"Turn-Key" Linux-Based Fileservers? 63
idjitProof asks: "I work for a non-profit organization with about 70 satellite offices. We're trying to find a cheap way to get these offices out of the stone age and into an ethernet with centralized, secure file-storage. I was wondering if there is a Linux hardware solution that is fairly dummy resistant or, alternatively, remotely configurable (with decent security). I spent the better part of today searching the web, but all I could find was boxed software products, no hardware solutions. I'd appreciate links to any companies that might have this kind of product."
Not quite sure of the question... (Score:1)
EXACTLY what you want! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:EXACTLY what you want! (Score:3, Informative)
Why not one of the commercial UNIXes? (Apple?) (Score:2)
Apple's XServe [apple.com] servers aren't a bad deal. OS X is based on FreeBSD, so don't think that Apple is still in their proprietary little world any more. They're certainly better at embracing open standards than that silly Redmond company.
- Peter
Re:Why not one of the commercial UNIXes? (Apple?) (Score:5, Informative)
Though apparently most people forget this.
Re:Why not one of the commercial UNIXes? (Apple?) (Score:3, Informative)
Redhat Advanced Server + 2 (or more) $200 Wallmart boxes (for redundancy) per remote.
All the redundancy & clustering is handled out of the box.
With $upport of varing level$, you're way ahead, <snagglepuss> an order of magnitude even...sheesh!</snagglepuss>
Re:Why not one of the commercial UNIXes? (Apple?) (Score:2)
That's completely bogus. I used an iBook with 256 MB every day for over a year with zero problems at all. My new Power Mac was only recently upgraded from 256 MB to 512 MB, and the only time I noticed swapping before the upgrade was when I was running Virtual PC. 256 MB would be just fine for an XServe, particularly if you're not running a web server or any additional stuff like that. Any extra RAM would be used for filesystem caching, which would be a good thing, but not a make-or-break thing.
Re:Why not one of the commercial UNIXes? (Apple?) (Score:1)
Maybe you meant Red Hat Professional.
Re:Why not one of the commercial UNIXes? (Apple?) (Score:1)
Anyone can d/l AS free. It's the support & stuff(docs?) that costs.
so for PREMIUM subscription
$2500 / (70 * 2) = $17.86US
or
$799 / 140 = $5.71US
or
$costOfBandwith + $costOfCDR = SRPMS [redhat.com]
Re:Why not one of the commercial UNIXes? (Apple?) (Score:1)
Once you agree to that agreement by buying one copy of AS, you must license each copy per-seat. I get really sick of explaining this to people.
http://www.redhat.com/licenses/
http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhlas_us.html?lo
(Asterisk emphasis mine)
BY *USING OR PURCHASING* RED HAT LINUX ADVANCED *SERVER OR SERVICES*, CUSTOMER SIGNIFIES ITS ASSENT TO THIS AGREEMENT.
REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed Servers, then Customer *will purchase* from Red Hat *additional Services for each additional Installed Server*.
Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
---
Go read it, it's plain english. The only way you could get around this is by never purchasing advanced server (compiling it all yourself), and thus never agreeing to this agreement. Of course, you won't get any of the support services at all. Otherwise, if you buy one copy of AS and then install it on multiple servers, you are violating this agreement, and Red Hat can audit you and force you to license the unlicensed servers.
Re:Why not one of the commercial UNIXes? (Apple?) (Score:1)
Listen: Linux Comes with Support. (Score:2)
Blimey. Some people...
Cobalt (Score:1)
Why not roll your own? If you are going to remote admin it, certainly you can set it up on your own.
Re:Cobalt (Score:1)
Qube 3 [sun.com]
i however think rolling your own is a much better deal if you RTFM and know what your doing. SunCobalt products are for the dumbest of the dumb if ya ask me. (or maybe the laziest of the lazy.)
Netmax/Toshiba (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.netmax.com/products/magnia_prods.htm
We use their software based distro in a couple of our remote office at work.
Re:Netmax/Toshiba (Score:1)
Re:Netmax/Toshiba (Score:1)
Not hard (Score:1)
Failing that sort of effort you might just want to do a full system backup of a master that works they way you want. Copy the backup to cdrom and fire up the RIAA disapproved duplicators and go to it.
