any hard disk, and that will be the limiting factor for speed. It doesn't matter how many clients you use, the limit is still 1 Gbps. All that happens, is that each client slows down since they need to wait their turn for network access. I suppose that a second (third etc.) NIC might speed things up, if you configured the network properly.

FWIW, I built my own NAS box, using an old Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, in an old case (it has a 1 Gbps NVIDIA NIC that works great with the Multimac NVIDIA driver). It is running eCS 2.1 for an OS, with SAMBA, RSYNC, WEB/2, Peter Moylan's FTP server and weasel mail server (including IMAP), and PMVNC for remote control. The most expensive part was a 1 TB Seagate disk to add to what the original system had. The main "problem" is that it is physically pretty big, but that could be solved by using one of those small box computers. In my case, I don't care.

There is no magic in a NAS box. I can use my setup with windows (XP and 7, specifically), and Linux, as well as with eCS (it should work with any system that uses standard TCP/IP software). Linux gets a bit complicated because of the, so called, "security" features, but it can be made to work.

I could, if I wanted to, add a second 1 TB disk drive, then use RSYNC to sync the two. Not quite a RAID setup, but almost as good, for what I would need.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Michaelhz on February 06, 2015, 10:51:24 am
Finally! Someone is using os/2 as NAS Server. I run nearly same setup as Doug, samba is running as a PDC, virtual box provides a winXP  terminal-server for this domain, cups provides printing service and mediatomb for video streaming. All in 24/7 operation, very solid.

If I would have some more time, I should mention this in the wiki here...
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on February 06, 2015, 03:25:19 pm
Quote
I'm seeing in general drives with more cache are being recommended for NAS boxes. I've decided to splurge the extra for a 7200 RPM drive.

It seems to me, that disk speed (including cache) is a non issue. The 1 Gbps network interface is very much slower than any hard disk, and that will be the limiting factor for speed. It doesn't matter how many clients you use, the limit is still 1 Gbps. All that happens, is that each client slows down since they need to wait their turn for network access. I suppose that a second (third etc.) NIC might speed things up, if you configured the network properly...

Doug,

Worst case scenario is that I have my 1Gig pathway saturated with multiple clients all looking for a different piece of data...if that is the case I want to be able to put a HD in that NAS enclosure that will not have a hard time getting the data the client needs, 7200 is faster then 5400, heck, 10K is even better...and SDD is simply awesome.

Here are some benchmarks (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/31906-zyxel-nsa325-2-bay-power-plus-media-server-reviewed?start=4 (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/31906-zyxel-nsa325-2-bay-power-plus-media-server-reviewed?start=4)) on the NSa325 unit, as you can tell, the sustained xfer rate is pretty high in a number of test cases, we are talking > 75MB/s...so if the network supports this throughput (yes, I agree, we have some challenges in OS/2) I want the storage media to handle multiple requests.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Doug Bissett on February 06, 2015, 09:04:10 pm
Quote
Worst case scenario is that I have my 1Gig pathway saturated with multiple clients all looking for a different piece of data...if that is the case I want to be able to put a HD in that NAS enclosure that will not have a hard time getting the data the client needs, 7200 is faster then 5400, heck, 10K is even better...and SDD is simply awesome.

Well, to put it in perspective: Your 100 Mbs network is like a motorized wheel chair. A 1 Gbs network is about like a 10 speed bicycle. A 5400 rpm disk is about like a standard 6 cylinder car. The 7200 rpm disk is about like a standard high performance street legal sports car. The 10000 rpm disk is like a low end race car. The SDD is like a high end race car. Any one of the disks will be around the block, many times, before the bicycle makes it around once.

One thing that you may want to do, is be sure that you can move the disk(s) into your main box. It would take me about a day to do a complete restore over the network. I figure that I will just move the disk into my main box, and it should only take about 4 hours to do a complete restore, if I ever need to do it. Smaller pieces are okay over the network, and I use RSYNC to do the backups, so that doesn't take very long. I use the same approach for my USB disks, which are only a little slower.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Paul Smedley on February 06, 2015, 09:40:29 pm
Hey Mark,

Any opinions on choice of disks for these systems?

Green drives for saving money?
Black drives for performance?
Red NAS drives for some other reason?

What makes a good drive for a NAS application?

Security:
Does everyone think those NAS enclosures have or maintain good security?  I would think that NAS systems based on a linux distribution would have regular security updates & fixes.  How does that compare/contrast to the NAS enclosures approach?

I'm using Western Digital Red drivers here. I agree that for security, a system based on a linux system like freenas or ubuntu server is the best option. I used to run a Qnap NAS and they were VERY slow to release security updates, and even updates of core applications like samba, etc.
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: karotlopj on April 17, 2016, 01:08:19 pm
Personally I would recommend setting up a FreeNAS box

http://www.freenas.org/

It's based on FreeBSD and is extremely scalable. Works well with my OS/2 boxes.

You can set up CIFS (Samba) shares quite easily via the web interface and connect using 'net use'
Title: Re: NAS and OS/2?
Post by: Olafur Gunnlaugsson on April 19, 2016, 04:25:23 am
Any opinions on choice of disks for these systems?

Green drives for saving money?
Black drives for performance?
Red NAS drives for some other reason?

What makes a good drive for a NAS application?

Normal 3TB Toshiba drives 7200rpm drives, a number of online hosting companies have come up with data that suggests these are by far the most reliable drives on the market, the 1, 2 and 4 TB versions from the same company have a much better than average reliability, on par with the best WD drives and a class above Seagate.

According to the data 3TB Tosh have around 1+% failure rates over the course of two years constant use (online 24/7), other Tosh drives around 2+%, WD around 2 to 5% depending on model and Segate 5 to 11%, ditto.

As I run OS/2 and Win 2011 HS (for XP compatibility that is not available for newer Win servers) I have bought 2TB version as the OS/2 server cannot use anything bigger and the WHS needs quite a lot of manual work to use the 3TB ones so I have stuck with the 2TB ones, four in each server, one has developed a minor fault after about 14 months that the company swapped out for me even though it was out of warranty.

These replaced a host of drives bought in the period between 2009 and 2011, two Hitachi (Now Toshiba), two Samsung, two WD and about six Seagate drives, all the drives except one Hitachi drive developed some errors during their livetime, the Samsungs and the WD's could be re-used after a low-level format and have been re-purposed for my PC's, the Hitachi could not be fixed as WD (Who owned the Hitachi factory at the time) stopped supplying disk repair software that worked with that specific model but otherwise that drive only had surface errors so should have been recoverable, and it and all the Seagate drives have been thrown away. The only working Seagate drive left in the house is a 35 year old 506 .... so you can guess which drive manufacturer I am not recommending.