Open Solaris

[Jonny Stutters]

On 21 February 2010 21:23, Mikael Hansson <forums at deadmengods.com> wrote:
> Hi -bar!
>
> I'm thinking about setting up an old computer as a server and I'm
> thinking about Open Solaris as OS.
>
> I'm going to buy some large disks and put in it to store files
> (audio/video/apps...) that are to be accessible from my network and also
> through a remote connection. Other services might be considered later.
>
> First, is Open Solaris a good choice or would you use anything else?

Seems odd to choose Open Solaris when there's so much more information
and community support around for this sort of task on any of the
popular Linux distributions.  I have no doubt that what you want to do
is perfectly possible in Open Solaris but it's not what I'd go for
apart from for the learning experience of trying a new OS.

> I'm a bit unclear about the capabilities of ZFS, but would it render the
> need for RAID (redundancy) unnecessary?

If a disk fails and your data isn't replicated then you're stuffed,
ZFS or otherwise.  Features like snapshots and so on do seem handy
though as part of a backup strategy.  Whether you need RAID or not is
more a question of how long you can stand to spend recovering from a
disk failure (quick rebuild of the array or slower recovery from
offline backup).

> Anyone (Peter :) ) have a short direction of which steps are needed, to
> achieve such a configuration?

Can't help you there.

Jonny