Look in your local events paper in the musicians section there are ads for bulk cdrom houses, these do press runs for Demos tapes and limited releases mostly. If you can convince them that it's not copyrighted material they may even do it for the Tax Deduction.
eSmith (Score:3, Informative)
It's a cd you pop into a pc and turns it into a really dumb-proof server. very complete and cheap!
Clarkconnect! (Score:2, Informative)
I am running this firewall/fileserver on a P100 with 96M of ram, so performance was pretty important to me.
I run the following servers on the box...
Appletalk (netatalk), Samba, FTP (Proftpd), HTTP (Apache), SMTP (exim), DHCP, SSH, CUPS, WEBMIN and SQUID.
The performance of the box is outstanding and very robust. It has a really nice web-based interface for modifying the box's setup.
I'm not knocking any of the others... I still have an e-smith server running at a clients and it's been chuggin' along for a couple of years now.
Just my $.02
-Fordboy0
Linksys (Score:2)
http://linksys.com/products/group.asp?grid=35&scid =43 [linksys.com]
Re:Linksys (Score:1)
and since the linksys requires a windows PC it probably runs windows as well. (not to mention the "scandisk" and "defrag" utilities it has on it.)
Re:Linksys (Score:2)
Re:Linksys (Score:1)
first there is this:
# Share music, video, or data files, with managed access by user name or group
# Built-in disk utilities - backup, self test, scandisk, defrag
which means it has some version of windows utils. since "scandisk" and "defrag" AFAIK do not and never have run under linux.
and the more interesting part is the "user name or group" aspect. that strikes me as windows file sharing.
and then of course there is also the fact that it actually "requires" a windows PC.
"Network Attached Storage" (Score:1)
Para-Docs (Score:2)
Let me know if you need any additional information.
Matthew
matthew@mattshouse.removethis.com
You missed the first question (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, if its a small satellite office which has survived until 2003 without a LAN, LET IT BE. It sounds like you're trying to push a square peg into a round hole. Something is obviously working.
Re:You missed the first question (Score:2)
Re:You missed the first question (Score:2)
e-smith gets my vote (Score:2)
esmith can do smb, as well as vpn. sounds like it'll fit your bill. The install is straight forward, and you can get pre-setup boxes from www.myezserver.com, as well as support.
Do you want NAS? (Score:2)
centralized?? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're remotely accessing a file server, a point-to-point T-1 per branch office is the absolute bare minimum you'll need for connectivity. Don't even think about using a VPN over the Internet; the latencies will be so high that nobody at the branch offices will be able to tolerate using the central file server, so they'll store their files locally, which defeats the whole purpose.
A much better idea would be to put small NAS devices at each branch office, and a big server at the central office. Have the central server back up each NAS server every hour, either using a commercial backup product like Legato (bad idea) or using the NAS vendor's remote mirror feature (good idea). Snap's remote mirror feature, for example, is called Server-to-Server Synchronization. You can do remote-to-central syncs over a VPN over DSL or something equivalent.
There will probably be occasions when a branch needs to access files from another branch. When that happens, you can either have the person who needs the file mount the appropriate filesystem from the central office and copy his file, or you could get a little fancier. You could easily whip up a simple system for scheduling asynchronous file requests. Person X goes to a web page (hosted at the central site) and finds the file that he wants, then clicks a button to submit a transfer request. He goes about his business while the file is transferred via FTP (probably) from the central server to the branch server, then he gets an email, IM, or SMS informing him that the transfer is complete. You could just let all the transfers happen at once, or you could get a little fancier by priority-queueing the requests and executing them in order. This would have the advantages of being easier for your users-- they wouldn't have to know where the file was stored; they could just search for it-- and of keeping all the files on the various NAS servers for easy administration and backup.
Email me for more details.
Re:centralized?? (Score:2)
Qube (Score:3)
Get a Cobalt Qube, or whatever Sun renamed them to when they bought the company. Plug it in, switch it on and it does all your typical LAN services like file'n'print, web proxy cache, firewall and so on. All remotely administered via a web browser.
