Re: [BackupPC-users] OT: NAS GUI for native Linux (preferably RHEL)

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:43 PM, Timothy J Massey <tmassey AT obscorp DOT com> wrote:

Hello!

I'm in the middle of building a "Super" Backup server. It will do the following:

Run BackupPC for file-level backups
Provide NFS share(s) for VMware snapshots
Provide CIFS share(s) for Windows snapshots and Clonezilla
Contains a removable SATA tray
Manage all of this from a GUI

I am currently doing each of these features on various different BackupPC servers already, but in each case it was done manually, by hand, and from the command line. For this iteration, I would like to wrap a GUI around it.

In the case of BackupPC, it has a GUI and I will continue to use it. However, *many* of the functions I would like to have the user perform do not: NFS shares, CIFS shares, users, network settings, etc. However, these are *EXACTLY* the standard function that a NAS does, and there are 1E6 of these already built.

So, my question: is there a NAS GUI out there that can be added on top of "standard" Linux (preferably RHEL, but very willing to consider others) that will add most of these functions? For example, something like the GUI for an Iomega NAS would be perfect. (I thought about using them as the hardware and software base and adding BackupPC to them, but there's no built-in removable drive, and USB is awkward and slow. Plus the Linux environment is... minimal.)

I would prefer staying based on a generic Linux install, but I've also thought about using a NAS-based distro as the base (such as OpenFiler). In the specific case of OpenFiler, the current version in a bit of a bad place at the moment. There is much concern that the base OS, which is based on rPath, will not be available for free users for much longer; in addition the current beta version (2.99) has some known critical bugs in iSCSI (which I use), and there have been no updates since April. So, it's not my favorite base to build on... (Reference: https://forums.openfiler.com/viewtopic.php?pid=26228)

And I'd vastly prefer to stay with Linux, which eliminates FreeNAS and Nexenta.

Many of the Linux-based NAS systems are designed as firmware for dedicated (and often vastly inadequate) hardware: NSLU2 falls into this camp. I am not running this on an embedded device: It's a full-featured PC-based architecture.

I'm also willing to consider generic Linux system management tools such as webmin, but I'd prefer something more focused on NAS-type functions if I can get it. It's been years since I've looked at Webmin, but a quick glance seems to show that it hasn't changed much: it's little more than textareas with chunks of the configuration files dumped into them. I'm hoping for something more polished if I can get it.

Like I said, I'm looking for the general interface provided by every NAS I've ever seen. Of course, each of them is specific to their device. I'm hoping there's a version out there for "generic" Linux.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions in this regard?

The two players in the 'generic server GUI' space are SME server and ClearOS.   Both are sort-of generic Centos under the covers but you barely see it. SME server has a long history but has slowed down progress in the last few years. It works by having a web interface build snippets of config files and perl scripts that are processed with templates to rebuild the real config files. If you want to make your own changes, you have to edit the templates, not the normal configs. ClearOS has a much more modern ajax-y interface but I'm not quite sure what does the real work.   The delay in the CentOS 6.0 release set them back badly so you have to choose between a beta 6.x version or an outdated 5.x.

Unless you have a lot of users or changing needs, this doesn't really sound like something that needs a web GUI to manage - or at least not worth putting up with oddball/non-standard configurations to get.    If your hardware can handle a small amount of overhead and you can manage it from a windows client, you might consider VMware ESXi (the free version). Then you can run a full GUI console of any OS remotely - and if you felt like it you could run one OS for file shares and a different one for backuppc. In any case, having a VMware setup with some disk space is handy to try out new things since you can map a downloaded iso image on an nfs share as the DVD drive and install in a new VM without having to touch any real hardware.

--
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com

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