Hello,
I'm a novice Linux user and a new BSD user. I've loaded Ubuntu on a half dozen machines and mucked around in another half dozen distros. I've been in that learning curve off and on for a year or so. All I've done in BSD so far is:
-Load it on an old laptop
-Load xfce on that
-Load it on a "rough draft" box (like a "training wheels" version of a file server)
-Set up key-auth OpenSSH and harden login security
This Essay was extremely compelling, on a basic level. So compelling, in fact, I would like to build my next file server on BSD. Here is a summary of what I would like to accomplish, given my current understanding:
Hardware:
-Low power consumption (as low as possible given the rest)
-Five 1TB SATA hard drives in Raid 5, 4TB of storage space (I've never implemented RAID before). I'm willing to buy 6 drives when it comes time for hardware purchasing.
Software:
General:
-Headless operation
-Automatically updates OS and applications daily
-The ability to know which of the drives has failed when any of them do
-The ability to hot swap out drives at will for disk maintenance
-The ability to "share" anything on the RAID array with my LAN (read only)
-A safe "open" place on the RAID array to write data (dump files here)
-Efficient file management (move files, tar, rar, zip, etc)
Applications:
-Moblock between WAN and all applications:
http://moblock.berlios.de/
-
HFS-like simple HTTP file server (for easy "anywhere") read access
-Safe and easy WAN write access to the "dump"
-Direct Connect client, bandwidth throttling
-Bit Torrent client that monitors the dump for .torrent files, bandwidth throttling, encrypted connections
-Newsgroup client that monitors the dump for .nzb files and .zip files containing .nzb files, encrypted connections
-irssi + screen - Accessible from anywhere
-All the above to come online at power up (it would be nice if they could come up 30 seconds apart - IRSSI, 30 seconds, MoBlock, 30seconds, Newsleecher, 30, Torrent, 30
)
So, if it is okay, as I go through this I'll just ask questions here in this thread. Is that okay?
Any hardware/application suggestions?
Suggested reading links?
What would you do differently?
Am I going to have to run Xorg?
Which apps should be run under a unique user?
Which apps should be run in jails (I have yet to touch jails but they sound like they'll be useful to me)?