Network Sort Out

I've got a small little home network which consists of a little server that up till now has been running Linux, to be honest I would rather keep Linux on it but the little machine is 32 bit only and I want to use Bitcasa to back up my data to the Interwebs so it' being converted to Windows 7.

It's an Intel Atom CPU with 2Gb of RAM and a 530Gb HDD, it's going to be running a few things like Sickbeard, Sabnzb and will eventually have 2 x 3Tb drives connected to it. One of these is going to be my main data drive and the other is my onsite backup.

Offsite backup will be taken care of by Bitcasa, if you want some infinite online storage then go and check out the Bitcasa website here.

Problem number one is down to the fact that all of my drives are currently formatted as EXT4 which Windows can't read, I've formatted the main 3TB drive as NTFS and then found that my main data drive on the server is starting to fail, so at the moment I'm backing up everything from the old 1Tb drive to the new 3Tb drive as quickly as I can.

I've also installed VNC, Teamviewer and will be running an ssh server courtesy of Cygwin so I can get at my machine from just about anywhere.

Another bit of the project will be to hook up a webcam which will be overlooking a bid feeder, I'm probably asking for a lot from the little server but it seems quite happy chugging along so far.

I will also be running an automated backup from the main drive to the backup drive(s) at least every night.

I'll keep this updated as I go along, in the meantime it's a matter of waiting till my data transfer has completed.

A few days later with the data transfer is running at a snails pace, I remembered I had a back up that was about a week old on another drive, I restored this and then used the wonderful mirrordir command to just update the new files and now my little server is up and operational once more.

I went to thinking about using rsync to duplicate my data drive to the backup drive and it was then that I remembered the wonderful robocopy command. Basically you type robocopy source destination /mir and the source drive is mirrored, any files removed from the source are removed from the destination and and files added to the source are added to the destination, you just need to remember that you can only use a folder path such as c:\mystuff d:\mystuff /mir.

All I need to do is use the Windows scheduler to run this about 3 times a day and I'm sorted.

Next task is to install SabNZB and Sickbeard, this is currently underway and updating and the little server is performing really well considering it's specifications.

Once all this is completed, it will be time to setup and configure the webcam.