How did I manage to get so much junk that I think I need a NAS? I just bought a 300GB HDD (Maxtor SATA - $199) so I can backup the contents of a 250GB drive that is dying, I was thinking of building a file server for a little while.
Recently I saw the ReadyNAS NV unit it'll cost a little over 1k, but the thought of being able to buy it and just throw HDDs into it and having it just work...
But then could I live with myself buying a preconfigured unit for use at home when I really should be setting up a proper Linux server? How many people here have got a Linux server set up here? Any of you guys played with LVM, backups (from network, versioning, and DVD archive?) and/or system partitioning?
What I really want to use the VLM from Linux to manage my storage, with the ability of play windows based games and use the OSX as the base OS, I guess I’ll need to wait for a hacked Intel based Powermac or just switch between three of my computers.
If you think about it from the perspective of giving people stuff to leech, you may find DVD a bit wanting as well. I find those little laptop drives do well, considering most people don't want to leech more than 40 GB off you at a time. I haven't found a good use for LVM, and I don't manage to accrue all the crap that other people manage to accrue.
I use Nathan's backup solution: give it all to friends, and they'll magically keep the good stuff and delete the crap. If I ever need it again I just ask around. In a more structured sense, P2P is really a good solution for this. Keep all the data you want in a P2P shared folder, and when the HDD dies, just look it up on the network.
Perhaps the best approach is that of the buddhist zen master: throw it away to prove your disconnection from the data.
It's so much easier to find things if they're on a HDD rather than hidden away on some disc somewhere, I suppose my problem now is I can't organise my backup disc properly.
How did you have your asterisk server setup? It sounds useful, just that the hardward to support it properly seems too expensive.
LVM for RAID is an excellent idea (if it works, I don't know). I've never really thought about doing that. RAID only appears to ever really be useful on the local box, though, not on NAS (at least, I can't think of anything I'd need quick network disk access over).
As for the asterisk setup, in short, I haven't set it up yet. The biggest problem is dealing with NAT (second being security). I'm using a SIP trunk to free world dialup as well as to iinetphone, which is pretty much the only free (ie: no minimum usage) SIP provider I've found. Hardware is a bit of a bitch, but I've had friends set up the hardware without too much trouble. You may need a sound card on your box, though.
The hardware itself is actually pretty cheap, something like $40 - $80 for the line cards (if I remember correctly). I haven't bought it because I don't really want to play with my real phone line
Oztell seems to be one of the cheapest VoIP companies, you still need to pay a few dollars a month to get a SIP number though.
My problem with line cards is, for a little more you can get a self contained VoIP unit, sure it doesn't do as much, but I like having a seperate unit to handle my phone calls when I'm rebuilding my server.
I thought NAT was easy enough to get through using SIP proxies, let us know how that goes.
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