Finish NAS post

content/technical/2011/12/freebsd-zfs-powered-nas.html

@@ -1,81 +1,131 @@
-TODO: Add photos
+## Summary
 
-Recently the Time Machine drive on my Mac Pro started to randomly
+Here's the tl;dr version: I sold my Mac Pro to fund building a home
+NAS. The result is a HP MicroServer with 4Gb RAM and 3 × 2Tb hard
+drives running FreeBSD from the system drive and a ZFS pool across the
+three 2Tb drives. Total cost: AU$731.67.
+
+## Rationale
+
+Recently the Time Machine drive in my Mac Pro started to randomly
 disappear and Mac OS X would say that I had removed it improperly,
 which was not true given it was an internal drive still inside the
 machine.
 
-I'd seen this behaviour before and in that case it resulted in the drive
+I've seen this behaviour before and in that case it resulted in the drive
 being replaced due to its inability to complete a short S.M.A.R.T.
 scan. This drive (also a Samsung) was suffering a similar problem except
 that initiating the S.M.A.R.T. scan would actually cause it to disappear
 from the SATA bus. A check on the Samsung site showed that the drive was
 out of warranty so I was up for a replacement.
 
-The Mac Pro wasn't getting used for much since I got a i7 powered Mac Book Pro.
-Its main duties involved storing my iTunes library, Aperture library and
-running my weather logger. It wasn't exactly a very energy efficient machine
-to run all the time. It would in fact keep the study warm overnight when the
-door was closed.
+The Mac Pro wasn't getting used for much since I got a i7 powered Mac
+Book Pro. Its main duties involved storing my iTunes library, Aperture
+library and running my weather logger. It wasn't exactly a very energy
+efficient machine to run all the time. It would in fact keep the study
+warm overnight when the door was closed during winter.
 
 There was also a problem with replacing the failing drive: I couldn't afford
 to do so. So I decided to move the weather logging to my [ALIX board][alix]
 and sell the Mac Pro to fund building a home NAS. I was able to sell the
 Mac Pro very quickly on eBay for $1500 but gave myself a budget of $1000 for
-the NAS. I wanted the NAS to have reliable redundant storage, which for me
+the NAS. I wanted the NAS to have reliable, redundant storage, which for me
 meant [ZFS]. This implied the new machine would need to run one of [Solaris],
-[Illumos], [FreeBSD], [FreeNAS] or [SmartOS]. The requirement to run one of
+[illumos], [FreeBSD], [FreeNAS] or [SmartOS]. The requirement to run one of
 these OS's ruled out an off the shelf NAS appliance.
 
-[ZFS]: TODO
-[alix]: TODO
-[Solaris]: TODO
-[Illumos]: TODO
-[FreeBSD]: TODO
-[SmartOS]: TODO
+[ZFS]: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/
+[alix]: /2011/12/openwrt-on-alix/
+[Solaris]: http://oracle.com/solaris
+[illumos]: https://www.illumos.org/
+[FreeBSD]: http://www.FreeBSD.org/
+[SmartOS]: http://smartos.org/
+[FreeNAS]: https://www.illumos.org/
 
 I did a lot of research into different ways to build the machine and
 tried out all the OS options in virtual machines. I considered using
-basic PC hardware, MiniITX, HP MicroServer, etc. Each had its own pros
-and cons. The basic PC approach was possibly the cheapest but it was the
-largest. MiniITX was more expensive and choice of multi hard drive bay
-cases were limited. I ended up settling on the [HP Proliant MicroServer]
-running FreeBSD.
+basic PC hardware, MiniITX, HP MicroServer, etc. Each had its own
+pros and cons. The basic PC approach was possibly the cheapest but it
+was the largest. MiniITX was more expensive and choice of multi hard
+drive bay cases were limited. I ended up settling on the [HP Proliant
+MicroServer][microserver] running FreeBSD.
 
 [microserver]: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/hk/en/sm/WF06b/15351-15351-4237916-4237917-4237917-4248009-5163345.html
 
-The MicroSever is a neat little unit. It uses a low poert dual core AMD
+<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
+  $(function () {
+    var alt = $(document.createElement('img')).attr('src', '/images/2012/01/_MG_0581.jpg');
+    $('#inside-outside-view').toggle(function() {
+      $(this).attr('src', alt.attr('src'))
+    }, function() {
+      $(this).attr('src', '/images/2012/01/_MG_0582.jpg')
+    });
+  });
+</script>
+
+<figure>
+  <img id="inside-outside-view" src="/images/2012/01/_MG_0582.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="" />
+  <figcaption>The end result. Click/tap to toggle inside view.</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure>
+  <img src="/images/2012/01/_MG_0583.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="" />
+  <figcaption>CD for size comparison.</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure>
+  <img src="/images/2012/01/_MG_0584.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="" />
+  <figcaption>Oblique view (excuse the finger prints).</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+
+## The Build
+
+The MicroServer is a neat little unit. It uses a low power dual core AMD
 Turion II CPU and comes with 2Gb ECC RAM and a 250Gb HD. I has 4 non-hot
 swappable hard drive bays all packaged up in a squat little box. I ordered
 mine with an extra 2Gb or RAM as ZFS likes to have plenty of RAM available
 to run well.
 
