I was bored at work today, so I figured I'd learn a bit more about FreeNAS. Got it up & running in about 4 minutes.
Looks like a nice, small footprint alternative to running an XP/NT file server. Active Directory integration caught my eye for a bit, but no way in hell am I giving it Domain Admin rights. Doubt you'll be needing that at home anyway, so no big deal. CIFS is what you'll need to configure, and you're home & hosed. Haven't looked at the backup options, so that might be a bit of a gotcha. I can see potential for serious WAF degradation if that doesn't work properly. Not something I have to worry about just yet
OK, so that didn't kill anywhere near as much time as I'd hoped. Back to watching Season 8 of Top Gear I guess...
Cheers,
Ben