Datahive (Score:1)
vpn and central server (Score:1)
(plenty of links above)
each satelite office gets a vpn endpoint/router
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products
(dont know how well they work yet but they seem simple and small)
And then your users balk (Score:2)
Not that it doesnt work, but latency sux.. and it runs your cost up due to major increase in bandwith needs.
Penguin Computing (Score:2)
SnapServers (Score:1)
My company does exactly this... (Score:3, Informative)
We set up many of our systems for secure remote administration as a lot of our customers simply want us to handle it. We are not a hardware shop, we are a professional services company and our prices reflect that fact (they are extremely competetive).
Why not home grown? (Score:2)
If they are small offices or don't do much over the lan, just grab an old pentium, throw in a large enough hard drive for their needs, and install your network-fileshare-system-of-choice and sshd. If they are stuck on dialup, just have the servers accept call-ins as well. Once you get one configured how you like it, mirror it to the rest. Cheap, easy solution. (Oh, and buy UPSs. I know this is a non-profit, but they are worth every penny.)
Including the UPS, I'm guessing each machine could be configured for about 120GBs of storage without going overe $300. You're going to be hard pressed to find a NAT that will do the same thing for that price. Don't worry about the reliability of a home-brew solution - a properly setup NFS/Samba/sshd server will probably stay running until the hardware fails. Plus, all of the components are cheap, and easily replaceable.
Oh, one last thing : if they need backups, either look into rsyncing it to a main server, or teaching the secratery to swap tapes at the end of the day. Plus, you probably want to set up a cron job, timed so that every day, 2 or 3 of the machines email you with their status for the month.
Of course, I'm not in your shoes, and maybe something like a NAS/SAN is what you really need.
Plenty of FBSD turnkey out there. (Score:2)
Tons of options out there.. for most every need/budget..
A little bit of homework goes a long way.
Quantum NAS servers (Score:2)
OT: e-smith 5.6...? Where to get it? (Score:1)
Background
The latest post on the front page
of www.e-smith.org refers to a 5.6
version of SMS (formerly e-smith),
but none of the ISO's are ver 5.6
Has someone got a URL link for a 5.6
ISO?
TIA
OT: "You can't post to this page." (Score:1)
on the button to get a reply to
post ['using Opera 6.04, if relavent]?
TIA
Re:OT: e-smith 5.6...? Where to get it? (Score:2)
However, since apparently you're not real good with online resources I'll just feed it to you:
Another vote for E-Smith (Score:2)
A stripped down Redhat-based distrib entirely managed by a well-scripted web-interface they really can be locally administered by the Office Administrator. The install is short and sweet and with a few questions it sets up a well organized server offering 'bout anything a modern office would want all automagically.
Ok, actually it's all done off an impressive system of scripts and templates but as far as J. Random "Administrator" is concerned it just works, and all from the clean browser-interface. Groups and accounts, POP & IMAP, LDAP and Webmail, all come built-in. A hardy user community contributes their own extensive set of ports and script templates including user self-management web interfaces, MySQL administration, mp3 jukeboxes, log and queue management, etc.
I set this up on a donated Compaq box a year ago for a local youth services organization (read: Human Services-type folks who don't know anything about computers, aren't inclined to learn much, and really just want this stuff to work with a minimum of muss and fuss so they can get on with their real work) and they've loved it. Ok, actually they don't care: It just does what they need it to do, is easy to get to do those things, offers the services they needed and they're not interested beyond that, which is a Good Thing.
Oh yeah, services they use their E-Smith box for are:
Personally I've got E-Smith servers in both of my residences (different countries) where I use a Unison [upenn.edu] implementation [ifost.org.au] for E-Smith to keep both boxes synchronized. It also provides a handy VPN between both houses as well as offering all of the other services listed above. Next up it'll be hosting photo galleries and some web sites for the family as well as a Twiki [e-smith.org] server for friends to share.
Oh, and best thing about all of this? It runs on low end PIII's, 200MHZ w/ 128MB RAM, not speed demons but stable, reliable, secure, and very effective. Did I mention trivial to administer too?
Re:Another vote for E-Smith (Score:1)
Billy