Hardware Open source alternatives to Windows Home Server

Yes, that is what they said about it (it is somewhere in the documentation/FAQ as well). They got a lot of places where names and IP's are put, so according to them it is not that easy to do. I guess somewhere in future they will make it possible, but for now, it is only possible this way.

 

So the guys at Amahi have helped me out, and told me where to edit the settings to change the DHCP allocation pool. I'm really impressed they were right on it, and I can carry on using the HDA.

 

and something that MS (unless you have paid support or something ) likely wouldnt do.... another `thumbs up` for opensource!

 

Definitely. I am rapidly becoming a HUGE fan of opensource, Linux server, Amahi, Plex (OK not strictly 'Open Source'), Ubuntu netbook edition. I'll keep Windows as my main OS though.

 

I've bounced around between win7 installs and Ubuntu for just over a year now. I stripped everything windows out of my house and went pure FOSS March 2011 just as I went freelance.

At first no major issues were to be found, the first hipcup was blu-ray. I had been running blu-rays on my windows box under total media fail, but in the time I switched we hadn't watched any films due to being too busy.

So to overcome the headache i bought a HP microserver and built a HTPC around that with my Blu-ray drive and installed Win7 for such purposes. Then software updates in December 2011 that required me to buy another version of Total media fail caused me to walk out and buy a BD player for the same cost, but zero hassle.

Then came my requirement for CAD, up to this point all my work was purely graphic and mathematical however I do require Solidworks in my trade so I installed Windows yet again, and that gaming twitch hit me so my main comp went back to windows.

Its really bloody annoying, because dual booting is to much hassle, VM's are handy but no replacement for an actual GUI environment. Every machine listed below had a version of ubuntu on it, depending on its critical nature it varied between 10.04 LTS and 11.10

Workstation (Windows)
Main computer (Windows)
Microserver (windows) (Replaced old Ubuntu server)
Mobile workstation (Windows)
ultrabook (Ubuntu)

If you ask why my server isn't linux, then I raise you this. Have you tried transferring 4Tb of data from a NTFS to EXT4 file system under linux? The NTFS driver is a joke running at ~10mbits. Last time I did it, it took 3 days. Unless someone has reworked the driver recently I am not interested.


Will I be going back to FOSS for everything, no not really but soon Ubuntu will be making a big return around here. I want to RAID 5 or 6 my server but when I had a chance HDD prices shot up so that's on a the back burner. So when a decent deal can be had on 4 HDD's then that will be the return of linux to my server.

On the workstations I run only FOSS under windows with the exception of Solidworks, allows far easier document control.


I've just noticed this is more of a rant about FOSS than the article, but I what came to mind when I read the article. What I will add is Ubuntu 12.04 is still buggy when it comes to file sharing.

 

I am just doing that, and i get 30-100MB/s with my WD20EARS/EARX in Ubuntu 12.04 using ntfs-3g depending on the file position on the drive and the target drive usage (i am using greyhole, so the files are distributed right out and that slows some transfers down). And that is with pushing all that through locally mounted samba shares.

And i have no issues with Samba, what are your issues with file sharing ?

 

I transferred about 100gb of mkvs last night from ntfs on w7 to ext4 on amahi, grey pool but with only 1 disk at the minute, I was getting about 60MBps using a 5 port d-link desktop switch and cat 5e.
I had noticed very slow speeds initially of around 10MB so changed the mtu from 1500 to 9014 to match the desktop settings, enabled jumbo frames on windows, rebooted and voila 60-70MB. Happy days.

 

Why not use a crossover cable between two machines with Gigabit networking (that's most motherboards these days), one running the nice and fast Windows, the other running Linux. Use RSync or something similar to do the transfer and you don't have to worry about SMB slowness or getting NFS mounts under Windows.

Just a thought.

 

Huh ? I think you misunderstood.
Disk 1 has ext4, this is the target drive. Disk 2 has ntfs, this is the source drive. I could get full speeds by direct copying without any issues.

But because Greyhole pooling works on SMB level, i have the Samba and Greyhole server running, Samba shares are mounted locally through the loopback (read Samba shares from 127.0.0.1). I then copy the files from the ntfs-3g mounted NTFS drive to the Samba share, which saves the files to the ext4 drive(s) in pool. I am pretty sure the network loopback is a better choice than physical network .

Anyway, i am not sure what performance issues Burnout21 had, i get full read speeds from the NTFS drives. Sure, write speeds could be bad, but who in their sane mind would write to NTFS drive in Linux ?

 

Sorry, yes, I was talking about Burnout21's issues. I think I replied to the wrong comment.

Exactly. It's not even supported by default (ISTR you have to go to some lengths to enable write support for NTFS, as it's "fragile").

 

hey guys just wandering if someone can clarify something about this article. it talks about open sourc eversions whs, but only lists individual ones for particular abilities of whs. im looking for something that will not only serve as a backup server for windows and osx devices but also a content server/streamer ( movies music etc) to xbox's and pc's.... does any of the open source os's/programmes above do both these tasks ?

 

OpenMediaVault does.

 

Basically, Linux is very good at doing lots of things well, but it can be individually tailored to do some tasks better. So what you can do is start with a backup server base, and add content serving/streaming to it. Or vice-versa.

 

A glaring omission in my opinion is Resara Server which is a very easy to install and manage replacement for Active Directory.

 

One thing I've found nice about my FreeNAS box is that i can reformat and re-install the OS without affecting the data. When I first set up the box I used a slow-ish 4GB CF card for the OS, but then later I got a faster 512 MB one and wanted to swap them out. I changed out the cards, and re-installed the OS, and it looked at the other disks in the machine and said "Oh, hey, this looks like an array. Want me to make it one for you?".

The upshot of all this is that:

1. you can install FreeNAS on a CF card and it will be happy

2. You can put the FreeNAS OS someplace besides on your data drives (Some NAS distros insist on putting all the available drives into one volume, no matter how you want it set up)

3. you can re-install the FreeNAS OS without having to wipe and re-install your data.

I've been running my box for years on a Via C7 based board and it's dead reliable. the drives are a pair of 1 TB units in RAID 1.

 

Windows Home Server wont be "out of date" for a long tme, after all you've spent a whole article trying to replicate the features it has built in alrready! The other features such as Streaming AV over the web and remote file access with compression support are all features I use from mine pretty much daily.

With WHS2011 curently being under £40 retail it's excellent value for money. I was hoping a 2012 version would have also had Skydrive backups etc built in too, but with the free Skydrive program from microsoft you can fiddle it in there.