[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI as file storage server

[Sašo Kiselkov]

On 09/14/2012 09:07 AM, Neddy, NH. Nam wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I have a question and may somebody help me to find the solution please?
> 
> Let say, my current system where I'm working is too old and it's easy
> to break up if something wrong happens (lucky for me, there's still
> nothing wrong). And I feel unhappy with it. In fact, we're running
> Novell Netware 6.5 to store sharing files between dept., users. It
> provides some more features like: windows logon restriction, network
> drive mapping rules, etc ...Now it's running out of free space, and
> adding more HDDs is an option.

I don't know about all the Windows stuff, but you should be able to get
most of this using Samba (but don't quote me on that).

> I've read some ZFS articles on Internet like:
> http://www.anandtech.com/show/3963/zfs-building-testing-and-benchmarking/
> and on this mailing list, people are using ZFS and there are more
> advantages in ZFS than Netware in storage competence. So I'd like to
> stick with it more. But I doubt about in my real case, my storage
> server will be working as a file level storage more than block level
> storeage. Does it slow down ZFS performance?

Nothing to worry about, ZFS excels at both file and block storage.
Illumos has pretty much the most advanced and feature-full NFSv4
implementation on the market and also natively supports SMB file
sharing. You can install Samba and get full AD integration, if necessary.

> And one more point, I'd plan to use OI + napp-it for file sharing, is
> there any solution to recover one(s) file(s) that was accidentally
> deleted by user but I don't have to roll back the whole storage?

I don't know about napp-it specifically, but you can easily recover lost
files by simply cloning a previous snapshot into a full filesystem,
mounting that and copying out the files you've lost. You can then
destroy the clone when you don't need it anymore (the original snapshot
remains unaffected).

> Excuse me if my questions are dump, and I highly appreciate your helps.

Hey, that's what community mailing lists are for (and your questions
most certainly aren't dumb, don't worry).

Cheers,
--
Saso