Hey there!
This topic is going to be about network storage and files backup and etc, right?
So I'm not sure how many of you are like me, but I have been having some provisionary
network storages over the years and each one was quite crap and all this because I
don't have too much money to buy like premium hardware and you know stuff like
that so in order to I don't know I have always been dreaming about a perfect
network storage about perfect NAS to have all my data and backed up on
multiple hard drives with mirrors and RAID 5s and maybe more with ZFS and
ECC memory and off-site backup and encrypted cloud backup I have so many
ideas in my head that all make like perfect sense but in the end it all takes
a really really lot of money to assemble so I have been postponing it for
quite a while right and one of the PCs of mine is Xeon CPU from 2009 which
is which is quite trash actually to be honest it's quite trash and it uses a
lot of electricity by doing literally nothing useful and not even that but it
also died on me very recently so I have been trying to get myself on speed
right I don't know how many of you do these things but I have like a lot of
these little drives which I use for I don't know random data storage and I
don't even remember which one holds which but I'm sure some of them have
something valuable for me and I just want to get all my data in one place
right and in one place I mean what I said in the previous sentences right so
in order to get there one has to start somewhere right so the Xeon server
from 2009 of course I got it for free because the previous owner was going to
throw it in trash anyway so why not save something right I just remember one of
my friends told me today how just you wait until AI will be ruling the world
that they are going to spare me you know because I'm I have been good to
their grandfathers and by that he means not throwing away any old computers
right that was kind of nice to hear but yeah I mean if I'm going to wait for a
perfect nas that might never happen because such a thing really really costs
a lot of money at least from the perspective of what I have in mind so I
keep like jumping from one gratis device to another and right now I got some
kind of a network storage that is 19 inches like rack mount one unit and it's
a bit noisy so there may be a problem with wife approval factor WAF right but
maybe I can change the fence or something either way it's an atom
processor from 2011 has two cores so it may be even slower than that Xeon from
2009 actually I'm quite you know convinced that it actually will be slower but I
know it is what it is it it only uses 10 watts so that may be bearable if it's
very slow and doesn't use too much electricity compared to being very slow
and using over 100 watts right so that's that's quite shit so today it
took me roughly I don't know in between 10 and 12 hours to install this thing and
I have had some issues right and I have documented most of it and I have
assembled like between 10 and 15 videos that I'm going to now put together for
you I am recording this video right now after the fact that I have already
finished installing the operating system right so let's not make you waste too much
time I just wanted to give you heads up on what this whole topic is about right so
enjoy the ride and see how it went for me today okay I got this what is it Fujitsu
something network storage it has proprietary operating system on there
which is not that good to be honest and it's like really really heavy and I was
thinking about whether we can reuse it with free software so let's open it up
and see how that goes actually before we open it up let's just check out what
it offers here okay so redundant power supplies we have some eSATA ports USB
double networks some more USBs and a monitor outputs which is convenient okay
so what do we got here is a four hard drive base we have this switching power
supply like redundant one and apparently let's try to zoom this in if we can yeah
apparently we have some kind of a QNAP storage here of the unknown size but it
appears to be I don't know if you can see this I don't think you can but it appears
to be hooked up to USB header so it seems to be a USB storage maybe that
is used for the operating system and we also have like a glued in place one
gigabyte of DDR3 memory and a custom motherboard that is so one of the things
that I have found in my drawer is another PC 3 1 gig RAM which should double
it but just as well I found another stick that is four gigs of RAM which should
boost this thing quite a lot so I'm not sure if it's a smart thing to put the
four gigs in here and pair it with one gig memory but well you never know if
it works on some other boards you can do that so I'm gonna give it a try and
see what happens if not then I'll just pop out the one gig out and have it at just
four I mean just four is still a four times more than it came with so that's
pretty awesome okay so whatever I do today is speed is of utmost importance
because this junk cannot be here on my desk when wife gets back home from work
so it is what it is let's give it a try oh my god this is very noisy voila we got
