Some discussions have come about adding another server to reduce the pressure on our existing server. I don't generally make any of the decisions regarding our computer network but a suggestion was made regarding a program/server/technology called openfiler. Given that I am the known open source advocate around here, the question was asked, what did I know about it and did anyone in the wlug have any experience of using it. I assumed it was a software package but its seems is a customized version of a Ret Hat derivate CentOS. http://www.openfiler.org Having a Linux server on the network would definitely be a foot in the door for Linux based software within our company but it would good if the first experience within the company was positive and straightforward. 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? Cheers Chris
[..] 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
Thanks for the comments Craig. The IT guys at work downloaded a version of Openfiler and installed it fine on a test machine. It appears to be a viable option so we'll wait how far their want to take it. I've also forwarded your post to them. Thanks Chris On 30/05/06, Craig Box <craig(a)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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participants (2)
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Chris O'Halloran -
Craig Box