Carl Hutzler’s Blog

I discovered a great little program called FREENAS. Basically it is code which turns “PC Hardware” into a Network Attached Server (NAS). The software is free, hence the name.

http://www.freenas.org/

I took an old eMachine PC I had in the basement (466 Mhz, 500MB RAM), added two 500GB IDE drives ($150 each), a gig-e network card ($20) and now I have a 1 TB network server that can easily do 10MB/s.

If the CPU were a bit faster in the 1-2 GHz range, the unit will do 20-30MB/s over the gig-e network (I tested it with a newer machine that I had, for fun).

FreeNAS provides:

- Root login/SSH (the OS is FreeBSD)
- Good logging of all events/Remote Logging
- RSYNC for backups
- AFP, SMB, FTP, NFS, and HTTP access to your files
- A very polished web UI for managing things

Install was completely simple…no unix skills required! Just download the CD image, burn the install CD and follow the install process (boot with the CD, install the basic OS, reboot). Done. Then configure your drives and networking most of which is straight forward or automagic.

There are some things you don’t get (yet)….a big hole in my opinion is the lack of any real user/group/permissions control. Not a big deal for me as I am just using it as a central media server for music/video/photo stuff.

I can see a lot of uses for the set-up. One idea is to use it as a simple RSYNC backup server for a professional NAS (like one of the Infrant boxes).

Anyway, thought you all might like to know about this. A fun afternoon project which is being used everyday at my house now.