The linux gravity pulled me back

[froop]

It was just getting too frustrating.. my WD MyBook NAS, although it claimed to be "gigabit ethernet", could only ever give me about 5MB/s over samba, and 8MB/s over FTP. It had to go.

The first time I setup a linux box from scratch was a loooong time ago. Kernel 0.98 or similar. The last time I setup a linux box was probably a decade ago. And its been a good 10 years since I've used linux outside of an appliance. My how things have changed!

I started out giving FreeNAS and Openfiler a shot at replacing my NAS, but it soon came clear to me that I'm more comfortable with a proper server rather than trying to force an appliance distro into what I want it to do. And for FreeNAS, even though its been a while since getting down and dirty in Linux, a shift to FreeBSD was just that little bit more to learn.

So here's just a hello to anyone listening as I reintroduce myself to the linux world.

(Oh, and in case you're interested, after shifting from the WD MyBook to my Debian install on an ATOM525, write speeds are up from 5MB/s to 70MB/s. Read speeds are still lagging a bit (About 15-25MB/s), but that's another topic that will likely appear in the next couple of days after I run some disk IO and network bandwidth tests)

[oz]

Welcome to the forums and welcome back to Linux!

Once someone gets a good taste of Linux, it's extremely hard to stay away forever.

[MASONTX]

Welcome home. We missed you.

[froop]

And its good to be home.

I must say that the experience is a lot easier than it used to be! The Debian installer made it really easy for me to boot off USB, then build and install the boot and root filesystems onto RAID1. And I love the "continue install over SSH" option. Much more comfortable for an install on a headless box.

[Rubberman]

A lot of commercial NAS boxes that have gigabit ethernet only run about 1/10 that speed at best, even my two Buffalo TeraStations, which otherwise have been nice, reliable units. I use them for read-mostly data (music, backups, Linux ISO imsages, etc). If I need high-speed online RAID capabilities, I use Linux software RAID to a external Sata-2 enclosure. I get well over a gigabit/sec. I/O speeds (read and write) to that. With 4 1.5TB drives in a RAID-5 configuration, I get 4.5TB of usable storage for about 1/2 the price of a commercial NAS of the same capacity, and I still have hot-plug drive replacement capabilities.