My new fileserver

[DaveG]

http://www.it247.com/product/1/XHPSU1R2/612275-421-HP-ProLiant-
MicroServer-Dual-Core-1-3Ghz-AMD-Athlon-II.html?cat=612275-421-HP-
ProLiant-MicroServer-Dual-Core-1-3Ghz-AMD-Athlon-II

http://preview.tinyurl.com/35kykc2

Not bad for £251.99 inc VAT especially with the £100 cash back from HP

I'm just about to place the order now.

Next I need to look for the best deal on 4 off 2TB SATA HDDs.

I'll be running FreeBSD with software RAID on ZFS,

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/filesystems-zfs.html

Sharing to the network with both NFS to my FreeBSD workstation and FreeBSD
media centre and CIFS/Samba to the Windows PCs.

I'll install the OS to pendrive or SSD leaving all that lovely ~6TB HDD
space for data

[Mike Jones]

Post by DaveG
http://www.it247.com/product/1/XHPSU1R2/612275-421-HP-ProLiant-
MicroServer-Dual-Core-1-3Ghz-AMD-Athlon-II.html?cat=612275-421-HP-
ProLiant-MicroServer-Dual-Core-1-3Ghz-AMD-Athlon-II
http://preview.tinyurl.com/35kykc2
Not bad for £251.99 inc VAT especially with the £100 cash back from HP
I'm just about to place the order now.
Next I need to look for the best deal on 4 off 2TB SATA HDDs.
I'll be running FreeBSD with software RAID on ZFS,
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/filesystems-zfs.html
Sharing to the network with both NFS to my FreeBSD workstation and
FreeBSD media centre and CIFS/Samba to the Windows PCs.
I'll install the OS to pendrive or SSD leaving all that lovely ~6TB HDD
space for data

Keep us updated on the details please.

[DaveG]

Post by Mike Jones
Keep us updated on the details please.

After finding that *everyone* was out of stock despite what their webpages
claimed, I've been looking at getting a cheap m/b, CPU, RAM combo with a
case to take at least 4 3.5" HDDs.

Anyway, I check my emails tonight and one of the companies I tried to
order from has the HP servers back in stock. I checked the HP site for
the £100 cashback offer. It's on 'till the end of this month. Luckily, I
read the T&Cs. The part code for the cashback offer is now for the
version with the 250GB HDD. A quick Google confirms that the server with
the correct part code for the offer is available and in stock at a number
of places. I went with Dabs since I've used them before without problems.

The only possible hitch is that they only do 1-3 delivery /after/ they get
it delivered to them. I'm guessing that, as with my previous attempt to
buy, no one is carrying stock. They just advertise what HP have in stock
and order on request. Here's hoping it's delivered before the 28th. If
not, it's still a decent price for a nice small box.

Once that arrives, I'll order in the 4 2TB HDDs :-)))

[Mike Jones]

Post by DaveG

Post by Mike Jones
Keep us updated on the details please.

After finding that *everyone* was out of stock despite what their
webpages claimed, I've been looking at getting a cheap m/b, CPU, RAM
combo with a case to take at least 4 3.5" HDDs.
Anyway, I check my emails tonight and one of the companies I tried to
order from has the HP servers back in stock. I checked the HP site for
the £100 cashback offer. It's on 'till the end of this month. Luckily,
I read the T&Cs. The part code for the cashback offer is now for the
version with the 250GB HDD. A quick Google confirms that the server
with the correct part code for the offer is available and in stock at a
number of places. I went with Dabs since I've used them before without
problems.
The only possible hitch is that they only do 1-3 delivery /after/ they
get it delivered to them. I'm guessing that, as with my previous
attempt to buy, no one is carrying stock. They just advertise what HP
have in stock and order on request. Here's hoping it's delivered before
the 28th. If not, it's still a decent price for a nice small box.
Once that arrives, I'll order in the 4 2TB HDDs :-)))

You don't need me to point out that cheap isn't really "cheap"?

