The New home server, what happened next...

I have been meaning to finish this off for a while and getting this thing up and running was not that straight forward at all.

Surgery continues

My original plan was to run this server on hardware raid over 5 x 1tb drives. this would include both the system drive and the data storage. Great plan, however, WHS seemed to have other ideas. Firstly I used the Intel embedded storage manager to create two raid volumes, a bootable C drive and a larger D drive. both Raid 5 using all 5 drives with 64kb blocks on C and 128k blocks on D (bigger files, bigger blocks etc.).


WHS just would not install on this, after the pain of having to create a driver floppy (a 3.5 disk, remember them?). not one PC in the house had a working floppy drive and I had dumped all my old 3.5 inch disks 4 years ago during a house move.

I managed to find a working USB floppy at work and make the required driver disks, however windows just would not install on my nice sensible raid. I tried for a week and then a work trip got in the way so I downed tools and ent off to Las Vegas (for work honestly).

Whilst I was in Las Vegas, I discovered Frys Electronics. It's kind of like a small corner of Sham Shui Po in Hong Kong without the tofu and wet market. Still perplexed by WHS's refusal to bend to my hardware demands, I went for a wander around this newly discovered world of computer goodies. If I needed a single boring drive to get this server going, what could fit the bill and not be such a glaring single point of failure?

The extra controller

Fry's had just started selling a range of SSD drives. This would give me a single drive but with no moving parts. This should work just fine. As I had filled all the internal SATA ports with 1tb drives, I would also need an additional SATA controller. a quick Google and a read of the box it came in, and I found a PCI SATA controller that had drivers for 2003 and picked up an 80gb SSD.

The drive "mounted" in the PC

After winning big in Vegas and wearing out shoes and knees walking around the convention center, I got back and continued the WHS quest.

This time, I created two huge 2gb volumes across all 5 disks due to 2003's 2tb hangup and installed the new controller and SSD into the HP. After a little fiddling with the config and boot order, WHS finally installed and booted up.

WHS then allowed me to add the 2 new raid volumes as storage drives to the system and off we went. I created new shares to mirror my old server and then used MS rich copy to copy all my content across then relocated the server into the loft and put it onto the UPS. I did not however stop using the old server, opting to just sync content to the new server and give it time to settle in and to see if it was going to flame out or die.

lucky I did.

A couple of days later, the unthinkable happened, drives 1 and 2 failed!! The system went into radi rebuild and failed (lost more than 1 drive) and WHS complained about everything being screwed / duplicated and I was basically sunk. I turned out that the failure was caused by the power Y cable I had to use and swapped it out and the drives came up and the server could then be rebuilt.

Not happy about this, I had a dig around google and read up on the pros and cons of WHS drive extender. Based on my experiences with large storage systems at work (we have around 250tb across various systems), I thought I would dump raid and go with the folder mirroring in WHS.

As the system was still booting and running of the single SSD, I firstly went in and deleted all all the files stored in the various shares, deleted the shares themselves and then in storage manager removed the raid volumes from the storage pool. I then rebooted the machine and deleted both Raid volumes, leaving me with just 5 single drives.



I then restarted WHS and went back into the console and was presented with 5 unused drives. I added all of then to the storage pool and then re-created my shares. this time for all the shares I enabled folder mirroring. OK so it's not as efficient as raid 5, but in the long term storage is cheap and this allows me to be flexible in how my files are managed and how I grow the system moving forward.

I then copied the media back into the newly created shares and let the storage management balance and replicate my data, at the file level across my pool of 5 separate drives.

I think the fact that the replication is done at the file level is very important. In a raid system, it's at a block level, your files are broken up and evenly spread across a number of drives, and this is fine when everything works but a raid system is just that, it's a system composed of a set of matched parts. your data will only be available as long as the system (excluding parity) survives.

With the drive extender, your files are distributed across a a pair of drives, like raid 0 but at a file level, so each f the drives have a complete copy of the file. Now I haven't

funny I should mention that.....

WHS complained that the storage pool was broken. This time however the fix was simple. As everything was mirrored, I did not loose anything. I just went into the storage manager and removed the dead drive from the storage pool. this just updated the pointers removing reference to any copy of a file that was on that drive.

I then ejected the drive and sent it off under warranty.

Disk extender then rebuilt the mirroring of the files across the remaining drives restoring my file resilience. When the replacement drive comes back I will add it to the pools and the files will then be distributed back across all 5 again. This is all done whilst the server is running and serving clients.
I think this is not a bad way to work. And drive extender realy needs to be something that Microsoft keep in the next version of WHS (but they are apparently dropping it!)

