Table of contents
Description
This page basically describes how to configure FreeNAS as a standalone server. For me, this project came about because my 1Tb Lacie BigEtherDisk NAS was filling up, and the backup 1Tb Lacie BigEtherDisk NAS was dead (2nd of the 2x500Gb SATA drives no longer responding). So not only was I tight on space, now I was at risk of losing data. The data I was at risk of losing was my entire music collection, my installation programs, my saved Tivo recordings, my backups, my cd/dvd images, and so much more. Clearly not something I was interested in losing. So a fix was needed, and pretty quickly.
I had reviewed the many solutions for NAS's out there - OpenFiler as a VMWare Virtual Appliance (which I had tried some time back), FreeNAS, NAS Lite, standalone hardware NAS, and some other free and opensource products. In the end, I had narrowed it down to FreeNAS and OpenFiler from a strickly cost/feature perspective. I could have gone with a hardware based RAID5 device and spent boku-bucks, I could have gone with more standalone ethernet based NAS like I already have, and I could have tried to fix what I already have. All have advantages, but in the end it was the ZFS features of FreeNAS, the low hardware requirements of FreeNAS, and the simplicity of FreeNAS that drew me to that solution. Admitedly, I did try the OpenFiler first, but my "whitebox" configuration didnt seem to have good support, as OpenFiler couldnt see my 1Tb eSATA drive which was connected via USB.
So now the decision was made - going with FreeNAS, on my 1.8Ghz AthlonXP whitebox. It has an internal 18Gb drive that I loaded the OS on. It has a 120Gb IDE drive as well, that I used for testing speed. And after I found a couple Seagate 1.5Tb external USB drives for about $100 each, I grabbed two of them. So my solution was going to be a ZFS mirrored share - where each 1.5Tb drive would be one half of the mirror. Below you see the setup and configuration changes to make all that happen.
Process/Implementation
Since this is a live cd, you can first load up the live cd environment, test if your hardware is supported (including external drives and so on) and then test it all out. I liked it so much, it was an immediate decision. Its so good in fact, that you'll be tempted to leave it running from a live cd. But dont do that because there isnt a way to store the configuration, so first power loss or unexpected reboot and you lose access to your data. You can re run it after that and re-use your existing filesystems and data, but its tricky, and not worth it. Just do the install to hard drive, and run it like a normal server.
Here are the steps :
- Download the FreeNAS software from the SourceForge site.
- Burn the ISO image to a cdrom, as you'll need that to kick things off.
- If doing a live cd trial run - just power on. If doing an install, continue to the next steps
- Follow the guide here, which is good enough as an example that I dont have to duplicate the isntall documentation myself.
- Reboot after all installed and configured
- Make changes and customizations to the configuration (hostname, IP address, domain name)
- Configure pools, disks, filesystems and shares.
- Enable shares via CIFS/NFS or whatever protocols are desired.
- Begin using.
Tuning / Customization
Unlike alot of other installs, there isnt much need to be in a shell in this appliance. They really have built in all the required tasks right in their own console menu.
Make a group called "write" and a group called "read", which we'll use to sort out our users.
... fill in details here ....
Below you'll see what I add to each SMB/CIFS share in the "share section" at the bottom. This is what will allow me to make the share writable by some, and readable by the rest :
read list = atron, read, @read write list = admin, root, write, @write
Then just reboot and its all good.
Further Information
There is a good bit of documentation and information on the Internet about this. Here are a few of the good links :
Thats pretty much it.
- Tag page
- What links here