Get the good stuff, and post up how things go.

Order a new kettle too, so you can have a cuppa when those 2TB HDDs hit
their boot-time fsck schedules. ;)

[DaveG]

Post by Mike Jones
You don't need me to point out that cheap isn't really "cheap"?

I know, I know, that's why I'd still not bought anything yet. Just as
well :-)

Post by Mike Jones
Get the good stuff, and post up how things go.
Order a new kettle too, so you can have a cuppa when those 2TB HDDs hit
their boot-time fsck schedules.

fsck has been a background task apart from / for ages now. Anyway, I'll
be using RAIDz. I need to look a little more closely but I think it's
journaling and doesn't fsck in the same way.

[DaveG]

Post by Mike Jones
Keep us updated on the details please.

It arrived today. Actually it should have been yesterday, but no one was
home. On a 1-3 day delivery with an implication on the website that it
wasn't in their own stores, I was pleasently gobsmacked that it arrived
effectively "next day". ie I placed the order at almost midnight and DHL
tried to deliver in less than 48hrs :-)

I installed a "standard" install of FreeBSD8.2 RELEASE, just released in
the last few days. Install was carried out from a USB pendrive. All
hardware was detected and usable within the basic install. I'm using the
AMD64 build.

Put allscreens_flags="80x60" into /etc/rc.conf for a nicer console :-)

Enabled SSH access.

Installed portupgade via package add.

Used csup to update kernel and world source files.

Installed a few ports from source including Perl, Ruby, Python, Cups and
their dependancies. Dual core 1.3GHz with DDR3 ram and a fairly quick HDD
seems like quite a nippy combo for this box.

Stripped the crap from the kernel config file (eg NIC/RAID etc drivers not
required, rebuilt kernel and world to make sure any/all latest updates are
in the system and to reduce the memory footprint of the kernel.

A nice little quiet box which does just what it says on the tin.

Next job is to maybe get some more RAM (came with 1GB DDR unbuffered ECC).
There's no GUI and it's basically a file and printer server serving files
via NFS and Samba, running Cups for the printer(s), so 1GB might be
enough. But it does have to handle 4x2TB HDDs in RAIDz. More RAM may be
beneficial. On the other hand, it's a not a mission critical high
availability file server. Oh yeah, I still need to choose and order the
HDDs :-)

Not having any spare SATA HDDs lying around, I might have a play with RAIDz
on a pair of 4GB USB sticks for practice. Depends on how much time I get
this weekend. The boss has ordered me to paint the bathroom :-(

[Mike Jones]

Post by DaveG

Post by Mike Jones
Keep us updated on the details please.

It arrived today. Actually it should have been yesterday, but no one
was home. On a 1-3 day delivery with an implication on the website that
it wasn't in their own stores, I was pleasently gobsmacked that it
arrived effectively "next day". ie I placed the order at almost
midnight and DHL tried to deliver in less than 48hrs :-)
I installed a "standard" install of FreeBSD8.2 RELEASE, just released in
the last few days. Install was carried out from a USB pendrive. All
hardware was detected and usable within the basic install. I'm using
the AMD64 build.
Put allscreens_flags="80x60" into /etc/rc.conf for a nicer console :-)
Enabled SSH access.
Installed portupgade via package add.
Used csup to update kernel and world source files.
Installed a few ports from source including Perl, Ruby, Python, Cups and
their dependancies. Dual core 1.3GHz with DDR3 ram and a fairly quick
HDD seems like quite a nippy combo for this box.
Stripped the crap from the kernel config file (eg NIC/RAID etc drivers
not required, rebuilt kernel and world to make sure any/all latest
updates are in the system and to reduce the memory footprint of the
kernel.
A nice little quiet box which does just what it says on the tin.

I'll be watching for further "installments". ;)

[DaveG]

Post by Mike Jones
I'll be watching for further "installments".

Just for a laugh, I plugged in a pair of 4GB USB sticks to play with ZFS/
Raidz.

