View Single Post
Unread 08-14-2012, 06:30 PM   #5
Zavyre
Cooling Neophyte
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Illinois
Posts: 10
Default Re: Introduction & A Few Questions

Thanks for the info,

A Fourth question ... RAM Upgrade ... Seems that I don't have any PC2100/2700 ECC REG RAM in my surplus compy crap boxes. And with 1 GB sticks @ ~$19 it would not cost much to max out the memory. The question is would I see much if any improvement with only 4 computers accessing the server. Mainly just streaming music or video.

I remembered the 3rd question; it was advice on the raid setup. Basically to use raid 5 with a spare or 6; as if I need to replace any drives I'm just going to convert it to SATA.

I decided rebuilt the raid this morning as a raid 6. The second parity is prob more important at this point then the extra 250 GB and a hot spare just seems kinda wasteful. The main reason for the raid 6 is that I have had raid 5 loose 2 drives within ~4 hours in the past. Probably very uncommon but the it seemed the second failure was do to the HD's being very heavily tasked while rebuilding. We were using tape backups at that time (which I'm not now) so it was not a huge deal. Other then having to send someone out to buy 4 new drives at local prices, and the day lost restoring. But that was on a company server who could afford to spend that kind of cash. This is more a personal server for the employees data so I'm not using any backups save them backing up their own folders to their Portables.

As to the Noise question. I hooked up all the fans again as there is no HD cooling fan other then the small fan that pulls air through the front over the HD's and then over the ram. The second small fan is for cooling the Add-on cards which I forgot to pull while I was in there DOH. As the server is next to my desk now in the Print Shop the noise is not really that bad. With the machines on and idling the server does not sound that loud. And when the machines are running ... well you can't even here it when standing right next to it lol.

Then there is the file recovery / Recycle Bin. After a bit of reading and monkeying around I got the Snapshot Extension working VERY nicely as a recycle bin of sorts. Very similar to Samba and the older SnapOS (never really used it on the older OS but it is there). I have blocked out 10% of the raid leaving me 415GB (138 GB for each employee) of useable space and 46 GB for Snapshots. I have the Snapshot set to a 1 hour interval and duration of 2 days. I'll have to report back on tweaking the interval and duration after I run it for a while. But so far in the test I've run it looks to be a most acceptable solution.

------------------------------

For those who have not played with the Snapshot extension much here are a few pointers for setting it up to easily recover files.

Firstly lets hope when you setup your volume that you either left the snapshot at the default 20% setting for at least gave your self some percentage of the raid to work with. If not you will need to remake the volume. You can check the amount of recovery of space available under ... Storage / Snapshot / Snapshot Space ... in the Web UI.

Next you will need to set up a Share.
- Set your Path & Name.
- Then you will want to click on "Advanced Share Properties" and select just the protocols you need and the most importantly select "Create Snapshot Share". Depending on the knowledge level of the end users you may want to rename the Snapshot folder to "Sharename_Restore", Rescue, Recycle_Bin, or something other then "Sharename_Snap". You can hide this folder and create links to it but I find it easier to leave it visible.
- Click "OK" to make the Share.
- Set your access rights.

Now you need to setup a schedule for Snapshot.
- So go to storage and then Snapshot and "Create Snapshot"
- You can rename it if you like but other then maintenance the name is basically moot.
- Next click "Create Snapshot Later (or schedule recurring snapshots)" and set the start date and time (default is fine as it is the closest to immediately).
- Click "Recurring (creates multiple snapshots that run according to the following repeat interval):" and set the "Repeat Interval". I used 1 hour. So every hour the Snap will take a image of the share. Any deleted files will be stored in the previos images. Now this is far from a recycle bin but still quite handy.
- Next set the duration. I have the duration set to 2 days but I might lower it depending on how quickly the Snapshot volume fills up (Still Tweaking this a bit)
- For this use of Snapshot the "Recovery File" is not needed so leave it unchecked.
- Click Ok

Now when you look in the root of you server in Window Networking you will see the second Snapshot folder. In the event you delete a file that you needed at lets say 3:33 PM; as long as it was there at 3:00 PM your covered just go to the folder called "latest" or the dated & time stamped (24 hr time with seconds) folder. Find the folder where the file was previously stored and just copy and paste it out of the Snapshot.

Now if you Delete a file at 3:33 PM and it was not there at 3:00 PM ... Sorry it's gone unless you wish to run a recovery program to find it (which could take a while). Not Perfect but still very handy.

------------------------------

After looking over this post the instructions might serve better as it's own tread ... Let me know what you all think.
Zavyre is offline   Reply With Quote