Saving Stuff...

I have been running my own server for a while now. I started largely as an experiment to see how cheaply I could make a running website. (It originally cost me zero dollars, including the computer, but a TON of time...) Later it evolved into a full blown home server.
At the present time, I am running two servers in my living room. One runs my photo site, and the other is a storage server. The second is the subject of this blog...
As photographers, even with judicious editing, we amass a lot of images. And while hard drive space gets cheaper and cheaper, hard drives still fail. I really did not want to lose years of work. Through my research on building my own website (a topic for another day...) I came across SME Server. A few things I like about this Linux distribution:

1. very simple and very fast
2. runs on cheap, old hardware. Both my servers are old discarded machines.
3. runs raid "out of the box"
   
4. easy to configure and run (more on this below)
5. works well with windows networks (XP at least, I had problems with Vista, which was one of the reasons I moved completely to Linux)
6. well maintained, many updates.

Let me start with the last point first. There are almost literally a million Linux distributions out there. Many of them are very specialized, many of them are a hobby of a small group of people. SME has a large group of people working on constantly improving it. The really cool thing about open source software is that any programmer anywhere can look at the program and improve it. The more eyes looking at a project, the faster it improves. Also, because so many eyes are looking at it, it is much harder to bugger it up by adding spyware, etc. The rule of large groups says most people are very reasonable, "it is the few that spoil it for the many". or to state it more directly, any sufficiently large group tends to act to its collective best interest.
While I consider myself fairly computer savvy, I am not a computer tech. I can follow instructions, but I don't want to spend all my time configuring or fixing my system. now that may seem a bit strange considering how I have my Ubuntu desktop setup, but while I like eye-candy, I do just want it to work!

On to point 5. did I say Vista sucks for networking? In fact Samba (the Linux version of MS Windows networking) is better at networking than the Windows it is supposed to be copying. Also Linux (and Unix that it was originally based on) were designed from inception to be network aware. Permissions, user groups, etc are much easier to manage on a Unix based system. SME servers shows up in windows XP as a shared network drive. Same for my Ubuntu. Apparently OSX is supported as well, but I have not tested this. FYI an SME installation is seen from Vista, but Vista is not able to log on without a lot of hoop jumping, and the final straw was that all these hoops had to be jumped through every time I accessed the drive. I could not find any way to get Vista to save my settings. Just frustrating.

And finally, a note on RAID. If you don't know what it is, it is basically an instant backup of everything you store. All files are stored on both of the two (or more, but that gets a bit more complicated to explain) installed hard drives. If one drive fails, you still have all your data backed up on the second drive. You can take out the bad drive, install a new one, and the system will rebuild itself. You can read more here