The server is now happy and running OK. At this time, I am still waiting for the replacement drive but it's doing OK so far.

Other things it is doing is backing up the main PC downstairs every night and it did back up my laptop too until the laptop died again. As WHS is really server 2003, it also has all the server features still hidden away too. I have now also got WHS acting as my home DNS with all my IP devices registered in my home zone and the DNS forwarding on other queries to my usual external DNS provider. I have also got it providing DHCP services for about 10 devices.

For media, I have installed Jriver media center on the server, and I use this to manage my music library and also jump out to Amazon via it's GUI to purchase MP3s. The Amazon MP3 downloader is also installed, and this allows my to download purchases directly into the music library.
For a media server, I have added the Twonkymedia server. This can serve out Music, pictures and video. In the lounge, we use a Sony network attached bluray player with the Sony Bravia portal. This can access Twonky on WHS and play stills, audio and video to the lounge TV.

For music around the house, I have a Roku M1001 sound bridge. This box happily acts as a renderer and teamed with the Twonky  Android app, can receive playlists and play music. I just purchased a second Roku (They don't make them anymore) and this will become the BBQ player linking back to the WHS via Wifi and being controlled from the android app.

It's all coming together rather well!

My New Home Server, hardware selection

OK

So I know pretty much what I want this box to do and have some basic idea about the sort of hardware I should push into service to make it all work.

As RAID support is a critical piece of this puzzle, for the hardware I started at the disks and worked out from there. I want this server to be nice and quick and to run RAID 5 so I am going to need 3 or more matched hard drives. Searching around, I found a source of SATA II RAID cages in the US at http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_cages_enclosures/. They had a range of 3 4 and 5 drive bays.

The one that tickled me was the ICY DOCK MB455SPF-B 5-in-3 SATA-II Cage.

This supported 5 X 3.5 inch SATA II drives vertically in 3 X 5.25" drive bays. it also had 1 for 1 SATA II connectors on the back and good cooling. Whilst PC Pitstops prices are OK (I paid US$125), their international shipping is off the dial so I would look closer to home for this cage. The only issue with this cage in reviews I have seen is that the latches are a "bit goofy" and may vibrate but I will sort that once the system is built.

There are other similar cages on Amazon that may be cheaper for shipping etc.

OK so I now need a server chassis that has 3 free 5.25" drive bays and I also need 5 hard drives to fill the cage.

Lets look at the disks first. I could push the boat out here and and stuff it full of 2tb drives giving me (after parity) 8tb of space. Sure I could do this, but I don't think I will ever fill that amount of storage, I am not building a huge library of video or storing data from the Large Hadron Collider. Good 2tb drives are also at the top end of pricing due to there desirability.  At the time of writing, a 2TB drive is going for around £60-£70 on Amazon. I will aim for 4tb and put in 5 X 1tb drives. Looking at Amazon I found the following Samsung drives and got them for £36.99 each.

 F3 HD103SJ 1TB internal Hard Drive SATAII 32MB Cache 7200RPM

They are fast, get good reviews and are just over half the price of the 2tb drives.






OK, so I have the cage and the drives so now to the PC / Server.

What I need is a chassis that can free up 3 5.25 drive bays. What I also need is a Raid controller but more on that later.

I have in the past, gone out and purchased an empty case and built from the ground up, so this would be an option however it may be cheaper to buy a fully built PC and just modify it. The PC I select or built will have to be recent technology as I want lots of funky IO and any of the newer power saving features to keep the consumption low. I also want expansion slots so that I can add cards in the future to add NICs or storage adaptors etc.

I started off first trawling Ebay for inspiration looking for something that fitted the ready built criteria and immediately struck gold.

I found a clearance company selling refurbished HP XW4600 workstations. These workstations are built like tanks, have an Intel Core2 duo 2.8ghz CPU lots of IO and if I remove the CD Rom, three spare 5.25 drive bays. It also has Firewire and an eSata port to boot! It also has some fancy Eco PSU with dynamic power factor correction.

Now for the bonus, this workstation also has an embedded multi port SATA II Raid controller.

As I said, it has loads of I/O so I have lots of ports, even an old school LPD and 232 port and the USB ports are all USB2.

Now for the really good bit, I got it for £206 plus 6£ postage!! Bargain..

