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I posted this call for help on SmallNetBuilder.com, since that’s one of the smartest, most knowledgeable communities on the Internet for finding out what to do with small, home networks. But I figure I ought to cross-post it here too, in the hopes that someone else might end up here instead. Your help is appreciated!

I came over here looking to just mention my experience with FreeNAS the last few weeks, and lo – Tim’s asking about RAID recovery. Slightly freaky.

I had my FreeNAS box go south on me over the last couple of days and I thought I’d just share two things I’ve learnt from the experience. A little background first: for over a year, I’ve been running FreeNAS 0.6x on a home-built Celeron 430-based machine, four SATA drives for storage via software RAID, a throwaway IDE drive for the OS. The basic setup was two RAID1 arrays joined together as a JBOD, a decision I have come to regret, but thus it was, thus it is. So what have I learnt?

1. RAID recovery does not work. There is inevitably something that will go wrong. In my case, two things went horribly wrong. First, even though I could read FreeNAS’ native UFS formatted file system, I couldn’t recover any of the disks because FreeNAS partitions using the GPT partition structure, and NOT the more common MBR partition structure. Second, because of my decision to JBOD the arrays, the file system was partially on the first array, and partially on the second. No recovery software I found could handle this setup.

2. RAID is not a backup, so backup, backup, backup, or don’t give a damn. Because of my inherent paranoia, I’ve been copying stuff from other computers on to the NAS, in the hopes that everything doesn’t go south all at the same time. The net result of the NAS crash is that we’ve lost: my current resume (and I’m pretty sure I have it in my email somewhere), the current network map (not that difficult to recreate, as I have older ones around), and two bits of software (which I can re-download and re-request keys for). I’m sure we’ll discover a few other things that have gone missing over a few weeks, but it’s not bad. So data loss is not the issue here – but time and convenience is. It was very simple for me to go to my software share and reinstall some piece of software, or to go to the music share and stream some music. That’s all on hold. Moreover, I’m currently missing a safety net, in case something else should go sour.

I’m going to give some thought as to what to do next – and your comments are welcome and appreciated. One option that I am going to rule out before someone suggests it is reinstall FreeNAS. This is the third time in as many years that I’ve had something go abruptly wrong, with no explanation, even though it’s apparently a known issue in the current nightly releases, and must exist earlier as I was running an earlier build. My time is not worth another FreeNAS install, though I’ve loved using it when things are going well. The fact is, there is no reason an orderly shut-down should result in chaos when brought back up again.

Options that I’ve come up with so far:
1. OpenFiler. I’m told this is a painful OS to administer, but a pleasure to use. I’m not sure I want to necessarily learn yet another OS to just have my files available everywhere. On the other hand, my previous experience indicates that it supports a significantly larger set of features than FreeNAS, including one thing that FreeNAS fails at – the ability to use (slightly) different size disks.

2. Windows Home Server. Testing here and elsewhere indicates that WHS is faster than its alternatives, and very user-friendly. However, the lack of a web-based administration front-end means that I’m stuck to using a PC running Windows to administer it, which is not an option. Microsoft also rubs me the wrong way philosophically, though I’m willing to put aside monetary and philosophical concerns if the damn thing just works and allows me to upgrade as larger hard drives become available.

3. Buy a BYOD NAS like the QNAP or Synology devices. Yes, that’s nice. It’s also several hundred dollars, and locking into a storage vendor’s options. What I mean by this last thing: codec support missing for video files, or some proprietary file system, or, worst of all, a feature that’s locked out because you’ve not paid for some annual subscription. Yes, there are relatively standard x86 computers inside some of them and no, I’m still not convinced. Unless someone has had a successful experience recovering a device, the trade-off is not worth it.

4. Forget it. No network-based storage. Expand local storage with a local RAID (or RAID-like) array, and use my Mac OS X based machine as a server to share out the files. I’m most tempted by this option – where this means buying a Drobo. I’ve heard both good things and bad things about it – no one I know has ever had an issue with their Drobo, but there are enough horror stories on the internet about Drobos going south that I don’t know whether I’m living in a statistical fluke.

5. Something else. This is where you all come in. Surely this can’t be the entirety of the options. You’ll notice that all of the options are those that keep the device (and data!) under my control; that’s a (strong) preference, but not an absolute requirement – provided strong encryption and incremental backup are both possible.

Thanks for listening. And remember to do your backups.

The New York Times is carrying an article basically summarizing what most of us have known for a while – technology is slowly creeping into every waking moment of life. More importantly, as the pipes and tubes of the internet have become available to every single device out there, networks are creeping into every single waking moment of life, which is a far more powerful thing than just technology:

Courtesy XKCD.

For what it’s worth, Jan Chipchase said something to me a few years ago when we were talking about Nokia’s design philosophy that still sticks out in my mind; sadly, though, I think Nokia’s lost this philosophy sometime between when we talked and now. To wit:

We’ve reached the age where your phone is both the first thing you look at when you wake up in the morning and the last thing you look at when you go to sleep. And there’s a lot of use-cases in between. We have to design for each of those cases, and still keep the phone simple enough for the average human to use.

It definitely got me thinking about when I first got a phone the better part of a decade ago. Without needing to be told, I put the phone on the bedside table when I went to sleep, setting an alarm on it for the next day. It seemed like the correct thing to do – and now it’s reflex for me to set the alarm at night, tap the snooze button once in the morning and then get up to go get ready. I’m not alone either.

Since you (you know who you are) asked, this is what it looks like, with apologies for the slight misalignment; different resolutions on the monitors:

And as long as you’re brutal about keeping your folder structure, it’s not that hard to not have any desktop clutter!