Do It Yourself NAS

I recently set about piecing together my home network from scratch due to moving into a new home, with this came a short-sighted purchase, the Synology DS211j. The intent of this article is not to bad-mouth this device, but point out that it was not fit for "my" purpose and supposedly many others in my situation.

I have a lot of media, maybe not the most but still plenty consisting of photo's, home videos, music, TV shows and movies. Initially I managed to cram most of this onto the DS211j which was setup with 4TB of space as well as nightly backups to a seperate disk. But with the recent decision to move every dvd and bluray I own off their shelves and onto the NAS I quickly ran out of space.

At £140 (time of writing) the Synology DS211j is great little work horse for those who don't want to get their hands dirty. But seeing as I didn't mind building a system myself I figured I could greatly reduce this price, especially when you consider moving to pre-built NAS devices with more drive capacity quickly inflates this price into its £1000's (before you even add hard drives).

So my task was simple, I would build my own with the following in mind...

1. Components must be cheap (not the cheapest but were not talking about a gaming PC here!)
2. It must be low power consuming, most pre-built NAS quote very low running wattage and I don't want to lose any saving I made shelling out money on the electricity bill
3. Support for at least 8 hard drives giving me a total of 24TB
4. Be able to perform backups
5. Provide some level of redundancy for hard drives

So with the above leading the way I set about picking a hardware/software combination that would theoretically be fit for purpose. The following is what I chose for the build along with reasoning...

1. Casecom KB-7760 ATX Case £12.51 from Ebuyer
• 11 potential hard drive bays
• Did not need a fancy looking case as it would be tucked away
2. Asus AT5NM10T-I £70.08 from Europc with 4% cashback through quidco
• Low power consuming motherboard specs here
• Intel Atom D525 processor built in, low power and ample raw processing power for a NAS
• 4 SATA II ports
• Gigabit Lan
• PCIe expansion port
3. Huntkey Jumper 80+ Gold Certified 300w PSU £43.38 from ebuyer
• I was considering a 12v 120w PicoPSU but at boot when all the discs spin up there was potential that the little PSU wouldn't be able to power 8 drives and a motherboard with processor.
• Don't go cheap with a PSU you get the majority of your energy saving and efficiency from here
4. 2GB SODIMM DDR3 Ram £10.79 from Crucial with 7% cashback through quidco
5. SATA II 4 Port PCIe Card £23.99 from ebay
• Add's 4 SATA II ports to my build albeit capped at the maximum throughput allowed by the PCIe port (500MB/s), still with this limitation you would be hard pressed to max out the PCIe ports bandwidth over a network, this only really becomes an issue transferring between drives on the same machine but since this is "Network" Attached Storage it is a non-issue.
• Didn't need any hardware raid support (would leave this to software) otherwise buy something more expensive
6. 2GB Pen Drive £3.99 from dabs
• To hold the operating system
7. FreeNAS operating system
• Provides a web based GUI
• Support for ZFS file system which includes snapshots, end-to-end checksumming and recovery/redundancy when pooled.
• Allows me to use software RAIDZ so it is independent of the hardware making future upgrades easier.
• Large community for support
• Has been around a while and is mature

Making a grand total of £164.74 for a potential 8 bay NAS! A quick Google tells me I would be lucky to get the low end models that support 8 bays for under £500.00 and these have severely reduced hardware specifications meaning you forfeit some functionality such as software raid, snapshots etc. So time to get down and dirty with the build, the following is a series of snapshots taken during the process, if you need help piecing a computer together from scratch I suggest Google is your friend.

So with the build ready I needed to set-up FreeNAS, following the instructions on their wiki I managed to install FreeNAS to a USB drive and boot into the FreeNAS console. Everything appeared to just work, it configured all my network settings automatically (I was connected to my network via Ethernet) and told me my device was available at 192.168.x.x. So using another PC I logged into the web GUI for FreeNAS and again after following more instructions on their wiki I had assigned a volume to my hard disk, setup a dataset for this volume and shared it with my windows clients. All was well.

Now for testing. A speed test was first on my list, I used the intel nas performance toolkit to measure throughput, to be completely honest this program is overkill for what information I wanted but it does the trick. The following is breakdown of my initial tests when compared to the DS211j that I own.

Test Name	DS211j	DIYNAS
HD Video Playback	Throughput: 32MB/s	Throughput: 40MB/s
HD Video Playback x2	Throughput: 32MB/s	Throughput: 40MB/s
HD Video Playback x4	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 36MB/s
HD Video Playback and HD Video Record	Throughput: 27MB/s	Throughput: 28MB/s
File Copy To NAS	Throughput: 18MB/s	Throughput: 30MB/s
File Copy From NAS	Throughput: 32MB/s	Throughput: 42MB/s
Directory Copy From NAS	Throughput: 28MB/s	Throughput: 37MB/s
Directory Copy To NAS	Throughput: 16MB/s	Throughput: 26MB/s

To say I was a little disappointed with these first results is true but never fear. I figured there may be some "tweaking" involved to get the most out of FreeNAS (it is designed to work on hundreds of pieces of hardware). So I had a play around with some of the kernel settings relating to buffers and zfs options and came to a trial-and-error solution that works for my hardware.

Adding the following settings to the loaders part of the FreeNAS GUI worked wonders.

vm.kmem_size 1

vm.kmem_size_max 1

vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable 0

And the new results following this change?