something I actually installed the dev one yesterday on one of my testing laptops
and I can already tell you that this is way way way slower than it was on the
laptop okay let's go language English let's switch to another country another
continent because that's where we want to be and the local can stay as is key map
to use let's go with my key map here okay we have two gigabit network cards so
let's go with the first one detecting link I'm sure if I plug the cable in the
right port but we'll find out that soon enough it looks like I may have plugged
the cable into the wrong port network auto configuration fail let's switch the
it works hostname what is the hostname going to be the hostname is going to be
Bratac Jaglenatz okay we don't want a route password full name okay I'm eager to
find out what the USB storage actually is and how big maybe we can do a speed test
on it after the installation okay guided use entire disk this should be fine
for this setup USB disk module 500 megabytes oh my god can we fit the
entire operating system on 500 megabytes okay we are definitely going to need to
rethink this procedure because clearly half a gigabyte is not enough to I mean
I could squeeze it in but let me see if I can do something about the storage
thing first because it's just going to be a little bit easier if I can get it to
to be larger right okay so what I could do here I could remove this USB let's call
it a stick right and plug in an USB header from an older computer and just insert
into the USB a USB stick but that's slightly too much work for something that
I have no idea if it will make any sense right in the long run so I have
this small USB stick it's eight gigabytes I'm just gonna plug it in here and let's
see if I can install the operating system on there so if it works here it will
also work here as well but this is not a bad solution for the temporary stuff
either so let's see how that works okay the moment of truth we are now trying to
install with that second USB stick inserted into the backside let's go with
guided use entire disk already okay so this is our install USB stick we are
definitely not touching that this is the internal one and for some reason the
one that we actually want to use is appearing as SDA which is actually good
I like it let's try that one all files in one partition perfectly fine let's see
what it has prepared for us so 500 megabytes for the ESP partition which
is a little bit too much in this case six gigabytes of system and one gigabyte of
swap so the first thing I would like to do here is remove the swap here because I
don't really feel like this will do any good to have swap partition on a use
be stick okay let's remove everything and do it manually delete partition delete
this partition this partition create a new one let's make it 250 megs in the
create a new partition 7.6 gigabytes and we are going to make it XFS done setting it
up okay so we're good with this I think root partition with 7.6 gigs and ESP
actually think 250 megs is even that is too much for ESP but let it have
some room for now you have not selected any partitions for use as swap space
enabling this swap space is recommended so that the system can make better use of
the available physical memory well as I have already said I don't feel comfortable
with putting swap on the USB stick and I'm going to reconsider this decision a
little bit later on do you want to return to partitioning menu no they want to
write changes to the disk yes okay well this is installing let's go head to the
second console and see what the RAM is like at the moment we don't have top
okay after four five hours we still did not finish the installation so I'm just
gonna have to switch to a different kind of storage okay I have been having a
serious of bad luck today so one of these drives is dead I'm not sure which one but
the operating system just hanged and it was very obvious that one of these is
dead and when we got to the partitioning it only showed one hard
drive so apparently maybe the electronics is dead or it's trying to be
alive or I don't know so let's remove this and voila let's do the laptop drives
okay finally the attempt number which one is it for I don't know I have wasted the
entire afternoon on this machine and let's hope this makes sense in the end
right so currently we have two laptop drives inside and so far the system is
behaving just fine I'm in the installer so let's go with manual method this
time because I have some ideas what I actually want to do so what do we have
here so this was some kind of a Windows drive obviously let's remove all of
that erase delete the partition fine and erase this one delete it okay USB disk
module so that's the one that's the small one right from my the built one in the
NAS so finally I have an idea of what am I going to do with this
with this little USB wannabe stick right so let's go ahead and delete the partition
and let's go and delete this one as well I mean it's really small so there isn't
I could make a really minimal system but I really don't want to bother with that
