nas-ing it up

Better Half and I have been searching for a NAS solution for a while – we both have maintained our own, separate “My Documents” over the years, and their us undoubtedly a considerable amount of unnecessary overlap. On top of that, backing things up is always a good idea (especially when your hard drive decides to go and turn into an oversize paperweight, like mine did), and a NAS seemed like a generally good solution on both counts.
Unfortunately, they are a little expensive – sure, $250 can get you a two-enclosure NAS with a single 1TB drive installed, but that is still a fair bit of ammunition (less, these days, but still).
Instead, we stumbled across an even better solution: FreeNAS. After I purchased my new, screaming XPS system, my old Sony COTS POS kind of lay by the wayside… After a while, the idea of using it as a printserver struck me, so I slicked its install of XP, reinstalled that, stuck a wireless dongle in it, and left it by its lonesome. I tried to share some of its 80GB drive for use as a network drive, but given that I was doing so over a network with Windows XP, I was pretty doomed to begin with – it was a lucky day when the printer operated without having to reboot or preform mystic incantations.
At any rate, dedicating a whole desktop to being a printserver is something of a… waste. However, if you take that 80GB drive, add a 160GB and a 300 GB, and throw in a specialized build of FreeBSD, you have yourself half a terabyte of networked storage, accessible by any computer on my home network.
I will confess – this was my first install of any operating system whose name did not start with “Windows”. However, that said, even an idiot like myself could muddle through this – if you are capable of burning an *.iso image to a CD-R, and then following relatively simple instructions, you should be capable of getting a FreeNAS server up and running within about an hour, tops. There are a few oddities in the installation – be sure to read the instructions through once, carefully, before you embark on the actual journey – but once you figure out the idiosyncracies of the software, it is quite easy to deal with.
As always, there are a few warnings – FreeBSD’s native (and really only-supported) drive format is something called “UFS” – whatever drive you install it on will need to be in that format, in its entirety (it will take out any partitions when it formats the drive). That said, you can in stall it on a flash drive or USB thumb drive, as long as the drive stays plugged into the computer. Apart from that drive, though, you can use either UFS or EXT2 (which has a little wider adoption rate) for your backup formats. Also, transfer speeds will not be exceptionally inspiring, even over a hardwired 10/100 network cable. Streaming, this system will not do, but it will perform backups just dandily. You need to understand how *nix systems identify, mount, and share drives – unlike Windows, none of that is automatic, and all of it is required for the system to use and share the drive. Also, as with all *nix systems, hardware can sometimes be… difficult. My old Linksys wireless dongle is not compatible with FreeBSD or FreeNAS because its chipset is one generation older than the available drivers on the ‘net at the moment… guess I will just have to make do with an ethernet cable. Oh, and that whole printserver thing? Yeah, FreeNAS cannot do that, and the development team has no inclination to add it in the future – they are content with simply providing a low-footprint NAS OS, no bells or whistles.
Once you get it all set up, though, you just map yourself a network drive, and off you go.
Is it as an ideal a solution as those available online? Not really, especially given the computer is 8 years old, still uses IDE drives, will probably kick the bucket in the near future, and hardware support is sketchy. But it is free, it is half a terabyte of networked storage, and it was easy enough I could manage it. I consider that a win.
Thanks to Eseell for reminding me to post about this.