Use Ubuntu to present your SAN to the network

Use Ubuntu to present your SAN to the network

I've recently been working on a way to improve our backup procedures. We back up to the network initially and I had been doing this using windows backup to a network drive.

This does work: but it slow and unreliable: so I decided that a good way forward would be to present the drive to the file server locally via a SAN.



I had been looking at Nexenta as a way of doing this, and also at the new feature of Server 2008 R2 which allows you to present your SAN via windows. However, in the end neither of these options fitted the bill due to hardware restrictions. The box I wanted to build the solution on is getting on a bit: and I just could not install either of these options. Windows 2008 R2 is 64 bit only: so would not work due to the processor present: and the nexenta solution was presenting issues on installation because of the SCSI card the server had fitted. By the way: I did set up Nexenta as a virtual machine for testing purposes and was very impressed indeed. There were no issues getting it to join the local domain (unlike my effortshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif with FreeNAS or OpenFiler).

So I was left with what I had on the server already: Ubuntu server.

I found this article by Falko Timme on the excellent Howto Forge site: and much to my surprise it worked straight away.

I've had a few issues with this since I set it up: but its early days yet: I may update this page with further findings in the future.