"Turn-Key" Linux-Based Fileservers?

idjitProof asks: "I work for a non-profit organization with about 70 satellite offices. We're trying to find a cheap way to get these offices out of the stone age and into an ethernet with centralized, secure file-storage. I was wondering if there is a Linux hardware solution that is fairly dummy resistant or, alternatively, remotely configurable (with decent security). I spent the better part of today searching the web, but all I could find was boxed software products, no hardware solutions. I'd appreciate links to any companies that might have this kind of product."

Comments

You missed the first question

[Gothmolly]

Why?

Seriously, if its a small satellite office which has survived until 2003 without a LAN, LET IT BE. It sounds like you're trying to push a square peg into a round hole. Something is obviously working.

centralized??

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You lost me at "centralized." You've got 70 branch offices and you want to create a centralized file server for all of them? Have you considered how much this is going to cost per month is telecom charges alone?

If you're remotely accessing a file server, a point-to-point T-1 per branch office is the absolute bare minimum you'll need for connectivity. Don't even think about using a VPN over the Internet; the latencies will be so high that nobody at the branch offices will be able to tolerate using the central file server, so they'll store their files locally, which defeats the whole purpose.

A much better idea would be to put small NAS devices at each branch office, and a big server at the central office. Have the central server back up each NAS server every hour, either using a commercial backup product like Legato (bad idea) or using the NAS vendor's remote mirror feature (good idea). Snap's remote mirror feature, for example, is called Server-to-Server Synchronization. You can do remote-to-central syncs over a VPN over DSL or something equivalent.

There will probably be occasions when a branch needs to access files from another branch. When that happens, you can either have the person who needs the file mount the appropriate filesystem from the central office and copy his file, or you could get a little fancier. You could easily whip up a simple system for scheduling asynchronous file requests. Person X goes to a web page (hosted at the central site) and finds the file that he wants, then clicks a button to submit a transfer request. He goes about his business while the file is transferred via FTP (probably) from the central server to the branch server, then he gets an email, IM, or SMS informing him that the transfer is complete. You could just let all the transfers happen at once, or you could get a little fancier by priority-queueing the requests and executing them in order. This would have the advantages of being easier for your users-- they wouldn't have to know where the file was stored; they could just search for it-- and of keeping all the files on the various NAS servers for easy administration and backup.

Email me for more details. ;-)