I'm currently in the phase of reorganizing my home network since there is currently one server that was added and I'm planning on adding more storage space. My parents aren't 100% thrilled of the whole idea due mainly to the fact that I'm spending a lot of money on this setup of mine.

I've heard of OpenFiler Network Storage OS which basically takes any server that you can install this OS on and converts it into a Network Attached Storage or NAS device that is more powerful than your average NAS device that can be found cheaply on the market. Now this isn't for everyone since it basically requires the user to build or purchase or recycle a PC or Server in order to install the software and then set it up.

This is my quick review in regards to this application and how it stands up for what I need…which is probably overkill for a home network…but then again this is what I do :)

Right now my main and in production file server runs FreeNAS which is basically an alternative to OpenFiler. Now FreeNAS has been working really good and has a really nice interface not to mention some really good features, like iSCSI, that make it worthwhile. So why the change? Well I haven't made the change yet and I'm trying out different options to see what works best and you'll have to keep reading to get an inside look as to what I did to test OpenFiler and how it stands up against FreeNAS, which is the only equivalent that I can compare it to since it's what I've used so far.

First my setup. OpenFiler runs on x86 platform only, whether it's 32-bit or 64-bit, so I can't install it on one of my Sun Netras and none of my x86 platforms are free in a way that I can simply whipe them out and install this OS. So I installed VMWare ESX 3i on my new IBM server and ran it there instead which is sweet due to the whole virtualization thing plus with the upside that in case that I want to restart all I have to do is upload the image again to the VMWare server and there we go not to mention that rebooting is way faster.

I used the VMWare ESX appliance that can be downloaded from OpenFiler's website so that I don't have to sit through the installation, though I will eventually do so. The appliance creates a ~2GB virtual disk where OF is installed and I added a second virtual ethernet card and two virtual hard drives of 8GB and 20GB, which were added after the first boot, so that I can test the software. Memory is kept at 512MB and only one vCPU or virtual processor is used. I eliminated the floppy since…well since I don't really use them anymore.

I also originally added an optical drive but I saw that during the boot of OpenFiler it gives errors when initializing that device so it was removed.

When OF is first powered on it goes through it's configuration of SSH keys and SSL certificate since SSL is used for the Web Interface. Once the system comletes the boot up process, the first boot is the longest, it will give you the standard Linux console and display the Web URL so that the user can access the web interface in order to manage the server.

Up to this point everything is going as planned and you shouldn't really have the need to come back to this console at which point you can take the monitor and keyboard and mouse away from the server…but let me just get ahead of myself and tell you to hold on that thought as you will later understand.

I accessed the Web Interface from my Windows XP desktop using Firefox 3 and the whole interface looks professionally done. The company that makes OpenFiler actually has several “add-on” features that require payment and you get support as well. I'm just going with the gratis edition since I don't plan on paying for support or the crazy amount that they're charging for the “extra features”.

Checking back on VMWare to see the amount of resources used by the application we notice that while it's idling, no Samba, FTP or any of the other protocols are enabled and no one is connected to the appliance, it uses 70MHz of CPU and occupies around 20MB of RAM.

Going back to the interface. I like how the information is displayed and the Status page, which is the first thing you see when you log in, shows a lot of information regarding the system which is useful to monitor de server and know how much space is left on the hard drives. It also displays network statistics which can be useful in determining how heavy of a load the server is having once it's placed in production. This is mostly a view only page and though it's quite descriptive it shows the information in quite a technical way so if you're not used to seeing /dev/sdb and knowing that's your second hard drive you might be a little lost.

Moving onto the System tab, which basically it's the whole configuration section, you will notice that the system does allow for several services, though I believe that FreeNAS has a lot more features than OpenFiler but I'll get back to you on that one. One Feature that gets my attention is that it allows you to bond ethernet cards at the software level and it's a feature that FreeNAS is missing on it's current stable version. Other configuration sections include the standard password security, time and date settings with ability to obtain the information from a NTP server, also it can interact with APC and Belkin UPS to shut down the system in case of a power failure, the system can send notifications over e-mail when a SMTP server is configured and it can automatically upgrade the system.

I haven't tested the Ethernet Card Bonding so I won't comment on that yet. I didn't see anything that would make the system send an e-mail every once in a while with the system information, like FreeNAS can do. I'm still wondering what exactly the notifications that it sends are but I'll have to test that feature later on.

