decent NAS

Hi All,
I'm looking for a decent home NAS solution.
I want a small, low power box that I can run headless and do the
following:

* serve up network shares at 100mbit speeds, preferably via SMB and
AFP
* run a bittorrent client on
* run FTP
* has a simple web-based admin page
* can cope with multiple drives running either as RAID or JBOD.
* bonus points for being able to run Ebay sniping software on it
* VPN a bonus, too

Anyone got a suggestion for how to do this on a budget? All the home
power-user-nas boxes I've seen have been slightly lacking in some way
so personal recommendations a bonus.

 

On a budget, you have to likely do it yourself or try something
like OpenNAS.

Arno

 

Linux with Webmin on a mini ITX box is the obvious solution, but I
think you'll have to get your hands dirty when it comes to setting it
up.

 

Maybe worth looking for a HP Proliant ML115 server? In the £120 region when
I bought one, and a fully featured server. No OS/monitor, but i`d be
surprised if you got better value for money on anything else

 

Not exactly a low power solution though, is it?

 

You will have a struggle finding them in stock at this price now. Gone
up :-(

 

Depends how low power he means. And if it could replace other boxes on his
network, like mine has done, it could work out to be a power saver. For
example, mine has replaced 4 external hard drives, each with its own power
supply than ran fairly warm 24/7. The new machine runs nice and cool, and
has allowed me to turn off another PC that used to run 24/7, so it`s
probably not far from breaking even power wise

 

It's a minefield this one.
Ubuntu server'll do everything, with some buggering about, although
it's not going to give me a web interface that controls everything
like bittorrent all in one without some messing about.

FreeNAS looks great, does RAID1, does AFP to play nice with my macs
and Time Machine, doesn't do webdav
Openfiler does webdav (so I can get access to home resources from work
where FTP's blocked) but doesn't do AFP.

Argh.

Think I'm going to go FreeNAS and see how I get on, then move to
Ubuntu server.

I don't mind getting my hands dirty with hardware or software, but
this box is going to be on 24x7 so size/power/noise is a factor -
ideally a mini-ITX, passively-cooled system would do the job...

Not sure I need VPN - presumably Rsync would do the job to do an over-
the-internet sync to a mate running a similar setup?

 

For a web based bittorrent interface you should check out torrentflux
(it's got a lot of dependencies but apt makes it a breeze), but I prefer
to run rtorrent in a screen session so I can leave it in the background
and connect to it over ssh at will.