First Open-source Storage Mgmt 

Since Linux is quite safe from the attacks of viruses, it is a good choice for NAS devices. But, there were no free and open-source software for managing these storage devices. Now there is Openfiler, a product sponsored by Xinit Systems.

Xinit, a company renowned for its Linux-based storage servers, is now shipping Openfiler with its NAS devices. Xinit also offers an enterprise version of this software, for which the company offers technical support. 

Since Openfiler was released only towards the end of September, there is no comprehensive documentation for it, except a Readme file that comes with the tar ball and contains the installation process of the software. The site (www.openfiler.org) claims that it will provide the documentation soon.

Officially, the software supports only Red Hat Linux 8.0. We tried it with PCQLinux 8.0 and found that it runs well. To begin with, you will need a machine with a fresh installation of PCQLinux (it shouldn’t contain any updates either from Red Hat or from any other source). Make a boot partition (/boot) of 128 MB, a swap partition equal to your RAM and a root partition (/ ) of at least 16.5 GB. Remember that it should have ample free space so that you can further create LVM partitions. 

From here you can create new volumes in your NAS

LVM partitions



Boot to the system and create the LVM partitions by first creating new extended partitions and then logical volumes as per requirements. Now run fdisk and toggle (use the ‘t’ switch) the ‘8e’ value to the newly made partition. Now run the pvcreate command to create the volume and vgcreate command to give the appropriate name to the volume group like this,

#pvcreate /dev/hdxy



#vgcreat ‘vg_name’ /dev/hdxy

Here, replace the ‘xy’ part from hdxy with your appropriate device id and change the ‘vg_name’ with an appropriate volume group name (for example,

Openfiler).

Pre installation 



Run the rpm —e filename to remove the following rpms: squirrelmail, php-imap, php-ldap, php-dbg-client, php-dbg-server, php-manual, php-mysql, php-odbc, php-pgsql, php-snmp, php, weblaizer, glibc-utils, mrtg, nut-cgi, octave, amanda-server, gnuplot, gd-devel, gd-progs and gd. Remember to remove them in the sequence that we have given. 

Installing Openfiler 



Copy the openfiler tarball from this month’s DVD to your Linux machine and untar it like this,

#cp openfiler-initial-release-1.0.tar.gz /



#tar —zxvf openfiler-initial-release-1.0.tar.gz

Now install all the packages available in the / openfiler-initial-release/packages/i386 directory like this,

#cd /openfiler-initial-release/packages/i386



#rpm —Uvh —- oldpackage *.rpm

From this screen you can assign the disk quota

Next, open the file openfiler_installation.html file from the /openfiler-initial-release/docs directory. From the documentation, follow steps from step 2 to step 30. Once you complete the steps, su as the user postgres and run the following commands and exit to root.

#su postgres



$initdb —D /var/lib/pgsql/data


$exit

Follow steps from step-31 to step-34. Now, install the module pam_auth which is available at /openfiler-initial-release/packages/tar like this,

#cd /openfiler-initial-release/package/tar



#tar —xvf pam_auth-0.3.1.tar


#cd pam_auth-0.3.1


#./configure


#gmake


#gmake install

Now copy the pam_auth directory to ‘/opt/penfiler/include’ like this,

#cd .. 

(Supposing that you are still in pam_auth directory)

#cp —a pam_auth /opt/openfiler/include

Now open the file php.ini from your /etc directory in any text editor and search for the line starting with ‘include_path’ and append the following paths to it.

“/opt/openfiler/include/pam_auth:/opt/openfiler/include/pam_auth/modules”.

Now restart all the services like this,

#service postgresql restart



#service httpd restart


#service openfiler start

Using Openfiler



Now your openfiler server is ready to manage your storage network. To start working with it, fire up any Web browser and open the link https://yourmachinename:445, where ‘yourmachinename’ stands for the host name of the machine where openfiler is running. Remember to use https as openfiler works over a secured SSL connection. On the first screen it will ask you for the username and password. Use ‘openfiler’ as the username and ‘password’ as password. After logging into it you will find a neat and easy to use storage-management workplace. From here you can manage the existing volumes and create new volumes. You can also manage users and can set disk quota for these users. These users can be of any form, such as LDAP, CIFS, Kerprose and
NIS. 

Anindya Roy