From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Robinson Subject: Re: NAS Remote Side of a Mirror Date: Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:10:11 +0100 Message-ID: <4ACDE4B3.7000007@anonymous.org.uk> References: <656255.26746.qm@web38802.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <656255.26746.qm@web38802.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: adfas asd Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 08/10/2009 13:15, adfas asd wrote: > --- On Thu, 10/8/09, John Robinson wrote: >> Hang on - you still need Samba to export a Linux filesystem >> to Windows clients, don't you? And that's what a NAS has to >> do. > > Winduhs clients? We don't need no steenkin' Winduhs clients... In which case no, you don't need Samba, you never did need Samba and I've no idea why you were using it. The QNAP NAS you linked to does export filesystems via SMB using Samba, as well as via AFS, NFS, FTP and HTTP. It can also export volumes via iSCSI. It almost certainly runs LVM over md RAID to do all these things. If you want to build a box to put in your garage which exports raw discs over ethernet, you might want to consider nbd (Network Block Device) or similar, or iSCSI. If you want it to export files, you will need to run a filesystem and expose them using Samba, AFS or NFS, depending on your client and preference. I have a box in my hall cupboard which has 3 1TB discs. They're partitioned into two partitions each. The first partitions make up md0 with RAID-1 which mounts as /boot in the Xen dom0. The second partitions make up md1 with RAID-5 with a write-intent bitmap, over which I run LVM, which has logical volumes for the Xen dom0 root filesystem, various other Xen guests' filesystems, and a large filestore. The filestore volume is formatted ext3 and exported to the network with Samba to Windows clients and NFS to Linux clients. Fast clients also using gigabit ethernet manage ~80MB/s reading and ~60MB/s writing large files over either SMB or NFS. The machine also runs a MythTV backend. I have done some performance tuning to get where I am, some of it discussed on this list, and now I have no performance problems, and just look at all those layers... Cheers, John.