-During my reesarch hard drive prices sky rocketed due to the floods
+During my research hard drive prices sky rocketed due to floods
 in Thailand, however I was able to get some at pre-flood prices from
-[ht.com.au][ht]. They have since put the price up $40 (TODO) and placed order
-limits on them, so I got in at the right time.
+[ht.com.au][ht]. They have since put the price up ~$40 and placed order
+limits on them.
 
 For the drives I chose 2Tb Seagate Barracuda Green's. They feature SATA 3
-and a 64Mb cache and run at the atypical 5900RPM. These drives seemed to be
+and a 64Mb cache and run at an atypical 5900RPM. These drives seemed to be
 a good balance across energy efficiency, noise, performance and price.
 
 [ht]: http://ht.com.au/
 
-The final parts list ended up being the rater diminuative:
+The final parts list ended up being rather diminutive:
 
-* 1 &times; HP MicroServer (658553-371) + 2Gb extra RAM $336.82
-* 3 &times; 2Tb Seagate Barracuda Green Hard Drives $394.85
+* 1 &times; [HP MicroServer][microserver] (658553-371) + 2Gb extra RAM $336.82
+* 3 &times; [2Tb Seagate Barracuda Green Hard Drives][hard-drives] $394.85
+
+[hard-drives]: http://www.ht.com.au/cart/1/part/V0531-Seagate-Barracuda-Green-ST2000DL003-hard-drive-2-TB-SATA-600/detail.hts
 
 The total cost ended up being $731.67, healthily under budget.
 
-Installng FreeBSD and setting up the ZFS pool was very
-straightforward. I'm running the drives in a RAIDZ configuration,
-giving 3.6Tb of usable storage. I currently have two ZFS filsystems
-on that. One in a normal configuration and the other for photos with
-`copies=2` set. I plan to try out enabling ZFS deduplication on the
-former filesystem soon.
+<figure>
+  <img src="/images/2012/01/IMG_0097.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="" />
+  <figcaption>Installing the extra RAM.</figcaption>
+</figure>
 
-So the system all ran well for a few days however on the forth day one of
+<figure>
+  <img src="/images/2012/01/IMG_0098.jpg" width="600" height="600" alt="" />
+  <figcaption>Installing the hard drives.</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+## Software
+
+Installing FreeBSD and setting up the ZFS pool was very
+straightforward. I'm running the drives in a RAIDZ configuration,
+giving 3.6Tb of usable storage. I currently have two ZFS file systems
+on that. One in a normal configuration and the other for photos with
+`copies=2` set.
+
+The system all ran well for a few days however on the forth day one of
 the brand new drives failed and started making a terrible clicking, beeping
 noise. Fortunately HT replaced it very promptly and the replacement has
 been running fine since. During the time the failed drive was out for
@@ -84,3 +134,29 @@ no data loss. Once the new drive was installed it was a simple matter of
 issuing `zfs replace ada1` and it began the process of resilvering the data
 onto the new drive and all it has been running well since.
 
+    $ zpool status
+      pool: storage
+     state: ONLINE
+     scan: resilvered 1.07T in 9h32m with 0 errors on Tue Nov 29 07:13:29 2011
+    config:
+
+      NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
+      storage     ONLINE       0     0     0
+        raidz1-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
+          ada1    ONLINE       0     0     0
+          ada2    ONLINE       0     0     0
+          ada3    ONLINE       0     0     0
+
+    errors: No known data errors
+
+After setting up the OS and file systems the only other thing I
+needed to so was make the storage available to other machines on the
+network. Since my house is all Macs I built [netatalk] via the FreeBSD
+ports collection to make the storage available via <abbr title="Apple
+Filing Protocol">AFP</abbr>.
+
+[netatalk]: http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/
+
+With that done it's the sever shows up in the Finder via Bonjour and
+copying/accessing data is dead simple.
+

content/technical/2011/12/freebsd-zfs-powered-nas.yaml

@@ -1,9 +1,9 @@
 --- 
 title: Home NAS Powered by FreeBSD and ZFS
-extra: TODO
+extra: Building a home NAS with a HP MicroServer running FreeBSD and ZFS.
 kind: article
 section: technical
-created_at: 2011-12-08 17:57:00
+created_at: 2012-01-21 17:08:00
 keywords: 
 - zfs
 - freebsd