right now so let's go ahead and delete the two mag partition as well and delete
this one and the last one delete that one as well and now we have like half a
gigabyte of free space and what we are going to do here is create one really
large partition 500 megs primary and we are going to use this one and yes you
guessed it as our grub partition okay so this is our grub partition we are going
to boot from this drive okay so what I am going to do now I hope it will make
sense later create a new partition and the partition size is going to be 4
gigabytes primary on the beginning of the hard drive actually no let's delete
this one let's put it on the on the end of the hard drive it should give us a
bit more speed and this is going to be one of our swap partitions now we're going
to go to the second hard drive and we are going to put yet another swap
partition here so in my mind what I was thinking with this setup is that I
definitely want to have swap and having two swaps on two different hard
drives might make it a little bit more redundant as two different mechanical
drives will be able to write at the same time so this could improve a swap
performance by a little and eight gigs of swap should be fine in my setup and
now let's go and head and configure software raid write changes to the
disk yes create md device raid one mirror okay number of active devices will be
two and no spare devices and let's go ahead and choose three hundred and sixteen
gigs on both of our laptop hard drives right changes yes and let's finish with
this one okay and now we have three hundred and sixteen gigs of raid partition we are
going to use this one as XFS and mount it as a root there we go we are done
setting this one up so what we have here is a strange little setup right so we
have one raid like software raid array of like a little bit more than three hundred
gigs of XFS for root over two hard drives and then we have two swaps each one on the
one of the hard drives and then we have ESP on the USB disk module which is
extremely small but just about the right size for an ESP partition so let's go
ahead and finish partitioning and write changes to the disk do we want to write
absolutely yes and there we go so now we are going to install the system fully
this time and hopefully this will end today because I really really spent a lot
of hours on trying to get that first use be stick like a thing right and it
didn't work out and then the second pair of hard drives didn't work out either and
now we have some more hard drives let's go where this takes me okay so let's
choose the mirror mirror proxy scanning the mirror everything seems to be working
fine so far so I have good confidence that these drives will in fact manage to
survive the destiny that I have for them being root drives for this operating
system retrieving files we are good we're good I still don't know which CPU is in
there and I still didn't check if these five gigs of RAM are operational to their
full capacity or I would guess they are because I haven't seen any others
reported but I still didn't check it out I'm gonna check it after the installation
there we go select and install software okie dokie so we have got the choice to
pick between our in it demons okay so since we in it is recommended open
the rest and run it are optional so of course we are going to go with sis
for in it because that's the old ways right that's the reason why dev one
has even came to existence right it's not an actual fork I mean it is it is it's
made out of Debian right but it is actually a Debian right so it is a Debian
without the system D and some other stuff that they don't like so they do it
the old school way here we go ladies and the gentleman the moment of truth is
up on us will this actually boot running preserve grab branding almost done with
the installation it is a little bit slow yes yes that is definitely the case here
okay requesting reboot and I have unplugged the installer USB stick welcome to
grab and we don't have any choices here so I suppose that the installation actually
failed well okay then let's I don't know let's see if we can fix this for the
time being without reinstalling it right list okay we have prots mem disk HD 0
and HD 0 MS does one okay so grab is recognizing only one partition on only
one hard drive and this is an MBR partition table right it wasn't partitioned
as GPT let's see if we can see what is on this drive at the moment LS okay my
keyboard is different HD 0 MS does one and okay we have every partition in there
so the HD 0 is actually our internal USB so from this perspective it looks like
grab is not actually recognizing our raid array okay let's see what else can we
do okay what I think I did wrong here is I should have put boot folder on the USB
stick and not onto the root partition inside the raid array I actually don't
think that this is going to work at all because in order to load the raid
module clearly I need access to boot folder which is not present on the
USB internal sticky thing right so at this point I'm just gonna go ahead and
reinstall everything and repartition it differently this time okay so what I'm