Piss easy :-)

zpool create filestore da0 da1
zfs create filestore/test
zfs set mountpoint=/test filestore/test

This gives me a ZFS pool consisting of two 4GB USB sticks concatenated.
I then create a ZFS filesystem on it of a bit under 8GB
Then I set it's mount point as /test (it could already be accessed as
/filestore/test, setting the mount point is more for convenience.

So, a simple concatenated pool of drives created in seconds. Note that
the USB sticks, although externally identical, bought together, in
identical packaging, actually have different capacities, different write
speeds (one is half the other) and the status LEDs behave differently. A
simple concatenation of drives, AKA JBOD (Just A Bunch of Disks) is piss
easy to do and does not require identical drives.

zpool destroy filestore
...kills the pool as expected.

zpool create filestore raidz da0 da1
...creates a RAID-1 equivalent, ie mirrored drives but, as expected,
limited the pool size to the smallest drive.
RAID-5 equivalent, which I'll be using with the real HDDs, needs 3 or more
drives.

I also experimented with the following:

zfs set copies=2 filestore/test
...this duplicates all files as they are created/copied for extra security
in case of bad sectors/read errors.

and

zfs set compression=gzip filestore/test
...this uses gzip to de/compress the data during read/write.

My final test...

zpool create filestore raidz da0 da1

zfs create filestore/test

[copy some files over]
[pull one of the USB sticks out]

zpool status
pool: filestore
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An
attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are
unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
filestore ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
da0 ONLINE 0 0 0
da1 ONLINE 0 1 0

[plug USB stick back in]

zpool clear filestore

zpool status

pool: filestore
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed after 0h0m with 0 errors on Sun Feb 27 00:49:01
2011
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
filestore ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
da0 ONLINE 0 0 0
da1 ONLINE 0 0 0 114K resilvered

errors: No known data errors

Nice! Cool! Ace!
(delete as appropriate depending on which decade you live in)

[Alex Potter]

Post by DaveG
Nice! Cool! Ace!
(delete as appropriate depending on which decade you live in)

All of those :)

[DaveG]

Post by Alex Potter

Post by DaveG
Nice! Cool! Ace!
(delete as appropriate depending on which decade you live in)

All of those :)

Just ordered 4 off Samsung HD204UI/Z4, SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG SATA
3Gb/s, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms.

On offer at Scan "Today Only" at 2 for £116.39 so ordered two bundles.
Should be here on Friday.

These are the drives I've been looking at over the past week or so.
Local shop had some in so I went in today to see if they would budge down
to £65 each (on sale at £72.50). They wouldn't come down below £66,
which I might have gone for as they are local and I like to support local
business when possible but they only had two left in stock.

Nice that Scan did a Today Only offer on those very drives on the day
that I really wanted to buy them :-) The next cheapest was Ebuyer at £59
each + £8 odd P&P. Scan P&P is only £3 odd.

[DaveG]

Post by DaveG
Just ordered 4 off Samsung HD204UI/Z4, SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG SATA
3Gb/s, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms.

HDDs arrived today. Will be installing them tomorrow if I get the
bathroom finished in time :-(

[DaveG]

Post by DaveG

Post by DaveG
Just ordered 4 off Samsung HD204UI/Z4, SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG SATA
3Gb/s, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms.

HDDs arrived today. Will be installing them tomorrow if I get the
bathroom finished in time :-(

Flashed the firmware on each of the HDDs as a "just in case". There's
the possibility of some problems with data loss under some circumstances
with these Samsung drives. I knew this before I bought them and knew the
link on the Samsung website to get the updated firmware. There was no
change in the firmware revision after the update so maybe they already
had it, ie manufactured after the fix was put in place.

Another potential problem I discovered while trawling the 'net is that
large capacity drives use 4Kb sectors instead of 512b sectors. this is a
serious problem for older operating systems. So the drive manufactures
"helpfully" hide this from the OS by emulating 512b sectors. If your
slice (or partition) doesn't start on a 4k boundary, data writes can be
significantly reduced.

