FREENAS, has anyone used it???

[oz_johnno]

Having just about filled up my 300GB drive on my media center I am in dire need of more space. I was having a look online and came across FREENAS, which is apparently a rollup of a free BSD system for the specific use of being an NAS server.

I have an old P3 machine lying about and I have procured a 750GB hard drive to run on it. If this works with 2 channels primary and secondaries and a gigabit NIC , I have the potential to turn this old machine into a 3TB NAS server for little more than the cost of the 4 750GB drives.

Has anyone used this software before? Does anyone know of anything I should know about this setup?

Cheers

OZ

[ancall]

Highly recommended.
Needs a wired connection to work (it can use wireless as a secondary connection). I use it with a 250GB drive as a headless P3 system (no keyboard or monitor). Web GUI is very easy and it updates over the network.
Regards
ancall

[Circuit]

I have tried it for my NAS it works great easy to setup and login to etc.
But there didn't seem to be much support for standby, only for setting up a timer to start and shutdown.

I wanted my setup to wake on lan so I ended up using Windows XP, which was a bugger to setup with shares for Media Centre.

Circuit

[HackySack]

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

[impact]

And if anyone wants to read more about FreeNas - here is a good tutorial

http://www.howtoforge.com/network_at...e_with_freenas

[ksipp01]

Just strarting to play whith this. So far great software. I added two 400 GB drives to an old PC. Very easy to set-up. Streams DVD's to WMP 11 w/ no problems. Also use for gen. back-up. Not using RAID yet. I have the drives 'shut-down' after 10 min of inactivity--works great. highly recommended!

[PCgeek]

Originally Posted by HackySack

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.

I am going to have a file server running on Active directory with basic read / write policies to all users (except backup files). I have been running this setup in Virtual PC (sorting out the software issues while waiting on the hardware) and it has worker flawlessly in all tests. I don't though have a HTPC t test on yet... I look forward to that testing.

From the virtual PC all you have to do is take a drive image and copy that to your OS drive of the server and away you go. Nothing to it. I am a 15 year old yr 10 student and my computers run the house. I learnt most of what I know from the net. If this isn't your thing then that's fine but Active Directory is great for files and backups on a home network.

(Just my thoughts)

[misterp]

Just a word of warning with FreeNAS...if, like me your a cheap skate and have the Silicon image SIL 31XX SATA RAID card(s) then FreeNAS isnt for you. Seems that the current crop of drivers/FreeNAS distros have problems with these cards, and so making your nice RAID setup useless.
One of the many forum thread(s) here:-
http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3917047
Maybe stick to Windows for the time being.

EDIT:- should add that this isnt a fault with FreeNAS or any NIX OS, its just that Silicon Image seem very bad at supporting other OS`s other than M$.

[henri]

One of the features of Windows Home Server that i like is that it combines multiple hard drives one virtual drive that shows up on the system with it sorting out which file goes to which drive etc...

Is such a thing possible with FreeNAS or similar Linux based solution?

Just planning in case i don't get into the WHS beta group

[arkay]

Originally Posted by henri

One of the features of Windows Home Server that i like is that it combines multiple hard drives one virtual drive that shows up on the system with it sorting out which file goes to which drive etc...

Is such a thing possible with FreeNAS or similar Linux based solution?

Just planning in case i don't get into the WHS beta group

Concatenating drives together to one large useable space has been an option in any of the *nix variants since the day of it's design.

Yes. It is the way it is done and yes, you can do this with any version of Linux/BSD.

Only Windows could use basic disk managemant as a sales tool...

Linux uses a thing called LVM (Logical Volume Manager). With it you can create:

1. A Volume Group (containing one or more physical disks) on which you place
2. Logical Volumes (can be any size up to the size of the physical volume group) on which you create
3. Filesystems (that can be mounted anywhere on the system, no need for drive letters!)

You can add or remove a volume from a volume group. You can stripe logical volumes across physical disks in any raid level you want. You can create hot spares. You can mirror disks. You can extend or reduce the size of filesystems on the fly (no partition tools required). You can back up by mirroring a disk then breaking the mirror etc etc.. It's extremely flexable. The idea of FREENAS is to manage all this for you and do the network sharing via samba.

You can do it all relativley easy with any Linux distro and a little time. Most have graphical tools for creating your LVM configuration and setting up Samba sharing.

Cheers,

Arkay.