About a year ago we were facing a serious problem of storage. As amateur photographers we want to store the RAW photo along with the fully rendered JPG. Obviously the problem is with the two combined it can easily consume 10-12MB per photo, which adds up very quickly. Previously, the solution was to just buy larger drives for our primary file-server and migrate the data over. With the ever-increasing size this was becoming less and less practical, not to mention costly in terms of finances and time. I also hated the idea of a single file-server that for any reason could fail possibly damaging our data and requiring even more time to repair. We began to play with ESXi (as it was now free) as a means to virtualize all of our home servers that would enable us to better manage the systems and offer a better solution towards fault tolerance. The only problem was, do we really want to virtualize a system holding ~500GB of data?

Obviously no. So the solution was clear, construct a home SAN (storage area networking) or technically a NAS (network-attached storage).

I wanted a system that could hold a large amount of data, plus be scalable enough to support growth without the need to constantly migrate data from one array to another. The solution was using the open-source SAN solution OpenFiler. This offered us a very simple way to scale-up the capacity by growing the RAID array with new drives and resizing the necessary volumes. No more transferring data around and buying all new sets of drives.

I chose to have my guests that needed the increased space to connect via iSCSI to the SAN which offered me the most flexibility and network fault tolerance. OpenFiler supports many other sharing methods including NFS and SMB, which were appealing, but I wanted to have gating control over access on my file server and not the SAN.

This solution has been working great for well over a year now, and I would strongly recommend this form of solution. With the ease of media development, and the ever-increasing ease of media presentation within the home, building a centralized file-server makes more sense now than ever. Rather than putting a large drive or two in your system, you can consider using a SAN to offer better scalability.

Well, it’s close to it anyway. To be honest I don’t recall the exact date I fired it up, but it was shortly after I started my first year of college. For those who do not know, Colossus is currently our primary file server, DNS server, and DHCP server in our house. Colossus has been with us now for 10 years  and has changed its role over the years, facilitating a variety of purposes.

Colossus was built soon after I joined the CTS Telecomm department at the University of Portland during my freshman year, in an effort to better understand Linux. Simply put, I am a kinetic learner, therefore the only why I will understand many IT technologies is to install them and use them on a regular basis. The senior members of the CTS team used another personal server called Snafu which was their project box and home dial-in server. Not wanted to be outdone, I built up Colossus which was named after the supercomputer in the 70s movie “Colossus: The Forbin Project“. Colossus originally ran RH Linux v5.2, and was slowly upgraded on the RH line through the years. Colossus started its life using my old workstation hardware, and it would receive the latest hand-me-down hardware all through school. Originally, a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 3.5GB HD, it served as fairly reliable hobby server.

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As years went on, Colossus became a great refuge for folks wanting to host their website and have a separate email system separated from the University. At its peak it had 23 users on the system. Colossus underwent a lot of scrutiny and trouble during the college years including one Windows administrator concerned that since it was DNS server it could bring down the whole University if it allowed zone transfers. It was relocated more times than I can count including hiding out in dorm data room, enduring a 80-90 degree storage closet, and sitting in a proper rack in the switch room.

A Dogs Breakfast divx After school, the need for private web space dropped off as did many of the users. Even though Colossus continued to host a number sites including our photo gallery and personal blogs, I began to become increasingly concerned about my data. So Colossus was slowly retired from the web hosting service and began to serve our household data. With my post-college paychecks I was finally able to afford a bit better hardware for the server so that it could adequately perform and had sufficient redundancy to safeguard our information.  Despite my best efforts, Colossus has crashed more times than I can count due to hardware failure. At its lowest point, I was in Cincinnati advising Natalie how to completely rebuild the hardware from spare parts after it tanked. That was during the phase where it was blowing up a RAID member every 6 months for no reason.

Finally, midway through 2008 thanks to VMware releasing ESXi for free, I was able to virtualize my whole environment. It was kind of  the end of era for Colossus as it went from being a physical system to a virtual server for the first time. From a management-, redundancy-, and HA-standpoint it is in a far superior configuration now. At the same time, I dumped the less-than-stable Fedora Core distros for CentOS 5. Colossus continues to host our data with over 1.2TB of NAS space available, serving as our DNS and DHCP servers, as well as still remains a place for hobby-development.

For pure amusement, I dug up the original website for Colossus from when it was serving as file-hosting webserver:

old_colossus_site1

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Stumbled across this photo the other day, behold the interior of the space shuttle in high-resolution! The first thing that terrified me was how old the technology is on-board. I suspect my iPhone probably has 10X the CPU capability of the shuttle computers. . .but the shuttle systems have never, ever failed. Hmmm. . .can’t think of a single computer platform with that kind of track record. BSOD while landed = death!