Newbie Questions

General
1

Hello all,
I have several questions.

  1. The tutorial on setting up Windows clients seem to be unavailable at the moment. Can anybody explain the setup procedure for Windows clients?

  2. Is there anyway to mimic the functions of Windows Home Server 2011 such as automated full-system backups and client monitoring?

  3. Besides the minimum requirements on the Quick Start Guide, do you guys have any recommendations for hardware (or any quirks I should know about)?

Thanks in advance.

2

@Hagane Welcome to Rockstor community! You must be referring to this section. I’ve added this to my documentation task list and we should have it updated in a few days. I’ll update this post when that happens. In the meantime, just a quick run through. (1) Follow this to setup a samba export. I know this is also a bit outdated and will be updated. (2) From Windows file browser, you can “map a drive” and use \\<share_name>. Hope this helps for now, but docs coming soon.

3

The full system backup is possible, I believe, just by using Samba and Windows backup. Again, we’ll update the docs soon on this. For existing Windows users – If you got this working or have authoritative doc links, please share.

I don’t know about client monitoring capabilities of a Windows Server. Others might.

4

You can search in this forum and gather some hardware specs being used by other users. Here’s a work in progress recommendations document. http://rockstor.com/docs/install.html#hardware-recommendations

5

Thank you for all the help (and the quick response)! I’m really glad I was able to find Rockstor. If you don’t mind me asking another question, would you say ECC memory is a necessity like it is (at least, according to the forums) for ZFS/Freenas?

6

From everything I’ve read, ECC memory is an orthogonal layer of protection to the FS-level stuff in ZFS and BTRFS. So the “if you care a lot about your data, use ECC RAM” mantra would seem to be as relevant to BTRFS as it is to ZFS; not required for either, but a good idea.

The cost premium of ECC RAM, in my recent experience, is minimal. But it does require a motherboard that supports it, which can add to cost, and decrease flexibility.

1 Like
7

That is what I thought as well. But from scouring the FreeNAS forums, the general mantra seems to be “If you don’t use ECC Memory, don’t even bother.”, since corrupt data on ZFS will kill the entire array. Is Rockstor like this, or will the corruption of a file only affect that file? (P.S. Sorry for all the questions.)

8

I’d Google for “BTRFS ECC memory” for an answer :wink:

9

ZFS’s extensive use of memory make it particular vulnerable to memory corrupt. And i believe btrfs didn’t do that. But dangerous are always there, it’s just smaller,
I will use ECC ram since it’s not very expensive. And i will always want a server board to get the ikvm, more server grade nic and more buit-in sata (for some board).

10

Thanks for the answer. I looked it up on google as per the above suggestions, but couldn’t find anything on it.

11

as @xudaiqing said, every filesystem is vulnerable to in memory corruption, there was an article about how zfs/btfs even prevent such a thing from happening other than like ext4 or something, will link it if i find it again.

for myself its not crucial, many of my servers dont have ecc and cant support it, but for every new board/build i look up how much ecc costs and if its worth the extra cost. For the last build ecc was built-in and on most modern and coming mainboards it is the default.

edit: here

12

Thanks for the good read. It clarified a lot of things.