Got a homebrew one myself

Posted by Kromey at 12:47am Feb 7 '14
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First two questions answered in the title. Next three:

6TB of raw space, but only about 2.8TB of usable space for files. It's a file server, as well as backup server, and it's the SSH gateway into my home network from The Outside.

The whole thing's built on Ubuntu, and I used mdadm to turn the 4 1.5TB hard drives into three RAID arrays: the first is RAID 1 (mirroring) across sda1 and sdb1, is a couple of hundred GB, and houses the OS; the second is RAID 0 (striping) across sda2 and sdb2, uses the remaining space, and is the primary file store; the final one merges sdc and sdd into another RAID 0 (striping), and is the backup.

I think I've posted about my backup scheme before, but in a nutshell it uses rsync to take snapshots every day, and keeps a daily snapshot of the entire file store for 7 days; it also stores 4 weekly snapshots and 6 monthly snapshots. The beautiful thing about it is that it uses hardlinks, which means that the overhead above and beyond the space needed for a single copy of the files to maintain all of those snapshots is just a few KB.

Additionally, I have scripts running that download (and snapshot using the same scripts) my web server's files and database, as well as scripts that maintain a mirror of the snapshots on an encrypted eSATA hard drive; I have two of those, and while one sits plugged in receiving data nightly, the other sits safely in our safe deposit box at the credit union, just in case the house blows up. (In actuality we have not resumed the off-site backups since we moved into the house ~1.5 years ago. I actually haven't even found the correct cables to hook up the eSATA drive to the file server!)

Finally, I have SMART monitoring scripts running on it that e-mail me of errors. (There's some warning signs that sda may be in the verge of starting to fail, so I'm keeping an eye on that -- but so far it's still humming along fine.)

One of these days I'll actually write a blog post describing in detail how it's set up. If you want to know what I did, well, that's one more motivation to actually do it.

Future plans for this thing include a streaming media server of some kind (would be awesome to stream to the PS3...), and it will be my Puppet Master as I start to convert my servers over to being managed by Puppet.