Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Nexenta product is commercial, but the community edition NexentaStor
is freely downloadable and has only minor restrictions. (For example, the
free version is limited to 12 TB of disk space in use.)
We looked at all of these alternatives except Windows Home Server, which we
didn't have and didn't want to buy (for the reasons cited). We suggest you do
the same before you decide on the OS for your server.
We first ruled out Windows Home Server, desktop Windows, and Ubuntu Serv-
er, for the reasons listed above. That left us with either desktop Linux or one of
the NAS environments. We looked at several of the latter and decided that, as
nice as some of them are, they really didn't do anything we needed to do that
we couldn't do ourselves about as easily with a general Linux distro.
We ended up installing Ubuntu 10.04, mainly because it was familiar to us and
we already knew how to do everything we needed to do to configure it as a
remotely managed server. We run Ubuntu on all of our other computers, so
using it on the server has the advantage of not requiring us to learn the ins
and outs of a different operating system or distribution. Also, Ubuntu 10.04 is a
long-term support (LTS) release, so we won't have to upgrade the OS until the
next LTS release, 12.04, due in April 2012.
Alas, the best-laid plans sometimes go awry. Nothing we tried, including
manually editing the
xorg.conf
file, allowed headless booting to work under
Ubuntu 10.04. After beating our heads against the wall for several hours, we
finally decided to punt. We installed Ubuntu 9.10, which worked perfectly.
Setting up headless booting, file sharing, and remote management in Ubuntu
9.10 took us all of 15 minutes, most of which we spent installing and config-
uring the Samba server, creating home directories and accounts, and setting
permissions. When we finished setting up the server, we shut it down and dis-
connected the display, keyboard, and mouse. We then removed the optical
drive, reinstalled the cover, moved the system under Robert's desk, connected
it to the UPS and Ethernet, and pushed the start button. The system came up
as expected and was visible to our network clients.
So we now have a stable server with gobs of disk space, which, after all, is what
we set out to build.