I think I finally have a working file server.
The replacement power supply is working great. I’m not sure what happened to the first one. Once I had the server up and running, I started doing some tests of copying data over. My initial tests seemed successful, but I started getting some errors reported from one of the hard drives. A quick replacement from Seagate, and things seem to be going well. My zpool is resilvering the new drive now.
After my initial tests, I tried copying over some larger data sets (my 153GB iTunes library). Initially, things seemed to go fine, but, after a while, the network connection dropped. After quite a bit of searching online, I ran across some fantastic info about this exact problem. I tried his solution and things, so far, are working well. I have copied nearly 200GB of data to the file server so far. If things keep working reliably for the next week or so, I’ll start moving the data to the file server and removing it from my computer.
I’ve had to abandon the OpenSAN iSCSI initiator that I was hoping to use for Time Machine backups. That initiator seems to be buggy in OS 10.5, and it kept causing my computer to hang. Although I like the idea of using iSCSI for backups, there is one big drawback to that method. The OS X install CD does not have an iSCSI initiator, so it would be tricky at best to restore from Time Machine backups stored on an iSCSI target. My next task will be to get Time Machine to work over NFS.
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