krille wrote:Touché on the distros.
Don't use Windows?
First, it's not like Windows won't work. Depending on your experiences and mindset going in, using Linux could be enlightening, or hair-pulling. If you're afraid of the command-line, there's no doubt it will be hair-pulling. Many aspects are going to be odd due to different philosophies used, too (like using root temporarily, sudo, software being gotten from a central place, etc.). OTOH, it won't hurt. If you really don't like it, pick up a Y-cable and go back to Windows (come to think of it, though, I don't think you need do that anymore).
What distribution?
There are other alternatives as well, mainly *BSD and GNU. It's very hard to choose with so many versions available: Literally hundreds (I think there are about 340!) of Linux distros, a few BSD distros (most popular one being FreeBSD) and GNU. What would you recommend, as you seem to have the experience?
Note that I have
no experience with dedicated BT boxes, nor BT experience on Linux beyond occasionally using kTorrent (for which I set the global upload limit, set the ports, and go on my merry way).
Keep in mind that this will be my very first media server/NAS/seedbox of any kind, so at this stage everything hasn't got to be perfect and optimized to infinity (it does not have to run efficiently on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX with 32MB RAM...), as long as it works. It will not be used as a desktop (I will probably only have a keyboard, mouse and monitor attached to it while initially setting it up, thenceforth it will be accessed remotely via LAN most likely).
1. The purpose is essentially to be able to stow away the box with all the HDDs where I can't hear it, allowing it to be on and working 24/7/365 (rebooting once in a while is fine).
2. Obviously it should act as NAS, everything should be accessible to my main PC running Windows (by mapping network drives).
3. It should act as a BitTorrent seedbox. That means support for a common widely accepted BitTorrent client.
Being able to run uTorrent on Linux would be great, as that's the client I'm currently using.
4. Support for a major Direct Connect client wouldn't hurt either. (Although the main PC could do this by sharing the server's contents via mapped network drives.)
5. A front-end for the main PC (I guess Remote Desktop or VNC or something should work fine, maybe uTorrent's web interface or TorrentFlux). After initial configuration of the server, everything else should be done remotely.
6. Since I'm new to Linux/BSD/GNU I'd prefer (to begin with) one of the
major distributions (there may be better sites for this), but I don't know.
7. It would be great if all P2P activity packets could be set to low priority (low QoS I think).
8. It would be great if the OS prioritized feeding data to the main system (in case of streaming music or a Blu-Ray movie) before tending to any P2P clients' needs.
First off, will be box be sitting behind a firewall, NATed, or open on the 'net? If NATed, security should be fairly simple. If just on the 'net, you'd need to make sure you have SNORT, and anything else similar in the distro running--it basically needs to be configured like it is a firewall. My firewall here gets thousands of attacks per day of various kinds. If Windows, you would also want something to protect it, and in any OS case, be careful with a web front end (SNORT, combined with other utilities, can detect, log, and prevent intrusion...but you really want a distro where it is configured well by default). Basically, you don't want anyone able to come in through normal attacks coming from bots (there aren't any know exploits, but if they see a server they know, and can hammer it with user/passes all day long...well...). If any service allows restrictions by IPs, only allowing LAN IPs generally does the trick.
2. Samba can do this. KDE has a Samba configuration applet that makes it all very easy.
3. There are many BT clients, and most are easy to use, but less tweakable than uTorrent (if you want to try the linked steps, and run Utorrent, it won't hurt anything to attempt it...but I'd make sure other simple clients like gTorrent and kTorrent, were lacking is some necessary feature). The interfaces are all so similar, I doubt there will be much to worry about, there, unless being a seeder box requires some odd settings that normal client users don't (which also seems unlikely, given BT's nature, as only the trackers should really be special).
4. I haven't the slightest clue what, if any, DC support there is.
5. There may be web controls for some, but VNC works well, too. Over a LAN, the performance of VNC would be fine, even managing things with the GUI. I haven't done it in a long time, but I don't recall setting up a VNC server being difficult in the slightest.
