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Ask Slashdot: Best *nix Distro For a Dynamic File Server?
An anonymous reader (citing "silly workplace security policies") writes "I'm in charge of developing for my workplace a particular sort of 'dynamic' file server for handling scientific data. We have all the hardware in place, but can't figure out what *nix distro would work best. Can the great minds at Slashdot pool their resources and divine an answer? Some background: We have sensor units scattered across a couple square miles of undeveloped land, which each collect ~500 gigs of data per 24h. When these drives come back from the field each day, they'll be plugged into a server featuring a dozen removable drive sleds. We need to present the contents of these drives as one unified tree (shared out via Samba), and the best way to go about that appears to be a unioning file system. There's also requirement that the server has to boot in 30 seconds or less off a mechanical hard drive. We've been looking around, but are having trouble finding info for this seemingly simple situation. Can we get FreeNAS to do this? Do we try Greyhole? Is there a distro that can run unionfs/aufs/mhddfs out-of-the-box without messing with manual recompiling? Why is documentation for *nix always so bad?""
Ok, lots of folks asking similar questions. In order to keep the submission word count down I left out a lot of info. I *thought* most of it would be obvious, but I guess not.
Notes, in no particular order:
- The server was sourced from a now-defunct project with similar setup. It's a custom box with non-normal design. We don't have authorization to buy more hardware. That's not a big deal because what we have already *should* be perfectly fine.
- People keep harping on the 30 seconds thing.
The system is already configured to spin up all the drives simultaneously (yes the PSU can handle that) and get through the bios all in a few seconds. I *know* you can configure most any distro to be fast, the question is how much fuss it takes to get it that way. Honestly I threw that in there as an aside, not thinking this would blow up into some huge debate. All I'm looking for are pointers along the lines of "yeah distro FOO is bloated by default, but it's not as bad as it looks because you can just use the BAR utility to turn most of that off". We have a handful of systems running winXP and linux already that boot in under 30, this isn't a big deal.
- The drives in question have a nearly identical directory structure but with globally-unique file names. We want to merge the trees because it's easier for people to deal with than dozens of identical trees. There are plenty of packages that can do this, I'm looking for a distro where I can set it up with minimal fuss (ie: apt-get or equivalent, as opposed to manual code editing and recompiling).
- The share doesn't have to be samba, it just needs to be easily accessible from windows/macs without installing extra software on them.
- No, I'm not an idiot or derpy student. I'm a sysadmin with 20 years experience (I'm aware that doesn't necessarily prove anything). I'm leaving out a lot of detail because most of it is stupid office bureaucracy and politics I can't do anything about. I'm not one of those people who intentionally makes things more complicated than they need to be as some form of job security. I believe in doing things the "right" way so those who come after me have a chance at keeping the system running. I'm trying to stick to standards when possible, as opposed to creating a monster involving homegrown shell scripts.