Personal computing discussed
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Just curious why you wanted an Ion system. You could grab a atom D510 board for half that price.
Also, I have been instructing people to stay away from Western Digital Green Drives
Shining Arcanine wrote:They're not raw flash. Raw flash exposes a read/erase/write interface, whereas a USB key "looks" like any other USB mass storage device. I'm not suggesting using them as an OS drive either, but for different reasons.You should not use a USB key as your OS drive because USB keys are raw flash devices and as far as I know
mmmmmdonuts21 wrote:If you want your file server to be stable and not a lot of continuous upkeep and maintenance work, I'd suggest using CentOS or Debian stable (possibly plus the backports repository) or Ubuntu LTS rather than Gentoo.I will definitely check out Gentoo.
mmmmmdonuts21 wrote:I have been running WHS version 1 and then later the next WHS Vail beta for about a year now but I was looking to try something different as I have been using more and more of Ubuntu. I really like WHS but I wanted to test some alternatives for the time being.
sid1089 wrote:Also you might want to consider Windows Home Server.
StuG wrote:That has to be one of the longest responses on Tech Report.
mmmmmdonuts21 wrote:First of all thank you for taking the time and energy to write that post Shining Arcanine. That took me 25 minutes to read and understand. I found it extremely useful and informative.
So I think my best bet than is to run a full linux distribution for the server then.Just curious why you wanted an Ion system. You could grab a atom D510 board for half that price.
I originally grabbed this board about a year ago when it was being used for a HTPC and the Ion was extremely helpful in the graphics department.Also, I have been instructing people to stay away from Western Digital Green Drives
I have not had any issues yet and I got these two drives a while back so I will be sure to keep a careful eye on them and probably purchase different HDDs next time.
Shining Arcanine:
I will definitely check out Gentoo. It looks promising. I may run it in a VM first for a little bit just to get a hang of how the system handles.
I don't need to do a headless installation at all, but I would really like to run it headless after I got the system up and running. I believe that would be much easier to do.
bitvector wrote:Shining Arcanine wrote:They're not raw flash. Raw flash exposes a read/erase/write interface, whereas a USB key "looks" like any other USB mass storage device. I'm not suggesting using them as an OS drive either, but for different reasons.You should not use a USB key as your OS drive because USB keys are raw flash devices and as far as I know
bitvector wrote:mmmmmdonuts21 wrote:If you want your file server to be stable and not a lot of continuous upkeep and maintenance work, I'd suggest using CentOS or Debian stable (possibly plus the backports repository) or Ubuntu LTS rather than Gentoo.I will definitely check out Gentoo.
Shining Arcanine wrote:And you're wrong about the age because you're just looking at the base number. The enterprise kernels start out with an older, stable base version but they are patched with literally thousands of patches backported from recent kernels, including drivers. For example, you can see in their release notes lines like "netxen: driver updates from 2.6.31 and 2.6.32 BZ#516833," despite the fact that the base version remains at 2.6.18. Now, as far as TV tuners go in particular, RHEL removes some drivers they don't want to support (such as Firewire and some TV capture cards), but CentOS often puts them back in their CentOS plus kernels.As I pointed out in my above post, the kernel on CentOS is roughly 3 years old, so it might not have driver support for his TV tuner.
Shining Arcanine wrote:No, the lenny backports.org kernel is 2.6.32. My fileserver runs lenny with ext4.Debian would be better in this regard, because it was released as Debian Lenny in Feburary 2009. The current stable kernel is 2.6.35.x while the kernel in Debian Lenny is version 2.6.26, which is fairly old. ext4 support in Linux had experimental status until kernel version 2.6.28, so using Debian Lenny will require that the original poster use ext3.
wibeasley wrote:mmmmmdonuts21 wrote:I have been running WHS version 1 and then later the next WHS Vail beta for about a year now but I was looking to try something different as I have been using more and more of Ubuntu. I really like WHS but I wanted to test some alternatives for the time being.sid1089 wrote:Also you might want to consider Windows Home Server.
bitvector wrote:Shining Arcanine wrote:And you're wrong about the age because you're just looking at the base number. The enterprise kernels start out with an older, stable base version but they are patched with literally thousands of patches backported from recent kernels, including drivers. For example, you can see in their release notes lines like "netxen: driver updates from 2.6.31 and 2.6.32 BZ#516833," despite the fact that the base version remains at 2.6.18. Now, as far as TV tuners go in particular, RHEL removes some drivers they don't want to support (such as Firewire and some TV capture cards), but CentOS often puts them back in their CentOS plus kernels.As I pointed out in my above post, the kernel on CentOS is roughly 3 years old, so it might not have driver support for his TV tuner.Shining Arcanine wrote:No, the lenny backports.org kernel is 2.6.32. My fileserver runs lenny with ext4.Debian would be better in this regard, because it was released as Debian Lenny in Feburary 2009. The current stable kernel is 2.6.35.x while the kernel in Debian Lenny is version 2.6.26, which is fairly old. ext4 support in Linux had experimental status until kernel version 2.6.28, so using Debian Lenny will require that the original poster use ext3.
