Tried out an interesting program
I saw a presentation on Tuesday at the MUUG (http://www.muug.mb.ca). The topic was on Network Attached Storage. There were two products demonstrated but being a stereotypical Winnipegger I decided to try out the free one. The program is FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org).
So, what the heck does FreeNAS do? It is in essence an easy way to gain access to massive (by todays standards) amounts of storage. It is a network file server. There are about a dozen access methods the administrator can enable. I've tested three of them to this point and they work. I've tried it from an OS X box where I can access everything easily. I tried it from my fathers XP box where it was less easy (because I know very little about XP - it also insisted on accessing the server by IP address rather than by name). Xubuntu on a PPC worked fairly well, but I wasn't willing to put a lot of time in to it. My Kubuntu (7.10) PC wasn't able to access CIFS (Windows networking) because I didn't have it set up properly, but everything else worked really well.
The setup was remarkably easy. Granted I had to do it a few times because I didn't read the instructions. Just boot from the live CD, install the full system to the hard drive, and set up an IP for the computer. From there login with another machine via HTTP. Configuration is a snap. The part which caught me was I was mounting the OS partition and not the data partition of the first hard drive. It took me four hours to figure that out. From there it was real easy to determine the configuration of the server. Once the server was configured and the partitions mounted it was time to enable the services. Again, very easy.
What I found most impressive was the low system requirements. First off it's because it runs on Free BSD (http://www.freebsd.org). Everything else is very small. Although I allocated 80MB to the system, I think I saw where I might be able to get it down to 32MB. Yes folks I wrote "MB" not "GB". In addition to being able to run on a minimal system there are other benefits to running a PC BSD system. It is perhaps the most stable PC operating system out there. It is very secure. It is very fast (perhaps the fastest there is). Here is the cool part... It bypasses the PCs BIOS and accesses the hard drives directly. This means older PCs are not limited as to the size of hard drive they can use. Finally, any storage drive, if connected properly, can be used on this machine. The administrator is not limited to four IDE devices.
As I can afford them I will be installing large hard drives into the old system I was using. It should prove useful.
So, what the heck does FreeNAS do? It is in essence an easy way to gain access to massive (by todays standards) amounts of storage. It is a network file server. There are about a dozen access methods the administrator can enable. I've tested three of them to this point and they work. I've tried it from an OS X box where I can access everything easily. I tried it from my fathers XP box where it was less easy (because I know very little about XP - it also insisted on accessing the server by IP address rather than by name). Xubuntu on a PPC worked fairly well, but I wasn't willing to put a lot of time in to it. My Kubuntu (7.10) PC wasn't able to access CIFS (Windows networking) because I didn't have it set up properly, but everything else worked really well.
The setup was remarkably easy. Granted I had to do it a few times because I didn't read the instructions. Just boot from the live CD, install the full system to the hard drive, and set up an IP for the computer. From there login with another machine via HTTP. Configuration is a snap. The part which caught me was I was mounting the OS partition and not the data partition of the first hard drive. It took me four hours to figure that out. From there it was real easy to determine the configuration of the server. Once the server was configured and the partitions mounted it was time to enable the services. Again, very easy.
What I found most impressive was the low system requirements. First off it's because it runs on Free BSD (http://www.freebsd.org). Everything else is very small. Although I allocated 80MB to the system, I think I saw where I might be able to get it down to 32MB. Yes folks I wrote "MB" not "GB". In addition to being able to run on a minimal system there are other benefits to running a PC BSD system. It is perhaps the most stable PC operating system out there. It is very secure. It is very fast (perhaps the fastest there is). Here is the cool part... It bypasses the PCs BIOS and accesses the hard drives directly. This means older PCs are not limited as to the size of hard drive they can use. Finally, any storage drive, if connected properly, can be used on this machine. The administrator is not limited to four IDE devices.
As I can afford them I will be installing large hard drives into the old system I was using. It should prove useful.
posted by Mike at 12:06 a.m.
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