I’ve been setting up an OpenFiler server lately. I have mixed feelings, it is a slick and well put-together package, but if you go for the open-source version then you’re pretty much on your own. Most of the documentation is either available to commercial clients only or sold commercially. The open-source version has all the features, but none of the support or documentation.

So far here’s a few things I’ve had problems with…

My discs didn’t show up. They had previously been used in another system. It turns out that the backend script that pulls disc information got a little confused when it tried to read the partition information and didn’t like the setup of the disc, it threw an error and the OpenFiler GUI couldn’t see the disc information.

That was resolved by the ‘dd’ trick in this forum post: Hard Drive missing – Better error checking needed in list-disks.pl

The next problem (and one I’m just starting to tackle now) is LDAP authentication from the local LDAP server. If you’re like me and don’t really understand LDAP then none of it really makes sense, but this post is helping: Quick setup guide install with local ldap

Fingers crossed now, new fileserver should be setup soon.