FlexRAID going commercial

[fpp]

Seeing as FlexRAID is an important part of Ian's Ubuntu home server Howto (and the one that finally got me going with my own, for which I am still grateful), this may be of interest to others :

http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,502.0.html

In a nutshell, Brahim (the author) has decided to turn FlexRAID into a commercially licensed product after the current beta expires, which is very soon now. The tentative pricing scheme is in the first post above.

Personally I don't find the idea shocking, nor are the prices extravagant.
However I have some serious doubts about the long-term results.

Brahim is a technical genius and FlexRAID is a seriously impressive product, but IMHO it is nowhere near mature and user-friendly enough (especially on Linux) for regular paying customers beyond its current user base (which is mostly hackers).

Moreover, he has a day job, is always brimming with new ideas and great projects (latest being "NZFS"), and I don't see how such a part-time, one-man shop could bring the level and continuity of support (and hand holding) that paying customers usually expect. In particular, given his habit of switching Wikis and forums every now and then, documentation for the current version is virtually nonexistent. Not to mention his other habit of disappearing without notice for extended periods of time...

Myself I'll wait till he comes through with his announcements in that first post (which are already a couple of weeks late :-), and maybe I'll decide to stay with FlexRAID after all -- but it's a matter of confidence, not price.

Meanwhile I'm investigating alternatives, as I don't want to be held hostage with terabytes of unprotected data when the beta expires. A promising one is http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/, which is clearly a (partial) re-implementation of the original FlexRAID concept(s), but with a much different attitude. In any case, those pages and the support forum make for a very interesting read.

[Ian]

Hi there fpp,

You've just about summed up my sentiments to a tee. I'm gonna wait and see how things pan out too. I didn't read the whole thread where he announced it so don't know whether others have expressed the same concerns to him. Perhaps I ought to read it through to the end.

Thanks for the pointer re the alternative, I'll read that one too!

Decisions decisions

Ian.

[fpp]

Okay, time for an update (and not an April's fool, either :-).

My beta of FlexRaid expired some time ago, and would stop working after the next reboot (and of course, along comes a kernel update :-).

Meanwhile, the FlexRaid forum is still swamped with Windows users, and knee-deep in a quagmire of licensing questions and problems after the new ("final") version came out. The Linux version was late as usual, and also buggy.

Buying software ? Why not. Being forced to use a buggy licensing scheme that ties your license to the hardware you're presently using ? Don't think so...

Meanwhile I'd got some good feedback from previous flexraid users on the snapraid forum, and done the configure/make/install routine to get a feel for the package. So I decided to make the switch during this weekend.

I am sorry to say there is nothing exciting to report, except it all went smoothly :-)

Snapraid is lean and mean, a simpler and more transparent piece of software than flexraid, which suits me fine. No mysteries here, no Java, no flashy Web UI : just a single executable and four main commands (sync, check, diff, fix).
The only important step is getting /etc/snapraid.conf right, with no typos in the disk paths :-)

After that it was just a matter of uninstalling flexraid, deleting the parity files on the PPU, and rebooting just in case. Then on to "sudo snapraid sync", overnight: started around 9pm, ended around 2:40am.

It's interesting to note that on my system, although snapraid is currently single-threaded (and maxes out one core of my E350 CPU), it is not slower than flexraid using both cores. C more efficient than Java ? I guess... and if Andrea creates an MT version of snapraid, it will be just plain faster...

I especially like how snapraid avoids the file name encoding issue under Linux !
Many users (me included) had problems with accented characters in flexraid (due to the Java code), and I was never comfortable with the ad hoc fixes circulating on the forum, which looked too much like black magic :-)

It's also nice how "snapraid diff" gives you a detailed listing of what has been changed/moved/deleted/added since the last sync.

And thankfully it's back to good old shell scripts and cron to customize how you want all this to work -- no more custom web scheduler and special "command language" silliness :-)

So far, so good... version 1.9 even came out yesterday while my array was sync'ing.

Last bit of trivia: snapraid, unlike flexraid, stores parity in one single file. I believe it's the first time in my life I create a 1.1 TB file all on my own :-)

[Ian]

Well, that's very good news. Thanks for sharing.

I had a good read of the snapraid website after your post and it all seemed rather tempting so I'm definitely going to give it a go. I'm going to wipe the OS on my server and start over when 12.04 comes out and will be using snapraid instead. It looks like someone has built a GUI for it but from what I've read there doesn't seem a lot of point using it.

I wasn't aware it used a single huge parity file, that's interesting. I always assumed one large file would be inefficient when it came to updating it as a result of changes to the underlying data but I'm obviously wrong on that front. Wouldn't be the first time

Ian.

[fpp]

I must admit it also terrified me when I saw that :-)

From the discussions on the snapraid forum it seems there isn't much downside to it though, if any : seeking inside a large file isn't slower that finding a smaller file among many, and a block error won't make much difference either way...

I haven't looked at the GUI as I (perhaps mistakenly) assumed it was only for Windows, being .NET-based.

Anyway it's clearly not necessary, and at best completely optional, unlike in FlexRaid :-)

[Ian]

Luckily (or unluckily) my main desktop still runs windows so I could install .net on it and then give the GUI a try. I'll see how difficult it is to put together a how-to for configuring everything from the command line first.

The large parity file doesn't bother me too much I guess. I'd like to think the developers have properly thought it through

Ian.

[fpp]

Luckily (or unluckily) my main desktop still runs windows so I could install .net on it and then give the GUI a try. I'll see how difficult it is to put together a how-to for configuring everything from the command line first.

That how-to should be quite a lot shorter and simpler than the FlexRaid one :-)

[coupas]

Hi there,

I have looked at snapraid, but have been unsuccesful in getting it to work.. I am still troubleshooting.

Do you mind sharing your .conf file?

Thanks in advance!

EDIR: Nevermind.. it's syncing now!

[fpp]

Good job, welcome to the club :-)

[Ian]

That how-to should be quite a lot shorter and simpler than the FlexRaid one :-)

And it is: SnapRAID on Ubuntu

Many thanks to you fpp for giving me a nudge in the direction of FlexRAID.

I'm very happy with my setup now. Not least because it doesn't keep expiring. I also like the lean nature of the whole thing and the script I'm using to keep it all up to date just rocks.

Hopefully other people find my guide useful although I suspect the difficult part will be making a suitable config file. Mine is rather simple and works well. Perhaps it's down to the simplicity of my setup?

Ian.

EDIT: fpp, are you the chap who helped me with the sync script on the sourceForge forums? If so, thank you very much. That issue was causing me a real head-ache. I was heading down the wrong road trying to get to the bottom of the issue so thanks, if it was you, for solving it for me.