Over the weekend I spent some time learning how to configure OpenLDAP to provide a central login server at home. This is pretty useful since I was tired of either syncing UID/GID's across servers or setting directories to 777 on my NFSv4 server. I chose Fedora 12 as my OS for the server, and will show how easy it is to configure authentication on both Fedora and OpenSolaris.

If you've already got an OpenSolaris based NFS server, you may be interested in serving iSCSI targets. For me, this is incredibly useful with the right network configurations and a machine running KVM based virtual machines.

When picking out a solution for your central file server, there is of course many options. None of them quite stack up to the ease of administration and redundancy, out of the box, as OpenSolaris and ZFS provide. With ZFS you can build cheap storage arrays with disks of varying size and different levels of redundancy. For this setup I'm going to go with a basic raidz configuration using 4x 1TB SATA drives.