freenas alternative for lower hardware requirements?

[Rich Ernst]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 10:28 AM, Gus Wirth <gwirth79 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/19/2011 08:25 AM, Rich Ernst wrote:
>> I'm starting research and before I spend a lot of research time, I
>> wondered if anyone had any familiarity with other (than freenas),
>> simple, headless (after installation) linux based file servers?
>>
>> I've been reviewing the current, v8 freenas server hardware specs and
>> dismayed that you can no longer install the OS to the hard drive(s)
>> you want to use as the file shares.  So you need another hard drive,
>> or recommend a flash drive or USB thumb drive for the os, and even
>> then, they suggest a 2+G drive for that.
>>
>> Also, the talk a LOT about some quite high end server hardware, add on
>> hardware raid cards, several gigabytes of ram, many multiple 2G SAS,
>> SCSI or similar hard drives and how desktop/consumer SATA drives are
>> that good for speed, etc.
>>
>> So, it looks like it's moving up to heavy duty, business type server,
>> vs. cheap home/small business setups.  (Reminding you all that I'm a
>> CB at heart....  :)   (Sure miss Lan Barnes....  :(
>>
>> Intent, just to serve up (thru SAMBA) a mirrored drive array on older
>> hardware (P4, or even P3), minimal ram, 512, or even 256meg, using
>> some old IDE, or possibly SATA drives.  2-3 users max, and just for
>> file storage, and through mirroring, some redundancy in case one of
>> the drives fails or starts to.
>>
>> What I was hoping for, was an install that would build a bootable CD
>> with the os on it that loads to ram.  Not sure how logs or whatever
>> would be dealt with in that case, simplest would be email, I'd think,
>> but this wish is just wish, I'm open to other suggestions.  Next would
>> be to use part of the mirrored (software or if soft/hardware raid
>> built into mbd, use that) for the OS, logs, etc.
>
> You seem to have conflicting requirements. You say you want a live CD to
> run the system from RAM but then you say you want to put the OS on the
> hard drive.
>
> For a low power, low RAM system you could consider Ubuntu 10.4 LTS (Long
> Term Support) with the alternate install CD since you are already
> familiar with Ubuntu. You can get the alternate install CD image from:
>
> http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/
>
> Specifically, the comments for the alternate install CD says:
>
> "installs on systems with less than about 256MiB of RAM (although note
> that low-memory systems may not be able to run a full desktop
> environment reasonably)."
>
> If all you need is a server you can even configure it to be headless as
> you won't need a GUI as everything can be managed remotely. Instead,
> manage it from a web page with Zentyal (an alternative to webmin):
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Zentyal

Great suggestions, thanks again Gus.

Yes, I was just thinking out loud, not putting out rigorous
specifications...  :)

Installing to the mirrored drives was original thought, but if a
system could be configured to boot from CD like a customized LiveCD,
and only store logs, other customized settings needed, swap partition,
etc. on the mirrored drives that would be great.   Hmmm, updates would
be tough then too, hmmm, does DSL support SAMBA???   :)   I guess it's
not really worth the effort to make customized LiveCD after all, but
love the idea of using Ubuntu LTS/alternate and running headless.

THANKS, this group is FANTASTIC!

Rich