Remote NAS
I've wanted to have off-site backups for some time, the first inclination months ago was to burn DVDs and keep them in a safety deposit box. Good idea, but I never overcame the time hurdle to actually organize and burn the DVDs, especially since I'd have to repeat burning every month or so. I only backup sporadically.
Yesterday I realized I have a perfect offsite solution. My family's Colorado house has a cable modem w/ unlimited bandwidth. I could easily take one of my old PCs that I'm no longer using and put it into service there as a secure remote NAS.
First I looked into a few NAS Linux distributions since it would be nice to have something out of the box rather than configuring an existing distribution for my needs:
- Darma NAS ($$$)
- ServerElements NASLite ($)
- OpenFiler - free, still in heavy development though
Desired features:
- SSH command line access
- Web administration
- Support software RAID 1 or 5
- Support some journaling filesystem
- ACL/login support
- Free
Features nice to have, but not required:
- rsync support
- Ability to install other apps/services (desired)
- SSL encrypted client-server communications (desired, could also use hardware VPN as my home router supports VPN)
- Logical Volume Manager (nice to have)
- Dynamic filesystem expansion (nice to have)
Others have built the same w/ RedHat 9 w/ XFS 1.3, LVM, etc. and having to customize the RH install.
Also ran across some other interesting tools: