NAS/Home Server Setup Help pleaseeeee

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
1

Ok this might get a little long winded but please bare with me. 

Long story short, I need to build a new home server/NAS/Media center PC for my home network. I've already chosen the parts for the build (listed below), since I don't have an old pc to re-purpose. But building isn't the issue, but rather how to set it up on the network that's my problem.

Short story long, I used to use simple external drives and pen drives to keep my data organised and backed up etc, but they ALWAYS seem to get broken. The reason for this is that for complex personal reasons I have a ton of ponies come through my home and I have to rely on them to do various different things, and the external drives always get dropped for one reason or another. Having been through about 6/7 4TB external drives, I finally got sick if it and decided to build a NAS home server so that the data never has to get physically moved around.

Trouble is, NAS/Networking is fairly uncharted territory for me. Networking is one of my weaker tech knowledge spots. The most I've ever done in the area is simple wifi+internet setup and connecting devices to wifi, so I've come up with a few questions I can't find easy answers for. Mostly to do with the setup and software. I don't need any super advanced features like shadow copy or web access. I found a fair few vids on youtube on part selection, hardware etc, but almost nothing on actually setting it up. I already have the gigabit switch and cables etc, but haven't yet built the home server.

 

My requirements:

 

Network accessed storage in RAID 6.

Local playback (use as a media center pc plugged directly into mane TV hdmi).

Only authorized devices access (More on this later)

Auto backup (this this more of a bonus than a requirement)

 

My questions:

Once built, what OS would be best for these requirements?

Once set up, how to I set up hardware RAID? Is this done automatically when I plug the drives into the card? Does an opton come up in the mobo BIOS? Is it just done with the downloaded firmware/ software from the manufacturer's site?

How to I set it up so that the drives in this pc are NAS?

What about viruses? I have quite a few different ponies come through my house everyday and use my wifi, and not one of them is remotely tech savvy, and I guarantee at least 1 of them WILL have a virus in their netbook/laptop. For now this isn't too much of an issue because viruses that spread via whatever wifi you cennect too seem to be pretty rare. Just to say, my wifi network atm is WPA2 password protected. But putting a dedicated server on the network is another matter entirely. For this reason I was thinking of Linux but not sure which version to get or how to setup the network access stuff with this either.

Any recomendations for a mid-high end RAID card?

 

Would really appreciate some answers to these questions.

Thanks

 

-SoulDragonWithFlow

 

My planned Build

Silverstone Grandia GD08

Asus Z87 TUF Gryphon mobo

Enermax 650W Revolution87  PSU

Intel 4130 i3 CPU

H100i liquid cooler. Config for low noise.(Overkill i know but had it lying around anyway)

8 X WD Red 4TB hard drives connected to RAID pcie card. (Raid 6). Possible more HDD in future. hence 16 port raid card

2 X intel 730 series SSD plugged into Mobo for boot. (Raid 1)

4X1 Gigabit intel NIC (unsure on exact model yet)

LSI Megaraid 9280-16i4e (This still can change if I get any recomendations)

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LSI will be a good choice for the raid card, I don't see anything wrong with your selection there. The raid setup can either be done in the card's option ROM, which will be available at boot if enabled in the BIOS, or through a utility you run in the OS. The option ROM takes forever to load, so I'd recommend disabling it if you aren't booting from the disks on the RAID card.

The benefit of SSDs for booting the OS will be completely null, because any storage server should be on all the time anyway. You'd be better off spending that money on maxing out the RAM. I'd suggest looking for a different motherboard that supports ECC, as well. Get a USB flash drive for the OS, that's really all you need. USB3 should be more than fast enough for what you really need. Once the OS gets warmed up, everything will be cached in RAM anyway.

The NIC you're looking at is probably an Intel PRO/1000 PT quad port gigabit adapter. I have a dual port version, and it works pretty great. Keep in mind that for 802.3ad link aggregation, you must have a managed switch, which can be considerably more expensive than the dumb switches most people are familiar with. I got a Dell PowerConnect 24 port gigabit switch used on eBay for a good price. A 4 port NIC is otherwise pointless for a NAS.

For the OS, you'll want to go Linux I imagine since you need to playback media. FreeBSD would probably be a bit tricky to get configured correctly. I imagine the integrated graphics on the i3 you've chosen are all you're planning on using, and that should be fine for your purposes. You will most likely want to go with some stable distribution and an LTS release rather than something like Arch, both for ease of setup and stability, as well as to help you resist the urge to frequently upgrade and reboot... My personal recommendation would be Debian, but that is about as helpful as me recommending a flavor of ice cream. You will likely do just as well with CentOS or Fedora or heck even something like Ubuntu... There are a lot of options out there, but the tricky part for you is that you want to dual purpose one box as both a NAS and a media center. I'm not aware of any specific distributions tailored to that particular use case.

To set up file sharing with Windows, you'll just need to follow a guide for installing and configuring Samba. The setup process generally involves setting up user accounts and permissions as well, so you can restrict access to only authorized people.

For the media center frontend, I'm not sure anything can beat XBMC.

For virus scanning, you can set up ClamAV as a service to automatically scan your shared folders and protect the Windows clients. The server won't be something you have to worry about as much, because most viruses that spread through Windows won't infect a Linux OS.

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Thank you very much! ;) this answered a lot. thanks! 

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Im not an expert by any means but my own research suggests, that you will not gain anything using ECC with Raid6. Only RaidZ / ZFS file system really takes advantage of ECC memory. But please, correct me if Im wrong.