Hi Tom,

 

About to build my 3.x server .

 

Ok on topic:  I'd love to have a built in mail server to send me disk failure notifications. Functionality could be expanded to optional triggers like fan failures, select SMART errors, power failures/restarts, etc..  Done via SMTP/sendmail I guess? albeit SNMP can also be very useful.

 

Also, to reiterate earlier/other requests:

 

Access Control/security manager

Universal Plug and Play support (UPnP AV)/ Twonkymedia

SAN type functionality (iSCSI target)

NTFS disk support

Slimserver 6.5 or later support (gotta get my flac on  )

Java; namely for Galleon, a java-based tivo server extender

Hot spare support

RSYNC and time/trigger manager

Wake on Lan

SFTP  support

USB/e-SATA support for external storage (just auto mount, no parity)

UPS monitoring(via usb) for graceful shut down

 

Finally I'd like to thank Tom for an awesome release that does 95% of what I hoped to get in the product.

 

Thanks Tom,

Alex

Since you brought it up, here's the roadmap:

 

1. Might be one more beta to fix a couple small things & then freeze to create release "3.0".

 

2. Next main functionality for "3.1" will be getting the User Shares to be fully writeable, and implement directory caching to some configurable level.  This will take some work.

 

Other features partially done & will probably get into 3.1

- email alerts

- an ftp server (looking at vsftpd)

 

Beyond that, here's what's on the list:

 

- security (also will take some work)

 

- get S3 powermode (standby) working

 

- permit some disks to be outside the array. This will let you select devices which will not be included in the parity-protected array.  There are some interesting things we can do with this:

• You can install pre-loaded disks, and use a command to copy the data to an array disk (rharvey fix #2).
  
• The device can be a share on another server (!).  Say you have two unRAID servers, server1 and server2, which both have a 'movie' share.  You could assign a device on server1 to be //server2/movies, so now in conjunction with User Shares, all those files will show up in //server1/movies.  Not sure how useful this is but it's something that's possible.
  
• I'm thinking you could have two disks outside the normal parity-protected array in a raid1 (mirroring) configuration.  Then configure it so that all file creates go to that volume, which would be fast being a raid1 (and protected).  Then have a scheduled job that wakes up at say 3:00AM and moves data from the mirrored share to the regular parity-protected array - a kind of simple HSM system.
  

 

Other features in no particular order:

 

- UPS monitoring (this will get put in once we finally get around to purchasing a UPS).

- Slimserver support

- http sever (perhaps apache!)

- rsync

- get time from the internet (ntpd)

- better 'clearing' of new disks

- integrate css in management utility. This will permit "skinning" and customization.

 

Features I don't know much about:

- UPnP

- other misc servers, eg, "Galleon"

 

Features I don't really want to do because their usefulness isn't worth the amount of effort required (IMHO), and for which I find it unexciting to write the code for, but for which I could be talked into if there's $ involved 

- hot spares

- iSCSI

 

BTW, wake-on-lan is already in.

 

The primary challenge in most of these features, and in all existing features, is to keep it simple and intuitive (and also not break stuff).

some really nice thought here

 

i would like almost all the features listed below (to go plzz  ).

 

the raid1 thingie is really well thought, keep it up

 

Tom,

 

The feature list looks great, but there is one other request you might want to consider. That is: using multiple drives to create one larger 'parity' drive. This has been talked about frequently on this forum, and at AVS. It has a lot of advantages for economical disk utilization. I just upgraded my parity drive with a 400Gig I got on sale. The second one of 2 is now a data drive. If I have a 'parity' drive fail now, I'd need to pay "off sale" pricing for a new 400G - whereas if I could use a couple of my 250G drives I wouldn't have to spend a cent.

 

Any thoughts?

 

-PGPfan

Tom,

 

The feature list looks great, but there is one other request you might want to consider. That is: using multiple drives to create one larger 'parity' drive. This has been talked about frequently on this forum, and at AVS. It has a lot of advantages for economical disk utilization. I just upgraded my parity drive with a 400Gig I got on sale. The second one of 2 is now a data drive. If I have a 'parity' drive fail now, I'd need to pay "off sale" pricing for a new 400G - whereas if I could use a couple of my 250G drives I wouldn't have to spend a cent.

 

Any thoughts?

 

-PGPfan

And assigning multiple physical "parity" drives to simulate a single, larger, "logical" parity drive might be fairly easy now that Tom  has a management page that allows user configuration/assignment of any drive to any purpose.

 

Joe L.

Support PCI-e based 8-12 port SATA cards. 

 

oh, NCQ if possible (many drives today are NCQ ready- depending on things accessed, read/write could be improved substantially with it's implementation).

 

 

Support PCI-e based 8-12 port SATA cards. 

 

Do you have the h/w to test this if s/w were available?

 

oh, NCQ if possible (many drives today are NCQ ready- depending on things accessed, read/write could be improved substantially with it's implementation).

 

 

haha, main thing substantially improved would be benchmarks.  NCQ is not much use on a non-shared connection like SATA.