As I had said in the previous post, I had decided to run Windows Home Server so this is the last purchase. Microsoft do not sell WHS as a retail product, it is only bundled with new hardware so I turned to Ebay again.

I found a genuine seal boxed copy of WHS on Ebay for just under £80. I know I will not get support (and I don't really need it), but it's fully licensed so it should be good to go.

To wrap up the hardware purchases, I added a Trust 1300 UPS to keep the machine protected. These units are cheap and seem to work very well. I have had one downstairs for 2 years and it has not missed a beat.








So that's all the hardware done. All up Excluding the UPS, I have spent £607 and should have a beast of a server built on a solid hardware platform to keep the media flowing for years to come.

Next, What happened next during the build

Stay Tuned.....

It's Time for a new Home Server

So after over 10 years of non stop operation (baring relocation and upgrades) it's finally time to move my home server to a new platform and join the rush to the integrated home IT solution.

My current workhorse is a Fedora server running on a generic reasonably fast motherboard with a 3ware IDE raid controller and 3 140gb drives in raid 5. The current drives have been running continuously for nearly 7 years and give my around 280gb of usable storage. The server is also my Linux play toy running various scripts and enduring my tinkering it's even had a Signiant agent installed on it as part of a proof of concept test for work. Overall, it's been a solid platform, even surviving the 3 months of relocation from Hong Kong to the UK and a stint at sea in a container.

So it's time to move on and look at what else is out there and where I can go taking my home IT infrastructure "to the next level". The House itself is ready. When it was built, it had multiple cat 5E installed to pretty much every room with a central RG45 patch bay in the study. It's a little OTT, some rooms have 3 pairs of cables and 3 RF cables too (I will get around to terminating them one day)




So what do I want my new server to provide?

1. It has to be fast enough to stream video (SD for sure, HD would be nice)
2. It has to be resilient so we are talking hardware raid for both the storage and the OS (raid 5 please)
3. I want all that DLNA has to offer, (I currently have a Roku soundbridge and a DLNA friendly Bluray) 
4. I need it to be able to manage my backups to Amazon S3
5. It has to be somewhere around 4TB usable storage but with the option to expand
6. It has to be expandable with lots of ports of all sorts
7. It has to have a 3rd party community to create plug ins and hacks to keep me tinkering.

This is not too much to ask is it?

So what is out there? Currently based on cruising the net there are basically three ways to go.

1. Builds a server and stick on linux and lots of other modules to make it work for me (what I have already)
2. Buy a ready to go box such as a Lacie Big5 or Netgear ReadyNAS with a customised version of a unixish OS and stuff it full of disks (I did this too but the hardware broke)
3. Buy or build a server and run Microsoft Home Server

 oops, did I forget "buy a Mac", I would rather sniff a Yak's armpit.

Looking at the list of options above, I have really done option 1 and 2 already and while option 1 could deliver everything I want with a lot of fiddling with software, I have really done this already and want to try something different. Option 2 would make me lock this server into a single manufacturers solution  and would not give me the ability to add option cards or upgrade the disk controller etc. This server would not be able to grow and expand due to it's fixed hardware configuration. I would also be locked into to an extent to the servers community for new software modules and feature support.

The last option, and the one that I will go for is to run a Microsoft Home Server system, but opt to build the hardware for it to run on.

Whilst it may seem that I am selling out my Linux roots, after looking around, this server has massive appeal in that it seems to be at the front end of the connected home solution, supporting all sorts of cool features (some I didn't even think of) and has a good aftermarket 3rd party community building all sorts of interesting plugins.

I could actually buy a server ready to go such as one of the Lacie Big5 models, the Acer H310 of the HP Media Vault range (soon to be discontinued) but there is one big issue. WHS version one uses a module called the Disk Extender. this allows the WHS server to take all available hard drives and build an aggregate pool of storage (sort of a Raid 0). As with Raid 0, this storage pool in its basic form has no resilience and fails to meet one of my primary requirements. The disk extender does allow you to replicate designated folders across different physical drives however, providing a sort of Raid 1 at a folder level. This would protect your data but to protect all you data, you would loose 50% of your usable disk capacity. Another issue for me is that it seems you cannot use this folder replication feature to protect the OS partition, so your boot drive would remain unprotected.

From my research, none of the WHS server in a box solutions offered hardware raid. Forum traffic however has indicated that WHS will run on top of hardware raid so this is an option if I build my own.

So this is my mission! Build a nice and expandable server with hardware raid and run WHS.

In my next post will cover my hardware purchases