FreeNAS

Paul and I (well mostly Paul since he's the one who wanted to use it) spent some time on Saturday exploring setting up FreeNAS on an older P2/333 machine so that he could use it as a NAS box. FreeNAS is a FreeBSD distribution that has a minimal interface and OS service set to support just file sharing and configuration of shares. It seems to work pretty well now. We had a couple of concerns about the filesystems and the installation and stuff, but he now has a NAS box with about 130GB of storage in it. The issues we had were just a few things. First, with the latest release image, the CDROM drive in his computer wasn't detected properly. It sounds like that shouldn't be a problem except that since the CD was detected, the installation aborted. We went back a few releases to 0.6.0 and that version seems to be working just fine. NTFS doesn't work with the installation as a read/write filesystem. He tried to reformated to FAT and FAT32 but the OS complained that the disk was too large. Its for the better anyway because FAT32 isn't a very efficient format for large disks. He ended up formatting UFS instead. That worked just fine. Then he setup CIFS so that Windows could see the drives as shares.