6. Nope. That's generally the site. For an easy desktop, PCLinuxOS is it...IMO. The installer is not the most intuitive, so may take a few tries (there are many places you might want to just go backwards, but only have a cancel option), but it has always been easier for me to set up than just about any other. Then, there's Ubuntu and Fedora, the big bad uber-popular distros. If the box sits behind a firewall, such that you don't need the likes of SNORT or anything, PCLinuxOS should be fine, and would be my first choice, Ubuntu second. Otherwise, Ubuntu or Fedora...but Fedora isn't terribly n00b-friendly (in the sense of how you use the OS, not anything wrong with the surrounding community). Both Ubuntu and Fedora are commonly used as desktops and servers, and Ubuntu Server is pretty nice. The handy thing about that is that security for the box
should be easier to set up. You may also get easier or more robust web controls. Read the wikis and forums a lot
. Also, with Ubuntu, while not my favorite distro, has very good forums--good for when you're stuck initially. Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS also both use APT, allowing you to use Synaptic, which is a great GUI package manager.
Note that no matter what distro you use, the Ubuntu and Gentoo Wikis are excellent sources of information.
So what would you recommend?
If it's sitting behind a firewall, and won't get much other server use, check out desktop distros, especially PCLOS and Kubuntu (Ubuntu with a nice default KDE setup), and find one you like. KDE's GUI admin tools could make it all much easier for you; especially the Samba one.
7. I know this can be done, but not how it can be done. It might be easier just to do network work and get a router that can set priority based on port ranges (getting one preloaded w/ DD-WRT would give you more than you'll ever need
). OTOH, if you leave yourself some upload headroom, it should work fine (set client max uploads so that they'll be a bit less than your actual upload speed). If your concern is mainly download or VOIP performance, limiting upload speed would be enough.
8. If this becomes an issue, it's easy to do, from a process standpoint ("nice" is the word to search for). From a filesystem/drive standpoint, you'd just have to play with it. I doubt this would become a problem, though.
Fragmentation
A partition or a designated drive for (temporary) downloads is a very good idea indeed. Especially for buffer-building (download something new, seed it while hot, usually a few days, then delete) and other temporary files. One drive could easily be designated for this. Completely wiping this temporary partition/drive every few months should be enough to avoid heavy fragmentation, no?
Should be.
Did I understand it correctly that you recommend EXT3=Ordered or JFS for all disks and partitions engaged in P2P activities? For the storage drives, how much free space should be reserved (percentage) to avoid heavy fragmentation (I've heard 10-20%)?
Pretty much. JFS will be closer to NTFS from a bad shutdown, but quicker. That is, it will check things out, recover what it can, and then you can finish booting. Not quite as good as NTFS as getting things back. EXT3 w/ data=ordered or data=journal will get data into a proper state a little better, but could need a FSCK (*n*x equivalent of CHKDSK), which might take many hours on a big drive. Then, you might not get the data back, or it might be forced to give up, and you would then need to go and use other recovery tools to scour the drive, or better, and image of it, for your data, copy it elsewhere, then work on restoring the system. Even when it can be recovered, it might be a long and painful process. But, it gives you a better chance of being able to recover said data at all, which is a huge reason for it being the default FS in most distros.
As far as free space, somewhere in there should be good. Just like with Windows, there isn't a hard limit, as it depends on many variables.
RAID
Thanks to you guys, I won't be using RAID-5 at all. I won't use any RAID at all actually (instead I'll get an external HDD for backups or something). My dad still insists on his RAID-1 though for his PC (he's had system disks fail on him before and he doesn't want any sudden downtime at all), I will tell him to use backups as well.
If your main concern is downtime due to hardware failure, RAID is great. RAID 1 also gives a good bit of extra read performance. The main thing is that it is not a replacement for a backup. It gives you redundancy for your disks...but that might not always be redundancy for your data.
). And I like using BitTorrent to, uhm, share Linux distributions (and occasionally download new ones too). Which may mean that I will be using the full capacity of this fiber quite often while at the same time doing everyday work, watching movies, gaming, listening to music, etc. Now these Linux distributions (along with my music and movie backups) will be stored on two possibly three 1TB HDDs (there will most likely be no RAID). I want my PC to be as quiet as possible of course, hopefully I'll be able to have it on even while I sleep.
but if I move around large amounts of data, especially if I move stuff from my download partition to my storage partition (both on the same WD GP), both my dl and ul speed suffers. I don't think any other HDD would do much better under the same circumstance.
