The key to the software Raid5 setup is to use MDADM. You can find full instructions for the setup of raid disks under Linux at Gregory Gulik’s site.

I liked the idea to use LVM which allows you some future flexibility to expand volumes, add more arrays to your volumes and in general get out of a bind if need be. The basic idea is to virtualize your array and volume setup so they can be modified without loosing data.

Some great places to get more info about the basic Ubuntu setup include:

Hardware Procurement list

1. 6 – 500GB Hitachi Sata II Drives
2. Misc Sata cables to hookup everything
3. Adaptec 2610 (Dell) RAID card – for hardware raid (from Ebay)
4. CF to IDE boot drive adapter (from Ebay)
5. Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Network adapter
6. New case (from Re-Pc)

So, first up was to build out the new raid system. The plan was to use 6 500 gig drives using a hardware raid controller to present them to FreeNAS. The problem was the hardware raid controller would not build out greater than 1.5T and would not complete building the raid group with the new disks. Next challenge was that when the system booted up freeNAS it would fail upon creating a volume on the hardware raid controller. After much research I decided on moving to software raid as the best solution.

1. I added 2 Sata HBA cards to directly hookup the 6 drives

With my new HBA direct connections to the drives, I forged ahead with FreeNAS software Raid setup. In short, it failed miserably. I couldn’t get anything to build out cleanly and never got a stable drive set out of it. Lots of research, many hours of testing, before I finally gave up. Hum, what to do next?

PUNT

Next up I installed Ubuntu Linux onto my existing NAS hardware setup. With great hopes I pushed install with a new CD in the drive…

With just a little while to go until Steve Jobs fanboy rally MacWorld Keynote Address, and with dreams of iTablets, $3.99 movie rentals, and ultra-thin macbooks. John Siracusa at Ars Technica has posted this years Bingo Cards . My favorite squares are: “Boom” and Leopard vs. Vista. So get yours now and watch the video and play along, or play at the keynote live in person. Don’t forget to read the rules.

FreeNAS configuration for a OSX network

The next key part of our local network is our FreeNAS storage server. It’s primary use is to store encoded media files for projection on our home theater system. We source content from an EyeTV PVR recorder on the mac. Once the shows are recorded we transcode into a variety of codecs as the need arises, usually choosing some form of H264 that can play nicely in quicktime.

The basic setup couldn’t be easier. You need the following kit to get started:

PC hardware for server (any Pentium box should work)

iso disk burned from the FreeNAS image

reboot your pc with the cd and install!

Configure up your FreeNAS box

I have tested many different protocols for file sharing.

AFP seemed like an obvious choice… Nope it’s way to slow. It’s age can be clearly seen these days.

How about NFS, the MAC is a unix box right, so let’s use NFS. Well, NFS works and is very fast, but has some permissions issues that are a bear to work through across both Tiger and Leopard. So that was no joy also.

FTP – that’s nice and fast and drop dead easy, however the interface for non technical users is not that great on the MAC unless you add some 3rd party software.

SMB – This is what I finally settled on as the best compromise. It seems strange to be using a windows networking protocol on a network that has no windows computers, but hey use what works I say. It’s fast and easy and the Samba implementation on FreeNAS is top notch. All the MACs can easily browse to the server and connect with no issues.

FreeNAS supports software raid and many different types of disks and configurations. Check out the install guides for all the details. What’s neat is it also supports the most basic cheap solutions to help you get going with a NAS box. I simply picked up a 320GB ATA drive and plugged it in and was sharing in minuets. Give it a try and I promise you won’t go back to local storage!

How to bypass the squid proxy server

One of the really sweet things about having your own fully functioned firewall at home is being able to run a transparent web cache. It’s on for all traffic with no configuration required for any of the client computers in the house. It makes surfing faster as it caches all the static content that you regularly see when browsing the same sites over and over. The only problem with this little slice of nirvana is when you have a device or application that needs http access directly to the internet and it’s not compatible with the web cache. This could include devices like and XBox, or Xbox360, Tivo PVR’s, Replay TV PVR’s, Eye-Fi wireless upload card, etc.

In my case I was trying to get my Eye-Fi card working. First it’s easiest to verify that your device works if you simply go into the admin interface on the smoothwall and turn off the web cache. This will ensure your traffic goes out directly to the internet. If that makes your device work, then the following steps are necessary to get everything working nicely together. What we are going to do is add an iptables firewall rule that will allow a single internal IP to bypass the squid config rules and go directly out to the internet.

First assign a static DHCP address to your device. You want the internal ip address to remain fixed as you will be using it in the configuration of the firewall in a second. (you can look at the dynamic leases to get the mac address and hostname to use in the static config.

Next you need shell access to your smoothwall. so SSH over to the system so we can edit the firewall startup script where the rules are stored.

The file to edit is /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall.up

In my case 10.0.0.10 is the ip I assigned to the Eye-Fi card. Search for “squid” in the file and just above the squid section add the following code:

# allow eyeFi camera card direct access / bypass squid
/sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING 1 -i eth0 -p tcp -s 10.0.0.10 –dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Then finally you need to restart the iptables firewall, or simply reboot your smoothwall. (I know it’s heresy, but it’s easy)

and that’s it, like magic your device will have full access to the internet without being held back by the transparent squid web cache. Hope this helps someone out there. It sure was neat for our setup.

Smoothwall Express 3.0 upgrade

I have been running a Smoothwall 2.0 firewall at home for the last 2 years. I installed it on an old Dell P133 box It’s old but good and works fine for this use. Over the years I had heavily moded it to tune and enhance the features etc. With the recent release of Smoothwall 3.0 I figured it was time to get upgraded to the latest and greatest to see what improvements we might get.

I was not disappointed by the upgrade. First off in typical form for the Smoothwall community, they make it incredibly easy to download and install on to your system. The initial install went smoothly and in about 30 min I had the new firewall up and running. I simply burned the CD iso using my mac and rebooted the firewall to boot from the CD and start the install.

Once the main install was done the configuration started…

First was the DHCP scope configuration

Next came the static DHCP configs for my internal systems

One of the things that smoothwall 3.0 is missing is a hack to allow name resolution of your static DHCP entries. There was a hack for 2.0 to do this, but none for 3.0, so I took an adapted the 2.0 fix over to 3.0 code. This allows you to have full dnsmasq support for the static DHCP entries.

I added some custom mods from the smoothwall comunity including, mod commander, AdZapper, DHCP Lease viewer, Performance Graphs, SMART for SWE, Uptimed for SWE.

Then some final config of the various settings, turning on transparent web caching, enable Quality of Service priority settings, enable admin via SSH.

Overall Smoothwall 3.0 Express seems faster than 2.0, has some neat features like the web cache and QOS support and is the latest and greatest offering for an easy to use, extensible, community supported firewall for home or small business use.