Text 16867, 144 rader
Skriven 2013-11-24 12:25:17 av mark lewis (1:3634/12.71)
  Kommentar till text 16863 av BOB KLAHN (1:135/382)
Ärende: small linux
===================
On Sun, 24 Nov 2013, BOB KLAHN wrote to MARK LEWIS:

 BK>>  I am looking for two things. One, a linux system to run a slower 
 BK>> computer. I have tried DSL, Puppy and plan to try Centos. Other 
 BK>> than that, any recommendations?

 ML> why do you specify "older computer"? there's no real

 BK>  I said slower, but older is quite appropriate. What I have is 
 BK> both types.

yes, you sure did... my apologies...

 ML> difference if you are not trying to do GUI stuff... maybe
 ML> some background services but some of those can be turned
 ML> off if they are not needed...

 BK>  Yes, but if it's Linux I don't know anything about background 
 BK> services.

just like on windows, they are easily found and some research tells what they
are used for...

 BK>  ...

 ML> i use freenas but the last of the old releases before that

 BK>  Hadn't thought of old releases.

i started with a version of freenas and updated three or four times to the one
i showed in my previous post... they used to be installed on a 200mhz and then
later a 300mhz machine... they worked but were slow, as mentioned... i also
tried it on an 800mhz machine and that was ok as well but i needed that box for
another task and tossed the current recycled 2.5ghz machine at it when it came
in... life is much better when working with the nas, now...

 ML> in any case, i would make sure that nas box is plenty fast
 ML> and has plenty of storage... fast cpu and plenty of memory
 ML> is important otherwise it could take several minutes to
 ML> copy files to/from the nas when it should take only a few
 ML> tens of seconds or less... BTDT... won't use less than a
 ML> 1ghz machine for that any more... 1ghz is livable...

 BK>  When you said "plenty fast" I was seeing multiple core 3 GHZ. 
 BK> Yeah, 1GHZ is in line with what I have available.

my current system would be even better if it were not a celeron... but for now
it is working and i don't get any complaints about speed from others using
it...

 ML> anything less was hardly tolerable and memory is definitely
 ML> needed to prevent swapping which will slow things even
 ML> further...

 BK>  I figure between 512 GB and 1GB. Whatever I do many of my
 BK>  computers are limited to 100mb network, and if I go internet 
 BK> that's 7MB so even a slow computer will be fast.

the current box has 768M of RAM but as you can see, it is not all available...
that because it boots off a CDROM and loads everything onto a RAMDisk for
operation... the only thing a thumbdrive is used for is the configuration
storage... i wouldn't try to boot and run from a thumbdrive because of their
limited writes and i don't want to have to replace the thumbdrive...

 BK>  I am working up to a faster desktop, with GB ethernet, but I can 
 BK> live with the 100MB for now.

we don't even know what gigabyte networking is ;)

 ML> Version       0.7.1 Shere (revision 5127)
 ML> Built on      Sun Apr 11 00:21:36 JST 2010
 ML> OS Version    FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p7 (revision 199506)
 ML> Platform      i386-livecd on Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.53GHz
 ML> Uptime        98 day(s) 4 hour(s) 9 minute(s) 29 second(s)
 ML> Memory usage  20% of 658MiB

 BK>  Ok, your memory usage is quite well in line with my smaller 
 BK> configuration.

i guess i also have some services turned off now, too... it used to use more
memory than that... it can serve multimedia as well as just files and i recall
i had some of that working a while back...

 ML> Disk space usage

 BK>  I'm not planning anything like that size drives. This will be 
 BK> used for file sharing, not backups.

those drives aren't large at all... in fact, they're getting pretty small for
our use... i've already had to move off a lot of multimedia files to make room
for other data... we don't really use the nas for backups either... mainly
storage (eg: downloaded and installed programs) so that we have one central
area for installed program archives... this way the machines are all running
the same software and the installers are not duplicated on each workstation
which easily leads to them getting out of sync...

 ML> the above boots from a live-cd (as noted) and stores its
 ML> config data on a usb thumbdrive... i have two drives in the
 ML> box as separate entities and shared individually... i don't
 ML> like the JBOD idea as there seems to be no 'security' of
 ML> the data... besides, with only two disks, any sort of
 ML> ganging of them makes little sense to me...

 BK>  I was thinking resident HD to run it, but maybe Thumbdrive
 BK>  booting would not be bad. 

you don't want to boot from a shared drive... i don't know that you can,
actually... booting from a CDROM is what we chose becaues it was easy to change
versions... just boot another CD and carry on... upgrading was as easy as that
and reverting was as well... but the newer stuff has no way to upgrade our
existing format to the newer formats so we're staying right here until another
recycle machine becomes available... then we'll take a look at the newer
version of freenas and decide whether to copy everything over to it or not...
at that time we hope to have some larger drives to use, too...

 BK> What I am mostly interested in is minimal effort for 
 BK> configuration. One person to upload, no passwords to download. 
 BK> Just family filesharing and anyone I decide to give the address 
 BK> to. All uploads done locally. Maybe even taking the drive off the 
 BK> NAS unit and doing the upload by USB.

the best thing i can suggest is to get it set up and try it... i know that one
can set http and ftp access but i don't allow external WAN connections to this
nas because of the data we store on it... i'm pretty sure that you can do what
you want but i haven't done it as you have described...

as for copying the files on via usb, you'd be better off to copy them over the
wire instead of trying to pull the storage drive... the format will most likely
not be compatible with other operating systems... network accessed stroage is
exactly that for a reason ;)

once i got this one set up the way we wanted it, it hasn't been touched
since... it just sits over in the corner and runs headless serving files and
storing new ones copied to it ;)

we do most of our copying via network neighborhood type access... i use that
terms for familiarity... i had one or two machines that access the nas via ftp
but we have to play with ownership and permissions of their files for others to
get access to them... samba/network neighborhood is much easier for everyone...

)\/(ark

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