Sold desktop, bought laptop, researching the GoFlex

[CiViCKiDD]

Sorry, ran out of room in the subject line above. Long story short, I'm a n00b with ARM Linux computing and am trying to do a little bit of research before I begin. I have a habit of changing my tech fairly often, and decided to buy a new laptop and dump my i5 desktop. Wife's not too happy because the desktop fileshared to our media center, which we do use a lot. I know I *could* buy a NAS, but I've had this Seagate GoFlex Net sitting in my closet for a year or two and thought this could be an interesting project.

My needs:
-Able to run SABnzbd, transmission, etc
-Able to run 24/7
-Able to support 2 external usb harddrives, one 2GB and one 3GB
-Able to provide filesharing capabilities (SAMBA works, not sure how the wife's Macbook will cope with that though)

-From what I've read I'll be able to do all of the above, right?
-Is there anything "different" or "special" I should be doing to get this set up the right way, initially...?
-Can I get away with using ntfs-3g or something to avoid repartitioning my existing drives?

Thanks!

[moonman]

You can get everything up and running if you follow the guides. You will have to repartition one of the drives, preferably the 2tb one (as it is the max you can use with MBR), make one partition on it with ext 2 filesystem to install alarm. Allow enough space. You can definitely get away with ntfs-3g for other partitions, but you will see the cpu load will be increased a lot due to ntfs-3g driver not being optimized on purpose. The optimized version is paid. So it is the best if you reformat the drives as ext3/4. Mac works just fine with samba, but if you are not happy, you can setup netatalk. It will by the way allow your goflex to be used for timemachine backups. Good luck
Edit: Corrected spelling. I was using my phone to write this

[WarheadsSE]

GoFlex's can boot ext3

[moonman]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('WarheadsSE', 'G')oFlex's can boot ext3

[WarheadsSE]

The V2, needs ext2 for uboot. the GFN uses UBIT, and understands ext3.

[CiViCKiDD]

Thanks guys, since I"m lazy I'll leave it NTFS and see if it stutters sending stuff to my media center. Running Arch Linux on it already and I'm REALLY impressed!!!

I have a problem though- instead of using a usb flash drive, I wanted to use an old 10gb 2.5" I have sitting in an external enclosure. Since SABnzbd needs a decently big swap file, makes sense to not kill flash drives. I have no idea how to revert back to stock though? I pulled the usb flash drive out and the single green led just keeps blinking. Googled and can't seem to find good instructions on reverting..

[WarheadsSE]

Just extract the rootfs to this new drive in ext2 or ext3 format.

[CiViCKiDD]

Thanks for the quick response, got it booting to the other drive. Just to make sure I did this right, here's what I did:

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5 ... goflex-net
Steps 9-19, downloading to sdb/sdb1, minus steps 16-17.

Did I do this right?

[moonman]

Seems right. If I were you though, I would free up some space and the beginning of the HDD, create there an ext2/ext3 partition and swap partition and install ALARM there which would free up a USB port and probably be a (little?) faster in regards to the swap in/swap out because the sata disk is faster than your 10GB 2.5 drive.

[CiViCKiDD]

Thanks for the tip. I'll look into that once I figure the basics out..

Seems ArchLinux doesn't like my 3TB NTFS partition, fdisk shows it as 2.2TB. Seems like there's no easy solution, so I'll end up creating 1TB ext3 partitions for my 2 and 3TB drives. Between that and transferring all my files around, that'll probably take the weekend..

Also trying to figure out how to get the sabnzbd daemon to work...