On 30/05/06, Craig Box <craig@dubculture.co.nz> wrote:

> [..] did anyone in the wlug have any experience of using it.

I've played with OpenFiler reasonably recently.

> Any comments or does openfiler provide a nice gui install for
> setting up a network server that could also be acheived using
> other modern distro?

OpenFiler started out as a set of custom scripts that could be installed on
top of Fedora or RHEL, but now it's a custom distro unto itself (so much so
they advise you don't use packages from outside of the OpenFiler
repositories.  (As long as you don't replace their samba/php/etc, you should
be fine).

It appears 2.0 beta 1 is still the latest version you can download, but you
can upgrade it with yum (last I looked they were up to at least 2.0b2).  I
don't think they encourage you to use the 1.x series any more.

One of the nicest things about a file server these days are providing volume
snapshots, so that your Windows users can automatically revert versions of
files or directories (for example, seeing the directory as it was yesterday
means you don't need to go to the tape to get backups restored!)  OpenFiler
has support for this but it was broken as of a month or so ago, but
unfortunately LVM snapshots aren't quite as polished a way of doing this as
you can get on Windows.

We ended up using Ubuntu for our file server, because we couldn't wait for a
stable OF2, and wanted the server to use the same OS/packaging system as our
others.  I documented the procedure I used to get LVM snapshots working:
http://www.wlug.org.nz/SambaShadowCopyHowto.

Horses for courses of course.

Craig

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