building a custom NAS appliance

So, uh, some time ago when I wrote the last post in my home NAS tutorial (for reference, here's all previous posts in the series, I made a rather bold omission:

Once you’ve got the tunnel running (ideally you’d set it up to run automatically), all that’s left is to mount the NFS share(s) to appropriate locations in your filesystem. This process varies by operating system (even across UNIXes), so for now I’ll leave that up to you.

Still more to go on my home NAS series, but I thought I'd take a moment to point out a recently-published article that benchmarks the performance of the MSI Wind box against several other DIY and off-the-shelf NAS units. The author ends with the conclusion that DIY NAS boxes based on Intel Atom chipsets (and also the VIA C7) typically get twice the throughput of their store-bought counterparts.

If it seems like I'm on an acronym kick, it's not my fault. In the previous bits of my home NAS series, I've shown you all sorts of them: S.M.A.R.T., RAID, LVM, SMB...wait, what happened to SMB?

I know I said my next post was going to be about NFS setup, but I thought it might be useful instead to take a momentary break for listing off the final hardware manifest. My previous posts have been a little unclear on this subject, so to avoid confusion, here's a list of everything I bought that's currently part of the machine, along with links to NewEgg product pages:

As I mentioned at the end of my RAID setup post, I want the storage space on my home NAS divided up into several fixed-size filesystems, each associated with a different purpose. Now, one approach here would have been to divide the physical disks up into several partitions and create several separate RAID arrays on top of those...but that seems a bit like overkill, and certainly isn't very flexible if I later increase the size of the array.

Now that my home NAS has its hard drives installed, it's time to set up the RAID-1 array. As it turns out, this is pretty simple work. First, create a single Linux RAID Autodetect partition on each disk, taking up its entire usable space. You can do this by running fdisk /dev/sda; fdisk is pretty powerful, so just in case you've never done this before, I'll walk you through the steps.

Well, it's been a couple of months since my last post, and I've gotten quite a bit more work done on my home NAS project. When I last posted, I had finished installing the basic hardware and operating system, but hadn't quite settled on the right set of hard drives.  But all that's changed; in fact, the ol' Wind PC has been up and running pretty solid for the last month or two, and I'm happy to report that the project is a success.

Having finished assembling the hardware and installing the base operating system for my home-grown NAS device, I've moved on to the fine art of tweaking.  For now, since there isn't a hard drive in the box for major storage, I'm focusing on two things: the long-term stability of the CompactFlash card, and the general security of the machine.

Now that the hardware's put together, the next step is installing the operating system.  As I mentioned earlier, my goal here is to install Debian Etch (actually, for reasons related to my backup policy, I ended up going with Debian Lenny; the install process is almost exactly the same, but you get slightly newer software) onto the onboard CompactFlash card without having to install an optical drive to do it.

Well, the hardware's here...at least most of it.  Aside from the defunct Hitachi Deskstar I mentioned in Part 1 of this lovely series, everything else has arrived intact and ready to go.  So, I thought it might be a good time to post some notes on the assembly process.