going to do this time is I'm not even going to touch the raid array at all
let's just go ahead and delete the ESP partition delete this one okay let's
make it again create new partition and this time we're going to make it 128
megabytes this is going to be our FE partition okay FE system partition
bootable flag on done setting up this partition and the rest of the free
space we are going to create it as primary and we can leave it at x4 but
mount point is going to be boot okay done setting up at this point I would continue
however I am a little bit concerned about the my main hard drives being MBR and
not GPT but since we are not going to actually boot from these hard drives but
rather from a very very small USB disk module I think we are safe to leave this
as is right the only thing that we want to change here is go here use as XFS once
again format the partition yes mount point root all of the defaults and done
setting up this partition and voila I don't know which attempt is this today
maybe 6th I wasn't even paying attention to the count finish partitioning okay the
partition tables are changed on SDC raid one device XFS to swaps ESP X4 on
SCSI 11 this all seems to be in order okay I'm gonna let you know how this went
after the installation finishes and according to the last time it
installed on these laptop hard drives it took about one hour to finish the
installation so I'm gonna see you guys in one hour from now okay ladies and
gentlemen attempt number 78 continue so the last installation what was it so we
have a once again the XFS file system over raid one over two laptop hard drives
roughly 300 and something gigabytes and then on the USB header on the motherboard
we have half a gigabyte of some kind of a USB storage and I have placed 128 megs
for the AFI partition which is probably too much but I wasn't exactly sure what
it will look like in the end so the boot partition on the same USB drive ended up
being roughly I think it was 360 megabytes or something like that and
after possibly hopefully booting up the system for the first time I may be able
to resize this USB boot drive okay let me unplug the install USB stick now
because we are now rebooting and welcome to grab and yep for the first time and
grab has managed to read its own configuration and we are doing the
first ever boot of the system right amazing okay there we have it we have
managed to boot up the system let's login okay after freshly booting we have
load average over the total power of our 2 core CPU which should be fine after the
fresh boot let's see top okay so we definitely have 5 gigs of RAM and 8
gigs of swap which is good let me just remind you what this looks like okay
there we go we have XFS system for the root with the width of the RAID array X4
actually let's see let's see what the space is being taken right for the boot we
have available 230 megs so that's good that's actually good and then again we
have boot FE mounted and that one has available 116 megs okay so clearly
that's too much so I may be inclined to resize these two boot and boot FE right
and make some more room for boot if this room becomes warranted right so if
it gets closer to 100% I'm going to steal a little bit from the FE
partition but for now this will stay as is it is it is perfectly fine right good
good there we have it I am going to round up this video at this point because I
have been doing this installation for a little bit more than nine hours and it
will take a couple of more hours to get together all of the recordings that I
did on this I think I have like over 10 recordings different ones different
moments timelines and put them all together and publish on my channels right
and in the let's say phase 2 or episode 2 I'm going to insert the actual storage
disks into this machine to finish the the setting up of the actual NAS machine
right so this was only the installation of the operating system and it roughly took
me the entire day so this is where I'm going to end up this video and that will
be all okay now that you have seen all of that right what do you think what do
you think about the whole thing right it is going to be a network storage
right do at the moment when I ended up recording all of the videos it's already
like almost 11 p.m. right for me so it's been the entire day that I have been
working on this so the part where I actually put in the storage drives is
not there yet I am probably going to do that tomorrow like at like in a episode
2 of the same video right so stay tuned for that one still to see how will
that actually work out for me currently it has like five gigs of RAM and I'm
going to try to go with zeta zz is EFS right zeta byte file system that one is
well it is basically the best one for storage right so whether or not this
system the amount of RAM and the CPU will be able to keep up with that and be
able to hand me the my data right over the network in a meaningful speed that
remains to be seen I'm going to measure it for sure when I'm done with it so it is
what it is right stay tuned for the next episode of this same video and I'm
going to see you in the next one