My first task was to check if the system had any updates pending so I went through the manual update setting and it took around a minute and a half to come back telling me which updates were available that I could download. I selected them all and click on the button to proceed with the update. This is where I noticed the first con and it's that it lacks updated status messages of the currently running task, whether it's upgrading the system or creating a new partition on a hard drive, and this can actually become annoying because the upgrade falls to the background and you aren't notified when the upgrade is finished, well maybe it's sent over e-mail but I'm not too sure about that, or if it's even doing the upgrade. I waited for a couple of minutes for a page to refresh telling me more information but nothing else happened. So was the system successfully upgraded? To be honest with you I don't know, a window tells you to check the log to determine if the update was successful, but the log turns out to be quite cryptic and hard to get any data from which can be used to determine that.

Moving along, not knowing if I needed to reboot the box or not, I proceeded to the Volume management section to add my hard drives so that I can share them. I'm automatically taken to a window that tells me that there are no physical volumes created and that I need to go to another window to create them…click…next window. I see a graphical representation of the hard drive using a pie chart and also the information and ability to create the partition or partitions that I need. It sad that I can't simply tell it the size of the partition but I have to tell it the cylinders that I want to use, at least they tell you what's the size of the partition with the range of cylinders that is given by the user but becomes a game of hit and miss trying to get the right range of cylinders to get the partition to the size you want. Maybe some people find this the best way to do this but to me this isn't intuitive so it's a con.

So I created one partition on the 8GB hard drive and two partitions on the 20GB hard drive. Going back to the Volume Management screen, again I'm not sure if the creation of the partition was successful or not, I'm greeted with the same message telling me that there aren't any physical volumes created…hrmm, weird, I can swear I just created them…let's double check. As it turns out everything checks out as it should be, well at least what I can tell from what I'm seeing, and this brings us to the 3rd con: documentation.

I understand that this company makes it's money off of selling the tech support to it's customers but that leaves the rest of the people in the dark since there isn't any help within the Web Interface as to what each feature does or even means. Going over to their site in search of some user guide you can see that the good Administrator guide is expensive so you end up going to the free administration guide which is as basic as it can get. Information is very little and hardly explains anything or gives you any idea as to what you can do to configure the system even at it's most basic level and also the screen shots are from an older version which doesn't really help much. Going over to the section where it gives you a slight hint of how to add your hard drives it goes into saying that you need to run a couple of commands on the console…but wait then why have the Web Interface? So I go into the System tab and into the option Secure Shell so that I get access to the CLI of that server…oops…it doesn't work. I try Internet Explorer 6 and it doesn't work either. Well that's useful. Now I don't know if it's just on my system that this is happening or if it's everywhere but I'm more inclined into it being on my system that everywhere because they would have released a fix for it…or maybe the fix is only for paying customers. So you go back to the console on the server…hopefully you didn't remove that monitor and keyboard and mouse before…you log in as root and then run the command that the guide specifies and the result a Segmentation Fault. I double check the command and it's correct.

Rebooting the server is quite fast actually, I did this like twice, though you don't really know if the server is rebooting because…well there just isn't a status update on that.

So the Admin Guide for the non-paying customers is out of date and worthless so you end up turning to the Forums on their community site…hopefully you don't need this setup right away as it will take you a while to dig through all of those posts in the Forums.

Up to this point I gave up on OpenFiler because it's simply taking too long to get anything working and I can't even get the partitions to b seen so that I can share them. Now this leaves me with a sour taste on my mouth and my expectations of this software were thrown out the window. Personally I wouldn't even consider buying this software since I'm unable to get it up and running with basic tasks.

Now, I know that it works because there are people out there who have it running so I'm not going to give up this easily. I wiped the image and I'm uploading it again to the server to give it another try but I've decided to install it from the CD image that I got from their site on a virtual machine to test it again and see how I can get it to work. I must have the ability of being able to easily add a hard drive afterwards without having to reinstall so this is something that I'll be testing as well.

So we have the Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Professional looking web interface
• Ethernet Card Bonding
• E-mail notification
• Multiple file sharing protocols (NFS, CIFS, FTP)
• iSCSI support
• Small footprint
• Software RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 support

Cons:

• Lack of up to date documentation
• Status updates are missing
• Web interface help is none
• Need to run commands on the console to get the partitions working
• No software encryption available
• Secure Shell within the web interface doesn't work

I'll be giving this application another try to see if I can get it up and running. If you use OpenFiler then please let us know how has your experience been with this software and for how long you've been using it.

-LM