FreeNAS

Tonight I’ve been playing around with (yet another) open source project called FreeNAS. As the name suggested it’s basically software that lets you create simple Network Attached Storage. The beauty is that it’s all compiled in FreeBSD so it runs on any old computer, you just have to pump up the hard drive space and use the web based configuration to set volumes and user permissions. I likened the install process to installing IPCop, only simpler.

Within five minutes I had just under 600GB of storage available to the network. One of the cool features is that it supports AFP, so the Mac can connect to it seamlessly. But if that’s not enough, this pretty much sums it up:

FreeNAS support in the current release:

Filesystem: UFS, FAT32, EXT2/EXT3, NTFS (limited read-only)
Protocol: CIFS (samba) , FTP, NFS, SSH, RSYNC and AFP
Hard drive: ATA/SATA, SCSI, USB and Firewire
GPT/EFI partitionning for hard drive bigger than 2TB
Networks cards: All supported by FreeBSD 6 (including wireless card!)
Boot from USB key
Hardware RAID cards: All supported by FreeBSD 6
Software RAID 0, 1 and 5
Management of the groups and the users (Local User authentication and Microsoft Domain)

So go check it out!

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Friday, June 2nd, 2006 at 23:56 and is filed under Apple, Hardware, Software, Technology . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

6 Responses to “FreeNAS”

  • gummAY Says:
    June 5th, 2006 at 21:38

    Awesome find Pant, that looks like a fun thing to toy with over the hols ;)

  • addo Says:
    June 7th, 2006 at 12:53

    gg wtb more hdd!

  • Daviesh Says:
    June 15th, 2006 at 23:44

    Holy shit, that seems like just the thing for my 2nd->4th hard drives. Does it support RAID5?

  • James Says:
    June 16th, 2006 at 16:40

    Yup, supports RAID.

  • gummAY Says:
    June 30th, 2006 at 17:22

    Just following up on this, I now have a lovely freeNAS box on my LAN - nothing too impressive hardware wise (see below) but I’m genuinely impressed with how easy it was to set up.

    Hardware:
    Dual P3 500
    Dual 9.1Gb SCSIs in Raid 0 (software raid provided by freeNAS)
    1×3.6GB IDE drive for system / playing around.

    I’m currently tooling some PHP scripts for running it, I’ve already got an extended version of my dropbox to run on it. Though not having scp and vim on the box bites, will be fixed soon.,

    –Tom

  • gummAY Says:
    June 30th, 2006 at 17:40

    err, minor point, but it’s actually raid 1 (mirroring) that I’m using

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.