hosted services

A friend at work offered to sell an Artigo A2000 to me for a small sum. I'm glad I accepted the generous offer as the box is rather snazzy. Populated with two 1.5TB disks and 2GB of RAM it makes a good file store. The VIA C7-D 1.5Gz processor isn't too bad.

For onsite backup FreeNAS offers ZFS[1] snapshots. For offsite backup, this comes in quite handy since using one of the snapshots, I can tar the contents of a snapshot into a file on USB disk.

Having the ability to simply plug a USB disk into the front or back of the NAS box adds a great deal of functional usability to the device, the old USB external disks around the house are currently getting copied to the single location.

We'll have a 1.5 external disk which shall function as off-site back up (through tar of snapshot).

Since the FreeNAS allows for configuring as a mirror, upgrading the volume capacity should be as simple as breaking the mirror and replacing with a larger physical disk, resync and upgrade the remaining half of the mirror.

FreeNAS is very polished, fully functional and better than any linux based alternative. There's no reason why I couldn't install debian and configure the services that I desire, but in this case FreeNAS was just ready and waiting to be used.

One of the really nice things about the Artigo A2000 is that it supports Wake On LAN (WOL). Remote power on over LAN (using Ico Doornekamp's (now maintained by José Pedro Oliveira) PERL wakeonlan script does the job nicely. Conventional shutdown -p now over SSH takes care of clean shutting down.

[1] ZFS is what I decided to use due to the lack of rsnapshot.