Shining Arcanine wrote:bitvector wrote:mmmmmdonuts21 wrote:If you want your file server to be stable and not a lot of continuous upkeep and maintenance work, I'd suggest using CentOS or Debian stable (possibly plus the backports repository) or Ubuntu LTS rather than Gentoo.I will definitely check out Gentoo.
Gentoo Linux is not much work in terms of upkeep if you know what you are doing. ...
just brew it! wrote:The issue is, he's just now learning what he is doing. If his goal is to learn the ins and outs of a niche distro like Gentoo, and get a working file server out of it as a side benefit at the end, then great. If his goal is to learn a mainstream distro (and gain some skills which are more likely to be useful out in the "real world"), and get his Linux server up and running relatively quickly, then Gentoo would not be my first choice.
mmmmmdonuts21 wrote:Thanks for all the further suggestions. The good part of my day yesterday was spent playing with different VM machines (fairly new at this as well) with different builds of Linux (CentOS, Debian, Gentoo). I spent the most time on trying to setup Gentoo (still not complete) and I am learning a lot in trying to do that. I guess my goal for today is to continue testing different varieties to try and see which one I like the best and how to integrate a VM Linux distribution with an actual Windows share and vice versa. Thanks again for all the help.
just brew it! wrote:[The issue is, he's just now learning what he is doing. If his goal is to learn the ins and outs of a niche distro like Gentoo, and get a working file server out of it as a side benefit at the end, then great. If his goal is to learn a mainstream distro (and gain some skills which are more likely to be useful out in the "real world"), and get his Linux server up and running relatively quickly, then Gentoo would not be my first choice.
bitvector wrote:just brew it! wrote:[The issue is, he's just now learning what he is doing. If his goal is to learn the ins and outs of a niche distro like Gentoo, and get a working file server out of it as a side benefit at the end, then great. If his goal is to learn a mainstream distro (and gain some skills which are more likely to be useful out in the "real world"), and get his Linux server up and running relatively quickly, then Gentoo would not be my first choice.
Furthermore, even if you know what you're doing, it's more work. I know what I'm doing, and yet I don't care to spend my time shepherding a system through things that could be handled for me (or waiting for updates to compile so I can perform whatever post-install tasks are required).
Slackware is another minimalist distro with a tinkerer approach like Gentoo. I used Slackware from 1995 until about 2001; when I switched to Debian, it was a revelation -- I realized how much of my own time I'd been wasting compiling tarballs and doing things by hand that could have been automated. And the tasks that I wasted the most time didn't really even transfer into learning anything useful that I'd ever have to do again with more automated, non-minimalist distros.
Shining Arcanine wrote:I think you are a bit confused, as Gentoo Linux is not a niche distribution. It is not only a mainstream distribution, but it is considered a "major" distribution by distrowatch.com:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
I believe that all of the distributions I recommended are major distributions according to that list.
Cons: Occasional instability and risk of breakdown, the project suffers from lack of directions and frequent infighting between its developers
just brew it! wrote:Shining Arcanine wrote:I think you are a bit confused, as Gentoo Linux is not a niche distribution. It is not only a mainstream distribution, but it is considered a "major" distribution by distrowatch.com:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
I believe that all of the distributions I recommended are major distributions according to that list.
That list also has this to say about Gentoo:Cons: Occasional instability and risk of breakdown, the project suffers from lack of directions and frequent infighting between its developers
Also, if you go to this page on their site, their own statistics contradict the claim that Gentoo is one of the 10 most popular distros. Depending on how long a period of time you average over, it ranks anywhere from 17th to 24th.
Shining Arcanine wrote:Furthermore, my claim is that Gentoo Linux is a mainstream distribution
just brew it! wrote:Shining Arcanine wrote:Furthermore, my claim is that Gentoo Linux is a mainstream distribution
Well, to be very blunt, I disagree. If you can provide any credible data which shows that it has more than oh... say... 2% of the Linux market, maybe I'll change my mind.
You are the only person I know who actually runs Gentoo as their primary OS. I think that says something.
Shining Arcanine wrote:I edited my post above to be more clear. Anyway, would you split this discussion into another thread? This has little to do with the original poster's decision to build a file server.
JustAnEngineer wrote:I favor Ubuntu for ease of use.
Shining Arcanine wrote:I have to disagree, just install the Ubuntu Server and it will run very well as a headless file server. I also like Debian and run that on my server which is headless and sitting in the basement.JustAnEngineer wrote:I favor Ubuntu for ease of use.
Ubuntu's strengths do not extend to the realm of headless file servers.
I favor Ubuntu for ease of use.