June 14, 2013

How to make back up server on
Acer easyStore H 340.
    I have small infrastructure based on Windows Server 2003 SP2 with Active Directory and file server role. I need to back up about 600 Gb small files. Unfortunately, our company haven't got backup software such as Acronis or Backup Exec. Only what I have is Acer easyStore H340 and two hard disks Seagate 750 Gb ST3750528AS and WD Green 750 Gb (WD7500AADS). Well, now I'm going to describe my backup decision.
   First of all, what is Acer H 340? It is a small box with Intel Atom 230 and 2 Gb DDR2, GbLAN and without any video out. I thought to buy small videocard, but it's price was about 100 $. Well, I thought I would find better way to spend this money. I started to google how to install FreeNAS or Linux on it blind. A great help for me was this blog - http://maxbeatty.com/blog/2010/09/how-to-install-ubuntu-server-acer-h340-whs. I tried to follow this guide, but my tricky part was quite different.
   I installed Ubuntu Server 12.10 and configured SSH on it. Ubuntu installation was rather simple, I did it on Seagate hard disk, which was connected to my home server. After installation I configured network interfaces in /etc/network/interfaces to static ip.
   OpenSSH configuration was also rather easy, I made authentication by password from my file server only, changed listening port. Config file you can find in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. After all I restarted service by typing sudo service restart ssh. You can check listening port by netstat -a command.After it I installed winscp and putty on my fileserver in order to have access to my new backup server.
    I read about tricky part, but unfortunately it didn't help me. Then I noticed that my interface name was unusual. I changed it to eth0 and everything became fine.
   All I need is only to connect WD Green disk to my backup server. This operation is general and easy, but I will repeat it.
1. First of all, after connection I should find out disk name. I used fdisk -l  for this purpose.
2. Create mounting directory to our new disk - mkdir /WD.
3. Format disk using mkfs.ext4 disk_name.
4. Mount new disk - sudo mount /dev/sdb /WD.
5. Then I always try to change parameters in sudo nano /etc/fstab.
6.  Before it I should know UUID. I did it by blkid command. Than copy and paste UUID to fstab file.
7. At the last moment I thought it would be a great idea to change disk owners. It can be done by chown -R name to all disks.
8. I tested configuration, everything is OK.