in search of a storage solution
the past few days have been rather hectic. between cranking out code at work and trying to sleep, i have been trying to get my home network in order. here are the ingredients: terabytes of disks, drobo, mac mini, a core 2 duo media center PC, and a usenet account.
1. mac mini and drobo
i put all the disks in the drobo, giving me about 1.25TB of effective usage. since i’m hooking it up to my mac mini, the drobo is formatted HFS+, which is not the best FS in the world. things were going well except the mac mini was lacking on power. it had to download from usenet, process the segments, par2 them, unrar them, and then move them to the drobo. since i also use VLC on that computer to watch my media, it could get sluggish at times.
2. freebsd, mac mini, and drobo
to improve on this solution, i decided it would be wise to move the downloading and processing of files from usenet off the computer i was using to view them. this will allow me to install whatever OS i want on the usenet downloading computer. like everyone else, i am eagerly awaiting the inclusion of zfs into os x. the next best thing is to install freebsd and use zfs there. currently, you cannot boot off a zfs partition, but there is a great guide on running your whole filesystem on zfs. this freed up the mac mini to run only as a media center. i had netatalk running on the freebsd machine, and the mac mini as a client. this is because afp is at least twice as fast as smb. i tried to get xbmc running on the mac mini, but for some reason it crashes when i run it, but works fine on my macbook pro. for the time, being, i have no problem using VLC.
the tragic flaw to this plan was using zfs on the drobo. the day after i installed this setup, i kept getting disk corruptions on the zfs pool. in addition, hellanzb got into this weird state where if i restarted it, all the sockets were stuck in a FIN_WAIT state. even if i kill all the hellanzb processes, the socket would remain. the only thing that would clear the tcp state was a reboot. later dustin> told me that mixing zfs and hardware raid is a bad idea. well, there goes that idea.
3. linux and drobo
well, maybe zfs was a little too exotic for me. let’s go back to something more conventional. i put linux on the core 2 duo media PC that was running freebsd and hooked up the drobo to it. ext3 was put on the PC and everything seemed to be going fine. as an added bonus, i could also use that box as a media center because xbmc compiles on linux. xbmc on linux. SLOW. other than that, ogle, vlc, and mplayer worked well for me. sure enough, i queued up a bunch of stuff the end i got it set up only to be disappointed by FS corruptions the next morning. i tried to fsck it, but apparently, i had no superblock. after taking forever to fsck, i lost the partition. at this point, i had also upgraded my usenet account to allow for 20 connections and SSL. i am pulling down data twice as fast as before and dealing with SSL. this box is much more powerful than the mac mini, so i had hoped it had no problems dealing with the new resource requirements. this didnt seem to work out, so on to the next solution.
4. core 2 duo PC, mac mini, bunch of disks
the idea was to just throw disks into the PC, put freebsd on it, and put all the disks under zfs. at this point, i also got a boxee invite, which i could use on the mac mini. i never got around to this solution because i settled for the next solution.
5. mac mini and drobo
yes. i went back to the original solution. i have removed all other unnecessary functions from the mac mini besides, hellanzb and boxee. i’m not even running the web interface on it. it is being run on another box. this has been the most stable solution and it has been working with no problems for more than a day. hopefully, everything will continue being that way. i would like to get a more powerful mac to run these things on, but i think i can overcome that by rate limiting the bandwidth used when i’m watching content on the mac mini.
if anyone has a better solution. please let me know.
