Opinions on safety of dropbox ???

[Rob Seastrom]

Zach made a nice choice for a FreeNAS box.  If I was looking at that
class of device I would give some serious thought to running SmartOS
on it instead, partially because SmartOS boots from a thumb drive (and
stores all its configuration in your main zpool), so you can use all
four drives for storage and not worry about a boot volume.  You do
lose the nice management gui, but then again that's not such a great
loss - managing ZFS from the command line is easy.  And you gain a
nice OS-level server virtualization platform (the CPU in it doesn't
have EPT, so SmartOS' KVM doesn't run, but that's a side note).

Since Dick's original question involved "security", the NAS
appliances, whether software based or a full package, are not a
perfect given either.  Witness today's nice little security alert:

http://blog.check-and-secure.com/040814-synolocker-ransomware-for-nas-devices/

-r



Zachary Yarashus <KJ4BXT at arrl.net> writes:

> I have tried using FreeNAS, and been fairly happy with the results. One of the
> things I really like about it is the ability to mount it as a network drive
> and work directly from it.
>
> That may or may not be as relevant in your case. The web GUI is also pretty
> nice.
>
>
> I set it up on one of these servers:
>
>
>
>
> [[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-CS24-SC-Server-2x-Intel-L5420-Quad-Core-Xeon-2-5GHz-16GB-NO-HDD-1U-Server-/141358923181?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item20e9a5fdad]]
>
>
>
> 4 SATA hard drive ports, 16 GB of ECC RAM, and 8 Xeon CPU cores for less than
> $200. (+ hard drives of course)
>
>
>
> Just as an aside, I really like these servers. They seem to have been made for
> an unknown government agency by dell, so there's no documentation or
> support, 
>
> but there's such a surplus of them and they're so cheap that you could buy a
> few and keep backups. They're fairly powerful too. I've used one as a render
> server for some of my CG work.
>
> You can't build much of a computer for less than $200, but these have quite
> decent specs, and are server grade hardware.
>
>
>
> Anyway, back on topic,
>
> FreeNAS uses ZFS, which is very nice as it claims to have the ability to
> detect silent bit rot. While two is better than one, not having to use the
> second is even better.
>
> FreeNAS does recommend using server grade hardware. e.g. this
> article:Â [[http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/]]
>
> Personally, I like having access to my hardware, but that's probably not much
> of an issue for most people.
>
> Amazon AWS seems to be highly recommended. I've only used their EC2 compute
> services, but if they work the same way, it's a pretty nice setup.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 5:05 PM, R Cramer <[[rwcfl at tampabay.rr.com]]> wrote:
>
>           Anyone have experience with Dropbox? Â Any opinions on
>      security? Restated dropbox vs FreeNAS as an internal cloud?
>      
>      Anyone current on cost of building a FreeNAS if that appears to be
>      the choice. Â You guys have MicroCenter close buy. Â How are there
>      prices these days?
>      
>      Dick
>      KY2E
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>
>
>
> --
> 73, DE KJ4BXT K
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