JDPFu.com 2025

As I ponder how to build a redundant file server that serves Linux, Solaris, VMware, Xen, VirtualBox, FreeBSD, FreeNAS, TiVo and Windows systems, a few interesting articles have come to light.

• A home file server using ZFS
• Snapshots into the cloud
• Backups with versioning
• 10 Reasons You need to Consider ZFS

Requirements

Basically, I’d like

1. reasonable amounts of redundancy
2. hardware agnostic
3. FOSS (non-commercial)
4. Enterprise ready – support for iSCSI, CIFS, Samba, NFSv4, RAID levels, snapshots, and versioning
5. remote backup capabilities – rdiff-backup would be ideal
6. Offsite backup capabilities – any type of external storage “in the cloud”
7. Encryption of offsite backups
8. high performance capabilities
9. Suitable for file system, database and raw disk device access

More on this as I work through the solution over the next few days and weeks.

BTRFS

Of course, I came across this article on btrfs a few days later explaining the it will likely be the default Linux file system in a few years. It also explains that any file systems created prior to kernel 2.6.30 are incompatible and with later kernels. Today, I’m running 2.6.24-24-generic SMP. No go.