This would mean manually selecting sector 64 instead of sector 63 in
fdisk. But you don't do that with ZFS.

The solution is, instead of simply creating the pool of drives, do the
following:
gnop create -S 4096 /dev/ad4
zpool create filestore raidz ad4.nop ad6 ad8 ad10
zpool export filestore
gnop destroy /dev/ad4.nop
zpool import filestore

...then create filesystems as required.

Testing demonstrated approx. a 25% speed-up in write times and a 40%
speed-up in read times.

I was also shocked to see someone who posted that using 4 drives in a
raidz (raid 5 equiv.) array was a really, really bad idea due to the
variable stripe sizing used. So I repeated my tests with only 3 drives.
Testing both with and without the gnop alignment "fix" resulted in slower
read/write times than with four drives. Maybe he meant 4 drives in a
JBOD ie concatented pool of 8TB.

Further reading:

Using 4k sector drives with ZFS
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=122617

ZFS Quickstart Guide
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSQuickStartGuide

ZFS Tuning Guide
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide

Comments on "bad" 4 disk pool
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=20797605#p20797605

[DaveG]

Post by DaveG

Post by DaveG
Just ordered 4 off Samsung HD204UI/Z4, SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG SATA
3Gb/s, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms.

HDDs arrived today. Will be installing them tomorrow if I get the
bathroom finished in time :-(

Backed up 626GB of data to a USB HDD. Downside. The old server is
running FreeBSD 4.8. ICBA to figure out how to do USB on that thing!!

It took about 20 hours to back up the server over the network to the USB
drive. Since I was either sleeping or at work during that time the time
doesn't matter.

It's now restoring to the new server and should take about 13 hours at
about 50GB/hr (timed a bit over 8GB in 10mins), likewise, I'll be asleep
or at work again :-)

For various reasons, the new server is currently plugged into a 10baseT
hub to extend the living room end of the network. I want to watch telly
while doing all this and I don't want to SSH into it from the laptop and
have to leave the laptop on all the time too.

I *really* have to pick up a 1000baseT switch sometime soon. Probably at
the same time I build a couple of new PCs for me and her :-)

I also need to find out why this HDD is seen as USB1.0 when plugged direct
into the server but is seen as USB2.0 when plugged into an external USB
hub. Just as well I tried that. The restore would have taken over 13
*days* at USB1.0 speeds LOL

[Alex Potter]

I don't want to SSH into it from the laptop and have to leave the laptop
on all the time too.

man screen.

[DaveG]

Post by Alex Potter

I don't want to SSH into it from the laptop and have to leave the
laptop on all the time too.

man screen.

Yes, that's something I've heard about and thought interesting, must look
at that sometime, but never really needed to, so didn't get a round tuit.

Anyway, just did "man screen" and it told me how to switch virtual
consoles with Alt-1,2,3, etc. Yes, learned about that on day 1. Then it
gives a list of the various control codes to do stuff on the screen.
Different codes, but learned about that patching CP/M programmes to work
on different terminals and/or printers many, many years ago.

But, there is nothing in the man page about disconnecting from a session
and re-connecting later on. Possibly the programme screen in not in the
base system. Possible, but unexpected.

Yep, it's in ports. Installed from source in about 30 seconds :-)

man screen now displays the required information.

[Alex Potter]

Post by DaveG
man screen now displays the required information.

All a good learning process. :)

I never needed anything other than a simple terminal, so I just needed to
know how to get out of it, and how to reattach. Have you got that yet? I
can give them if you haven't.

[DaveG]

Post by Alex Potter

Post by DaveG
man screen now displays the required information.

All a good learning process.
I never needed anything other than a simple terminal, so I just needed
to know how to get out of it, and how to reattach. Have you got that
yet? I can give them if you haven't.

Oh yes. very simple. Now I know how, I'll hopefully not forget :-)