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Building a Fully Encrypted NAS On OpenBSD
mistermark writes "Two years ago this community discussed my encrypted file server. That machine has kept running and running up until a failing drive and a power outage this last week. So, it's time to revise everything and add RAID to it as well. Now you can have an on-the-fly encrypting/decrypting NAS with the data security of RAID, all in one. Here is the how-to."
I've been doing encrypted Raid5 machines for years. XFS, on top of Loop-AES, on top of software Raid5 is the bomb. Add nfs-kernel-server and samba and you have a full service network server. It's pretty easy with Ubuntu, and now Feisty (with kernel 2.6.20) supports hot plug eSata, for fast backup to portable eSata disk drives. ZFS with encryption might conceivably replace the XFS/Loop-AES/Raid5 recipe someday, but at the current rate of progress, it looks to me like its a year away at least. If Seagate gets their act together, and starts shipping 1TB drives with hardware AES support, we might see a big jump in disk throughput. In any event, I use a headless file server with a frozen version of Dapper for the fileserver, and then run Feisty on a diskless machine that boots off the file server. If I need Windows, I just use VirtualBox on the diskless Feisty machine. And of course, it's all backed up offsite every night with rsync. Rsync is indeed our friend. So why would I need BSD again?