Test Name	DS211j	DIYNAS
HD Video Playback	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 65MB/s
HD Video Playback x2	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 45MB/s
HD Video Playback x4	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 41MB/s
HD Video Playback and HD Video Record	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 36MB/s
File Copy To NAS	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 38MB/s
File Copy From NAS	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 66MB/s
Directory Copy From NAS	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 61MB/s
Directory Copy To NAS	Throughput: 30MB/s	Throughput: 32MB/s

This made a huge difference to my results and as a result I get much snappier file transfers. In summary you can build a cheap NAS for your storage needs, I feel I have the FreeNAS bug now so there may be more DIY builds coming soon!

Risk, It's All About The Magic, Shazam

Just my thought of the day after playing Risk with a group of friends in a board game extravaganza of an evening. What really are the odds to consider when attacking someone? Well, in any given 1 on 1 there are 36 combinations that can be rolled e.g. one die for each player. This results in a win percentage for the defender an average 58.3% of the time with a remaining 41.7% chance of a win for the aggressor.

So when considering that 15 out of 36 attempts by the attacker will be successful and 21 will be won by the defender we need to balance the odds. To get to our magic 50% we need 18 of our 36 rolls to be winners! Thus we need 3 more rolls than we are currently achieving, 3/15 gives us the extra number of rolls we require to win, a nice 0.2 which means I need 1.2 dice to be on equal terms with the defender.

Aha "you can't have 0.2 of a dice" I hear you say, which sadly is true so all in all I've wasted 2 minutes typing this up! Stick to the rule of two to one when attacking and you'll be dandy although the above doesn't account for SOD's law which appears to apply to me in this game more than anyone else. Damn you Mike-"Genghis"-Croft!

Love Money Management Even For Nationwide

Two blog posts in one day! You might be thinking what the heck?!?

Love Money have just released an online service to budget and manage your finances. Due to the nightmare that is the IFA in the UK automation for these kind of services is pretty terrible but they have somehow done it. Genius! I can now even connect to my Nationwide account without having to upload OFX's, CSV's and the like.

It really is looking promising, make sure you give this find of the day a go!

GWT Dialog Box With Close Button

Due to the internals of the GWT Dialog Box, extending it to add support for a close button can be a little tricky if you dont understand what your looking for. Alas below demonstrates adding an anchor to the caption area of the dialog, all that's left to do is for you to style the anchor. Happy GWT'ing.

Some people will moan that adding a library such as Smart GWT will add this functionality. Whilst true it also adds a boat load of library code you may never need. Keep compile times short and sweet and use the minimum amount necessary.

// Create anchor we want to accept click events
final Anchor myAnchor = new Anchor("My Anchor");

// Add handler to anchor
myAnchor.addClickHandler(new ClickHandler() {
  @Override
  public void onClick(ClickEvent event) {
    Window.alert("Anchor was clicked");
  }
});

// Create dialog
final DialogBox myDialog = new DialogBox();
myDialog.setText("My Dialog");

// Get caption element
final HTML caption = ((HTML)myDialog.getCaption());

// Add anchor to caption
caption.getElement().appendChild(myAnchor.getElement());

// Add click handler to caption
caption.addClickHandler(new ClickHandler() {
  @Override
  public void onClick(ClickEvent event) {
    // Get x,y caption click relative to the anchor
    final int x = event.getRelativeX(myAnchor.getElement());
    final int y = event.getRelativeY(myAnchor.getElement());

    // Check click was within bounds of anchor
    if(x >= 0 && y >= 0 && 
      x <= myAnchor.getOffsetWidth() && 
      y <= myAnchor.getOffsetHeight()) {
        // Raise event on anchor
        myAnchor.fireEvent(event);
    }
  }
});

// Show the dialog
myDialog.show();

Craig and Charlotte's 100 things to do in Britain - #14 Iron Bridge, Shropshire

The birthplace of industry! And its not too bad a place to visit too. With plenty of museums (although you have to pay) to visit and walking trails through the gorge and the surrounding greenery you can definitely make a day of this. Make sure you turn up early though as it is a nightmare to traverse the steep narrow roads whilst trying to find a parking space.

Set in a quaint town/village (although its hard to believe this place exists right next to the M54) Iron Bridge has all the niceties you expect from small tea shops, hand made toy stores and useless garden ornaments! You might just forget that the bridge itself is pretty impressive. Do yourself a favour, take a picnic and make a day of it by getting lost in the woodland.

Rating:

Craig and Charlotte's 100 things to do in Britain - #16 Caernarvon Castle

A great little drive towards the back end of beyond 'Bangor' in North Wales will see you come across the mighty castle of Caernarvon. An awesomely English built slap in the face to the welsh all them years ago proving that we indeed were superior :P (until it got sacked by the welsh).

The castle itself houses a small town with coffee shops, cake stores a market and your classic 'bits n bobs' shops. The castle is kept in fabulous condition and is a real charm to walk round, through and under. A small entry fee is well worth the price with museum's and staff on hand to point out just how magnificent it really all is. A small wharf-side also is of interest for those who like a bit of a walk across to the lookout post on the opposite hillside.

Along with the drive this is a great scenic day out, and with a few coastal towns locally to the castle its easy to spend the entire day (neigh weekend!) in the area. Cheap and Cheerful, just how I like it!

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