NAS OS + Encryption

[nicholab]

Which OS would you use for a NAS? Do any nix support encryption of the Data? Edited November 7, 2012 by nicholab

[pete]

Probably some form of Linux or BSD.

All of them, depending on how you've setup your drives.

[dhicks]

Which OS would you use for a NAS?

 

FreeNAS - every feature you get from a specialised NAS device, plus block-level deduplication if you use a machine with enough (8GB) of RAM.

 

Do any nix support encryption of the Data?

 

I'm sure FreeNAS does, although I haven't had occasion to use it. On Linux, you'd use something that encrypted block devices and re-exposed them as block devices again, so your encryption would just slot in with whatever else you are using. So, for instance, you might have several physical disks (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc) combined into a MD RAID array (/dev/md0) which you might then encrypt (/dev/cr0) and then mirror to another machine (/dev/drbd1) before you actually format and mount the final resultant block device (i.e. do mkefs of /dev/drbd1 and mount it somewhere like /mnt/data).

[pete]

Your downside to encrypting is you either need to:

 

a) login and mount the volume by supplying a passphrase upon reboot.

b) provide a means for the server to mount the encrypted volume automatically (that wouldn't be effective if it got stolen, for example).

 

We went with a) on both a QNAP (custom Linux) and a standard server running Ubuntu 10.04 and encrypted LVM.

 

Also remember the files are only encrypted when the volume isn't mounted.

Edited November 7, 2012 by pete