Re: Advice please: NAS for home use?
- From: "Johny B Good" <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2011 02:36:20 -0000
On Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:22:19 -0000, DCA <dca860MAPS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 28/10/2011 15:42, Mike Tomlinson wrote:In article<qvwqq.7101$wT6.4980@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, DCA
<dca860MAPS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
How painful is it to set up though (software wise)
Depends where your expertise lies; if you're familiar with Windows, try
Windows Home Server.
If you're feeling a little more adventurous, you could try freeNAS.
I installed CentOS, as it's what I install on the servers at work (~40
at last count) and I'm familiar with it. After a bit of light swearing
at /etc/samba/smb.conf, it Just Works on the uServer.
http://www.centos.org/
Hi Mike
I am adventurous but far more on the hardware side (electronics background).
I am relatively lost (willing to learn but....) in the whole network world, and the terms your guys are regularly using I know are associated with routing/addressing but that's as far as I understand.
freeNAS sounds great but I wouldn't even know how to install it (no keyboard etc) let alone configure it to do what I want (that being 2 HDDs in RAID1 on a NAS - ideally wireless).
Does freeNAS come with decent (layman's)instructions?
David
Out of all the free NAS solutions for SoHo use that are readily available, FreeNAS stands head and shoulders above them all. I've been running FreeNAS on my home server box for the past 5 1/2 years without any problems at all[1].
Initially, I downloaded the iso images and burnt install CDs, installing to flash drive rather than creating a split partitioned HDD install. The boot speed obviously suffers but, since boot events can be as few as once per year (in practice, possibly as often as 9 or 10 if you regularly avail yourself of the almost monthly OS updates), this isn't normally of any consequence.
Eventually, after 9 months and another two iso image downloads, I stopped wasting time and resources on that method and downloaded the flash boot images instead and, unless you're pressing "Ancient Iron", with no flash boot options whatsoever, into service, I'd recommend going that route[2].
Regarding not having a keyboard or monitor, I presume you mean you don't have any to spare for full time connection rather than not being able to borrow them for the initial BIOS configuration and setup[3].
The initial boot from flash ram might not even need configuring at the console but I can't recall how intelligent the default network address setup is (I suspect it defaults to DHCP - not my personal choice, but it does get a working networking connection without user intervention)
What I do recall of the network set up, when electing to use the manual option, is that it defaults to nnn.nnn.nnn.250 where, in my case the nnn values are the current sub net 192.168.0, since my subnet previously used to be 192.168.1 and this was correctly assigned by FreeNAS, the final octet will always be 250 (which you can edit if you have a preference).
At worst, you'll only have to configure the IP address from the console and once that's done, the rest is dealt with via a webmin interface.
IMHO, as things stand, unless you're particularly attracted to ZFS, I'd steer clear of version 8 for the time being and stick with the current 'Legacy' version 0.7.2.8191. Version 8 still appears to be an early beta with a considerable amount of work to be done before it matches the maturity of the 'Legacy' version.
[1] That, of course, excludes the aberrant behaviour with disks larger than 1TB and the Ext2 file system format, cured by using the UFS option with 4K AF selected. I've just recently verified that UFS works just fine with the latest 2.68TB drives [3(small)TB capacity disks] by copying the contents of the outgoing 2(small)TB drive and then some (extra 400GB of data) to verify an absence of the LBA wrap around bug that had created so much trouble with the use of Ext2 on 2TB drives (purely a FreeBSD bug with their Ext2 FS support - Knoppix had worked perfectly fine with Ext2 on the 2(small)TB drives).
[2] There's a windows CLI utility called physdiskwrite.exe (I renamed it PDW.exe to speed up the CLI keyboard entry ;-) which writes the flash boot images to flash media (USB thumb drives or whatever flash media is convenient (and bootable on the target - I use SD cards and a cheap card reader in the server).
This makes the task of creating a bootable flash drive quite straight forward but, you need to be very careful to choose the correct drive from the drives found option list or you could end up with a borked windows box.
Despite the risk, this does have the advantage that you can do away with having an optical drive (or floppy disk) in the box (at least for the 'Legacy' version).
[3] Who sets up any new PC configuration _without_ at least a keyboard and monitor?
--
Regards JB Good
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