Okay, so two months later and I've made little progress with Project:Photon since my previous posting, but I figured I'd write up where I am so far anyway.
(note: I'll be updating this thread as I get more information)
On the CDP front, I had a couple of suggestions.
One was to use a versioning file system, which sounded promising but after investigating a couple of options (Wayback and CopyFS) I didn't really feel comfortable with the idea.
The other suggestion was for FAM — a File Allocation Monitor for Linux. Unfortunately FAM itself looks to be rather crap and no longer supported, but fortunately there is gamin, which is better for various reasons, including that it uses inotify not dnotify.
Gamin looks to be a good choice, but so far I've not been able to find a guide on how to use it.
I have been pointed towards inotify-tools which does a similar thing to gamin, but it's better documented and has an active mailing list, so it looks like this is a better choice.
I'm now leaning back towards the CopyFS idea again. Why? Because someone has created a Slax module for it, and I can't remember the initial reason I turned away from it, and I've seen vague mentions (but no confirmation either way) of inotify not working for network mounts — rendering it useless for a NAS device, if true.
Originally I was investigating any *nix–based OS, but I've decided to restrict my searches to Linux.
I'm no longer considering freeNAS as an option — both because its based on freeBSD (which I am entirely unfamiliar with), and also because there are a large number of complaints about it dotted around the web. There's a lot of praise too, however the complaints often slam people for praising it prematurely — stating that whilst it might be quick and easy to get going, if you try to use it you soon find its no good.
There are a few NAS–specific distos, such as Openfiler, NASLite and Cryptobox, but none of these appear to be suitable, for assorted reasons.
I was looking into Arch Linux as a potential starting point, but since it uses the 2.4 kernel, it only has dnotify (FAM) rather than inotify (gamin / inotify-tools), so it probably isn't going to help.
Well Slax is becoming a more and more promising choice, thanks to the helpful replies I received on the Slax forums. (It's nice to find a Linux forum where people actually give decent replies!)
Hopefully this weekend I'll be experimenting with the bare-bones Frodo edition of Slax and adding the appropriate modules (Samba/etc) and see what I get.
I still haven't had a chance to experiment properly with Slax, but I have started gathering the modules I will be using with it. Essentially, the Samba and CopyFS modules, for the NAS side (Frodo has built-in RAID tools), and Java+Tomcat+Apache+PHP+MySQL+PostgreSQL modules for the server side. And Vi, since apparently Slax/Frodo doesn't come with it by default.
Once I've checked that I don't need any other modules I'll compile these into an ISO and shove them on a CD-R/W for experimenting with. If that all goes well, I can finally start looking at actually getting my NAS up and running!
If anyone has any advice on either of these fronts, I would greatly appreciate it.
(Or, if you don't know yourself, but do know where I might find someone who does, that would also be excellent.)
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