Hi,
My question for those more aware of this issue is the following:
I want to build a home server with encrypted disks in a Raid 5 configuration.
This will be a dedicated server only for this purpose. There is no need for any “fancy” software on the machine.
I will use it as a backup server.
It is also not supposed to be powered on all the time and it is connected always to a UPS. So I think this will be a reliable setup. It will likely be booted only once or twice in a week.
From all the distros out there that could be used on this purpose I checked Openfiler but it does not support encryption on the disks.
I also tried to install FreeNas, but I really just want something more familiar to me.
So OpenSuSE fit the profile for this particular case.
Also my plan could be something simple like installing OpenSuSE on one disk and leave all other 4 hdd in software raid. Or install OpenSuSE on a flash usb drive and then mount the Raid on a partition.
All those options are to consider.
The idea to install a separate 4 hdd Raid 5 is to have that partition just for backups and if something happens to the installation on USB (or IDE hdd) I can have confidence and recover the data on the disks.
This setup is also “portable” in case I up-grade the system with a future OS … this is in my opinion a very important issue.
This would make that Raid a safe (always relative of course), place to store data.
Also I need that the Raid 5 partition Must be encrypted with LUKS.
I do not mind to not use LVM for the raid, just plain old good ext3 but in any case it should be like a single partition (say … /backup ) and it must be encrypted.
I am having a bad idea somewhere on this line of thought given this scenario?
Is this possible (specially the encryption of the backup partition with 4hdd in Raid 5)?
Is the RAID with the encrypted partition recoverable in case the disk/flash with the OS fails?
I need to know specially the part of encryption fot he disks … they are all 1TB / each … this takes Ages to encrypt and hence i would not like to loose something like 2 weeks on something that does not work …
Regards,
Pedro