Building a Linux NAS

[Thierry ITTY]

>I've been unable to find any information on exactly what I want to do so
maybe you guys can help!  Our company is kind of small and we can't afford
megabucks to buy a Dell NAS or SAN do I want to build my own.
>
>I'm looking at taking a Linux box that I have here, a P4 1.6GHz with 2GB
of RAM, putting it in like an 8U rack mount case with 2x40GB drives
mirrored for the system and then cramming as many (I'm hoping like eight or
more) 250GB SATA drives in it for the NAS.
>
>My questions to you guys are:
>
>1)  Is this a feasible approach to take or should I go buy a NAS at any cost?
>2)  Can someone make a recommendation of a nice 6U or 8U rack case to look
for?
>3)  I was planning on using 2x40GB on the onboard IDE controller for the
system drive.  Is this alright or should I have a Promise RAID controller?
>4)  What about a SATA controller (or even ATA133) that will support eight
drives?  What about two controllers that support four drives, would this work?
>5)  What software for setup and management should I be looking at?  I've
used Webmin but have never really had good luck with Samna.  I need to
share files via NFS, SMB and maybe AFP.  

I recently built such a thing (P IV 2.4, 5x200Gb data + 60 Gb system, rh9
w/ XFS1.3), I choosed LVM to make one 1To array then put XFS on it, with
samba and nfs (could have added netatalk too). It's working fine. disks are
basic ata, I just added an ide card to get 8 ide ports. Then I built a
second one, and every night the second one rsync's with the first one
(throught a private gigabit network). So I get a minimal security (D-1)
with the advantage that I can restore quickly files/directories that a user
could accidentally erase. Of course I'd put at least some raid on it if it
had to handle my core business data...

hth
			- * - * - * - * - * - * -
Bien sûr que je suis perfectionniste !
Mais ne pourrais-je pas l'être mieux ?
	Thierry ITTY
eMail : Thierry.Itty at Besancon.org		FRANCE