Home Fileserver: Drive temps

With the summer coming on, the ambient room temperature is increasing, and so here’s a handy script to help you monitor your drive temperatures to help prevent heat-related data loss.

Home Fileserver: Backups from ZFS snapshots

Backups are critical to keeping your data protected, so let’s discover how to use ZFS snapshots to perform full and incremental backups.

Home Fileserver: ZFS snapshots

The next thing you will want to master when running your own ZFS home fileserver is how to perform snapshots of your file systems, as this is a crucial part of helping to protect your data.

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.

Home Fileserver: I’ll use ZFS

After reading an article that turned out to be pure gold, namely: A Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore – The future of file systems, I felt a warm glow inside and realised that ZFS seemed to be the best solution currently available for solving a number of current problems, and I wanted to […]

Home Fileserver: Existing products

When I began my search for a suitable fileserver, I found the choice of available technologies and products quite overwhelming, with each having their own pros and cons. Here is a list of things I considered: