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1

hi. im a long time follower of tek syndicate on youtube.

im hoping to get some advice here :).
and im sorry if i posted this in the wrong sub forum.


this is the situation. i have my main computer, thats getting old but it still hangs in there (core2quad, 8gb ram, and now im working on getting a gtx 770). it has six hdd drives (yes, its 2014 and i still dont have a ssd disk).
i have WD raptor for my system, a 1TB WD green for my random stuff disk, 2x 1TB WD black for my not too important but important storage and a 2x 500GB WD RE3 in raid mirror for my main storage with very important stuff. so important that i have a two copies of my mirror on the two 1tb black drives.

now, i want to move my hard drives away from my main computer because of the noise and the heat and so i dont need to turn on and off my hard drives when i turn off my computer. so im going to put them in a server that will be in another part of the house. i will probably just leave the WD raptor in my system and something like one green drive for random stuff (maybe some day ill get an ssd disk for my system). so i also bought 2x 2TB WD RE disks (the new raid edition enterprise grade disks). they will replace my current raid array.

 

my problem is how to securely connect my disks from my server to my computer. i have hamachi2 network deployed on all my machines and on the machines that i support (about 15-20 more computer around the country and the world) so i dont want to have a security hole so someone can read and mess with my stuff. the server will run windows server 2008 R2 or windows server 2012 R2. the server machine will be an i3 with 4gb of ram (planin to upgrade to 8gb) or a real server machine from HP with a xeon cpu, so it will have some power, and the network will be upgraded to 1GBps of course.

 

so, what protocol sould i use to connect my disks from the server to my main computer? i dont have enough experience with network storage and all the different protocols.

i had some bad experience with simple network shares regarding performance and security dosent seem so great.

i stumbled upon iSCSI, a great thing because it registers on a machine as a local disk and the performance is great. but it makes a *.vhd disk on a physical disk in the computer so im afraid if something goes wrong with the disk and i have a bad sector, corrupted part of a plate or something, im going to loose all of the data in the *.vhd disk. i want to be able (if something goes wrong) to simply pull the disk out of the case, plug it in to another pc or a usb adapter and copy all the files to a new disk (apart from one damaged one that got destroyed with the bad sector).

also, i found out about NFS. but the internet isnt so helpful about that. i hear Logan mention that he uses NFS in a recent video, and im reading thing about it on the internet but havent found the answer to some questions. how secure it is? and does it just put the files on the disk as files or does it make something like a *.vhd file and puts them all in that? what is the performance of the system compared to for example iSCSI? when i duplicate a file on the disk, does the server execute the command or does the file travel trough the network to my machine and then back again?

in general, what would you recommend?

 

ps im sorry for my bad english :). im not a great speller and i have a huge headache.

pps should i put this in the inbox and ask tek syndicate team to make a video regarding this sort of stuff? there arnt many videos out there about this.

2

iSCSI shares disks. A VHD is just a virtual disk image. You have the option of sharing VHDs, but the target (server) doesn't have to make a VHD if you don't want it to. You can use it to directly share the whole disk. NFS shares files, but the Windows clients aren't very great.

With both machines inside your house, I'm not sure you should be concerned about security. Neither iSCSI nor NFS is encrypted, and using something like a VPN such as Hamachi2 for encryption can add overhead which may or may not be acceptable for you. Try it out for yourself though; if you're happy with it, great.

As far as copying files on a shared folder... If you want to quickly manage files, you're probably better off using remote desktop or VNC or SSH to do it directly on the server.

4

@advance_forum, are you saying that i can share the whole disk from the server to the client, and the files will be saved directly to the disk and not into a *.vhd file on the disk? so if i get i bad sector or something, i wont loose my whole data in the corrupted *.vhd file but only a small part that was in that bad sector? is this configuration possible in windows server?

i newer worked with server operating systems before, this will be my first experience with that.

also, is there any way to encrypt iSCSI traffic between the server and the client? i use hamachi2 just as a tunnel so i can access the computers that are not on my local network. on my local network i use the network itself.

about managing files, i dont want to use remote desktop for that, i want to be able to manage files from the client machine, and use remote desktop just for managing the server os. 

5

@kai, so windows server isnt really secure?

i now the power isnt necessary, i just pointed that out so if some protocol needs a little power you know that it will be available. and i try to avoid compression and use encryption only on the computer to computer communication.

my current pc has a 850W corsair psu (i think the power is about right), and the possible i3 server pc also had about a 400W corsair psu (i dont know the exact models, but the i3 machine was build two years ago on a budget) and all that will be on a APC 1.5kW smart UPS.

what would you recommend instead of windows server? i have about 1% experience with linux, so thats not really an option. and on windows server i can run applications that i already have on my machine running windows 7. like second copy, bittorrent sync, etc..

my clients arent so good with technology, but thel let other people use there laptops and stuff. and there is a high possibility that some of them could accidentally do something horrible. what exactly do you think when you mean separating my data from client accessible data on two drives?

7

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles-tutorials/misc_network_security/Secure-SMB-Connections.html

https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Server-Side_Copy

If you use CIFS for file sharing, you should be able to get encryption and server side copy.

FreeNAS is fairly friendly to work with as a server OS, once you learn the basics. It's managed through a web gui, you just have to do the initial network setup on the console when you first install. I have zero experience with Windows Server, but from general Windows experience, I imagine it can be a bit of a pain to manage. I strongly suggest you try out FreeNAS in a VM or on some spare hardware to see if you like it. There are lots of plugins for stuff like bittorrent, it has Samba for CIFS, an iSCSI target, tons and tons of useful features, not to mention the awesome ZFS. If you're worried about bad sectors, ZFS should help alleviate your woes; it's designed to make up for dodgy drives. ECC RAM is also strongly recommended.

To encrypt iSCSI you basically have to tunnel it through IPsec or some other encryption. I have no idea how you'd do that on Windows except that if you connected through hamachi it would be encrypted. I still don't quite understand why encryption is something you're worrying about on your LAN though.

I did a quick search, and it looks like Microsoft's iSCSI software target does not support using whole disks. I guess there's another reason to check out FreeNAS!

8

freenas is one of the options im looking into. but im more a windows guy so windows server is my first option. as i said before, i dont have enough experience with linux so i dont feel comfortable using it.

the only problem with windows server, as i mentioned before, is that i wont share whole disk over iSCSI. im not a fan of keeping all my data in one file.

9

thank you very much for the links!

as i said in the post above this one, freenas is one of the options im looking into, but im more of an windows guy. i know that windows can be a pain, and that its, special, sometimes, but after all those years i have some experience how to manage it (and use google in the same time :)).

ZFS is one thing that i like about freenas. but again, if i need to plug the hdd directly to a windows machine (and that happens a lot of time) i wont be able to read it. about ECC RAM, the i3 machine dosent support it, but the server maybe does (i dont have the server machine at the moment, im working on getting it).

and yes, windows server for some reason dosent support sharing the whole disk over iSCSI. i dont understand why.

thank you for all the help. now im going to put a question into inbox.exe and ask wendell to explain iSCSI in depth and explain iSCSI in freenas :).

11

the problem is time (as always). i have one job, and i work a lot at the side just to survive (and help my girlfriend with her collage) (unfortunately we live in croatia).

thank you very much for the offer, ill keep it in mind. im always for learning new things, so one day if i find the time ill contact you! :).

ps i already have windows server licence, so that is not a problem.

13

i dont have access to an original home storage server. and the lack of iscsi is a big down side.

also, i dont use dlna or media center so that dosent play any role in my choice :).


ps sorry im late with a reply. but im still reading all the forums!