Potential Data Protection Strategy? – OpenFiler
As I wrote before, I’m trying to figure out a good strategy for getting my personal data in my home network protected in a more safe and robust manner. Still in research mode, although I’m not sure that “backing up”, per se, is going to be feasable. I am leaning towards setting up a fileserver with a RAID configuration. I’ve been browsing the OpenFiler.org web site and am intrigued.
Basically it’s a purpose-specific Linux distribution for NAS/SAN servers. One of the features I would like, however, is iSCSI support. Apparently it can function as an iSCSI initiator to access your existing iSCSI storage so you can create a filesystem and present it via a NAS nechnology such as SMB or NFS, but that’s not all that useful to me since I don’t have any existing iSCSI SANs laying around my house.
I would like iSCSI target mode support under OpenFiler so I could mount filesystems on my Windows box (which apparently should support it). I don’t think this is a deal breaker, as I should be able to live with accessing my data volumes as SMB shares, but I know some applications (speicifically media applications such as Avid) would not amenable to using SMB shares as scratch space. There is a Linux iSCSI target driver from Ardis, but according to a discussion I was reading on the OpenFiler mailing list, there are some implications for getting it working.
Ah well, more updates as I learn more.