Home Fileserver: Media Center

Your ZFS home fileserver / NAS is a great place to store your music, photo and video media, and if you’ve setup your ZFS file systems similar to the way described in Home Fileserver: ZFS File Systems, then it will be quite simple to view this media from a media center. The nice thing about […]

Home Fileserver: OpenSolaris 2009.06

After running SXCE for the last year, due to a failed hardware upgrade, it was time to install OpenSolaris 2009.06. I was due to leave on a trip the next morning, but foolishly I decided to install a 3.5″ drive into a 5.25″ drive bay with some anti-vibe rubber grommets installed. When re-attaching the IDE […]

Home Fileserver: A Year in ZFS

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as ‘A Year in Provence’, does it? Oh well, never mind. 😉 After a year of using Solaris and ZFS for a home fileserver, I thought I would share my experiences here to give an insight into things that worked or did not work. Also, others have […]

Home Fileserver: Active Directory Integration

Matt Harrison wrote to me recently, to notify me about a guide he’d written showing how to integrate a ZFS-based OpenSolaris fileserver with Microsoft Active Directory. His guide covers all the necessary areas like: configuring Kerberos, synchronizing time/dates, enabling the CIFS server, joining the domain, user and group mapping, ZFS datasets, setting ACLs and auto-sharing […]

Home Fileserver: RAIDZ expansion

Recently I decided to expand the storage capacity of my ZFS home fileserver’s ZFS storage pool, which was configured to use a single RAIDZ vdev comprising of three 750 GB drives. I wanted to expand the RAIDZ vdev by adding one extra 750 GB drive. As you may or may not be aware, it is […]

Home Fileserver: Trunking

I had two Gigabit ethernet ports sitting on this motherboard and I was only using one. So I decided to take the path less travelled, as you never know where it can lead…

Home Fileserver: Suspend

Considering that a fileserver at home will spend a lot (most) of its life idle, it makes sense to look at its power usage and see what steps can be taken to reduce its operational costs — i.e. power consumption.

Home Fileserver: Backups

Now that you’ve got your ZFS Home Fileserver up and running and you’ve got your file systems created and shared to other machines on your home network, now’s the time to consider getting some backup policy in place. I’ll show a few different possibilities open to you.

Home Fileserver: ZFS setup

The next step in setting up your own ZFS home fileserver is to set up your ZFS storage pool and file systems and then share them with other machines. The ZFS commands should work from any operating system where ZFS is available. I have used two machines in this example: a machine running Sun Solaris […]

Home Fileserver: ZFS hardware

After deciding that I would use Sun Solaris and its ZFS file system as the foundation for a home fileserver, the next part was to select compatible hardware, as Solaris has fairly limited driver support for hardware.