NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello everyone.

I have not been here for quite a while, but am checking out the NAS scene and options again, and naturally, NASLite has to be considered.

I have been playing with FreeNAS, but don't really like it for a number of reasons, one being that to use it's advanced filesystem thing, you have to have crazy amounts of RAM. I know there is the option of more standard RAM size and the lesser filesystem, but it also seems like things like the RAID thing are a bit dangerous in that if one drive dies, it breaks the whole array - probably why they suggest the advanced filesystem and heaps of RAM.

However, I tried it anyway(using lesser filesystem and less RAM), and although it worked OK, it was problematic to get running, involving user accounts and access permissions etc, so I have come back to NASLite to have a peek at it, mainly as I remember it as being very simple but effective, and also uses very little RAM by comparison.

Unlike in my earlier posts about being concerned with fsck, I now run my servers(whatever OS) 24/7 with UPS backup, so I don't shut them down unless the UPS does cos of a power cut, so that basically should deal to the fsck concerns as far as I am concerned.

I used to shut down the server every night, you see......

Anyway, can someone here just confirm for me, that you can setup NASLite-2 without any RAID at all, so that each disk is separate and unique? I am pretty sure you can, and looking at the screenshot under OVERVIEW in the NASLite-2 page, suggests that you can. I just want to make sure that RAID is not forced on you. Reason being, that if one drive dies - yes - you have lost that data, but you can plop another one in there, and then copy everything back to the new drive from the archive backups. In the meantime, you can get the server up and running again, so users can still access the data on the other working drives. If you break a RAID array, the whole thing is down while you rebuild the flippin' array. In my case, it is a media server, not so much a mission-critical data server, so at worst if a drive dies, you lose access to the media on that drive, until you can restore it, but until that time, you can still run the server with the remaining drives.

Hopefully, this is making some kind of sense......

Also, does NASLIte-2 support UPS's with USB shutdown commands A-La the Windoze thing - if the UPS is getting weak during power failure, it can signal the server to shutdown before the juice dies and the server has an unclean shutdown.

EDIT: I found the answer to the RAID thing in the manual, which I also found on the NASLite-2 page. Page 13 of the manual tells me that all disks are exported to the network as Disk-0 through to Disk-N, so that has answered that bit.

Still would love to hear if the UPS shutdown is supported - I will keep reading the manual for now...

I know that there was a thread about something like a script that one of the users wrote and posted for shutting down a machine or the like. I suspect that you should be able to modify the script a bit to bend it to your will. Someone else will have to chime in on this.

As to no RAID needed... That is correct. Although RAID is not really all bad and in fact can be rather good in some ways. First off you could simply use RAID1 and have the data mirrored between a pair of same drives. The same data is written to both at once, on reads though it happens twice as fast. In RAID5 you can have a hot spare so if/when a drive fails it will simply start a rebuild of the lost data using the parity and data from the still good drives. This will slow the array but will not stop access as you think it would. Then you have RAID6 which is double parity. Same as RAID5 but with extra safety. All this is at a cost of course, you eat at least 1 drive in parity so an array of five 2TB drives will yield an array of 8TB but reads and writes will be far faster than just a single drive. Something to think about.

Mike

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I plan to research the different RAID things - I will most likely start at Wikipedia.
The fact that there are several configurations confuses me from the off, so I need to do some reading about RAID and why it could be a good idea.

Do you or anyone else know if NASLite-2 supports all those different RAID configurations?
I see by the manual, that there is a section talking about RAID, but I have yet to discover if I can choose what kind of RAID I want.

It is probably more a case of needing an add-on RAID controller card that NASLite can work with, because I would doubt that NASLite-2 has native support for RAID in it's code. I'm saying that without knowing anything really - just a guess, as a software RAID would be complicated and make NASLite much bigger in size etc...

I will do some reading.

I have also downloaded the supported network and drives PDF's, so will have to check that I can run the intended system first, otherwise I might need to reconsider hardware.

EDIT: Found in the description or features page, that RAID can only be had by hardware RAID card, so that answers that. Not really interested in RAID anyway - yet.

i shut down remotely - dont know if its what you want - also have a script for logging into running system and a wol script - non of them mine originally - i modified them but cannot give credit to original author as i have forgotten who did it

alter first 3 line to your system settings - save as .vbs file and it should run and work

remote shutdown

ServerName = "192.168.1.66"
Username = "admin" ' Current Username
Passwd = "nas" ' Current Password

XIT = "E" ' Used to "EXIT" from NAS. (upper-case E)
YES = "y" ' Used to confirm an option. (lower-case Y)
SHUT = "8" ' Used to SHUTDOWN NAS. (number eight)

DELAY = 250 ' Minimum 500ms recommended; 1000 works well.


' --------------------------------------------------------------------
' SECTION B: Start a Shell
' --------------------------------------------------------------------
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")


' --------------------------------------------------------------------
' SECTION C: Start the TELNET
' --------------------------------------------------------------------
WshShell.Run "telnet " + ServerName

' --------------------------------------------------------------------
' SECTION D: Login. ("Sleep" pauses are needed delays.)
' --------------------------------------------------------------------
WScript.Sleep DELAY
WshShell.SendKeys Username + vbLf
WScript.Sleep DELAY
WshShell.SendKeys Passwd + vbLf
WScript.Sleep DELAY
WshShell.SendKeys SHUT + vbLf
WScript.Sleep DELAY
WshShell.SendKeys YES + vbLf
WScript.Sleep DELAY
WScript.quit