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I have to answer this seriously, as I recently started using FreeBSD for two specific projects, and I'm loving it. First and foremost, it's great when you know EXACTLY what you need to do. I'm speaking here of FreeNAS and pfSense. Both are designed to be embedded and run on FreeBSD, and both were designed to do very specific tasks. Both will install entirely on and boot directly from any garden variety USB flash drive. Because the memory footprint is so small, they run by loading the entire OS into a RAMdrive, eliminating the need for a noisy and failure-prone hard drive. This results in a quick boot and very speedy application. The base configuration of FreeNAS (at the most recent release) is like 54MB installed and will run (literally) on a first-generation XBOX. From these measly specs, you can get a fully functional device, complete with NFS, Samba, FTP server, full Active Directory integration, iSCSI target, SMART, Software RAID, and many other file-server specific features, all of which are configured through an easy to use WebGUI. The Linux equivalent of the same file server distro is Openfiler, and having downloaded and tried that out, I can say that FreeNAS is light years ahead. Much easier, faster, smaller footprint, etc. Much of these same comparisons can be made with pfSense vs. IPCop. The Linux equivalents are generally larger, heavier and well suited for more general use, whereas the BSD versions are extremely light.

Strangely enough, I had many more hardware compatibility problems with the Linux equivalents as well, which is where I thought Linux should really shine. The BSD versions detect all hardware at bootup, and only load the specific driver modules for the hardware that they actually use. Compiling and installing additional modules, while tricky at first, is actually easier than I've ever experienced in Linux. I actually got my hardware RAID card working out of the box on FreeNAS, and after weeks of fighting, have yet to get the same card working on a separate install of CentOS for a different server. It should be said that I put absolutely no effort into choosing BSD-specific hardware. It may have just been blind luck.

Now, despite all this gushing over these apps, they are clearly designed for a specific purpose. I wouldn't want to use my FreeNAS box as an email server, or run my company knowledgebase off of pfSense. But if you want to dust off an old PC, slap a couple of hard drives in there and make a file server, you can do no better than FreeNAS.

Glad to hear it's on FreeBSD, even if it's a little shaky at the moment. I'm waiting patiently for them to move it to the FreeBSD-based FreeNAS

I love the qube, but even used they are still expensive. This way a simple distro that makes it a NAS http://www.freenas.org/ and easy to install, add a pair of cheapie 250gig hard drives and you are off with a terabyte.

So this box plus FreeNAS will let me store a terabyte of data across 2 250G drives + one 80G drive? Sign me up!

:-)

Exactly what I thought. a high power massive storage Cobalt Qube for dirt cheap.

I love the qube, but even used they are still expensive. This way a simple distro that makes it a NAS http://www.freenas.org/ and easy to install, add a pair of cheapie 250gig hard drives and you are off with a terabyte.

Advanced users get a router, web server, ftp server, UpNP media server, SMB server ,etc.... all for dirt.

What about FreeNAS?

As long as someone has a spare computer around, it's pretty easy to install off a CD once you download the iso. If they have the technical skill to throw a couple big hard drives in the spare box, even better.

You can try FreeNAS or Open Filer.

http://www.freenas.org/ - FreeBSD based, a pleasure to install, configure and use.

http://www.freenas.org/ ...You know you want to anyway.

FreeNAS is a minimal FreeBSD distribution that provides NAS (network-attached storage) services: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, local user authentication, and software RAID. It may be booted and run from compact flash or CD-ROM. It also features a full Web-based configuration interface.

Get a piece-o-crap machine from the dump, several cheap drives and a NIC - you're in business.

wow. not one comment for Freenas?
http://www.freenas.org/

I am a Microsoft person and run this. 4x250G drives, a raggity machine with around 128MB of RAM and an spare hour of time. It has been running flawlessly for months. Works like a brick. Shove it is a corner and forget it. Will serve you with minimal downtime.
I though at least one of you unix fruitcakes would mention it.

But how is this better than a Linux or BSD based solution that's free?

I am going to be looking at NAS for my home network soon and am leaning toward a BSD or Linux based NAS solution using software RAID:

http://www.freenas.org/

Openfiler is great but when they moved from CentOS to Rpath without any simple upgrade path for their non paying customers my love affair with them ended. http://www.freenas.org/ is attractive, or build something simple on top of Ubuntu server.

Nice easy to setup software: http://www.freenas.org/

Its FreeBSD based - so potentially very secure indeed, but your perimeter should take care of that in any event.

Good opportunity to re-cycle any old PC's that are lying around.

Trull

So I built a debian box (after looking at FreeNAS and OpenFiler and concluding that they were inadequate for the hardware I had already bought ...).

I used: SilverStone GD01 case (it has room for 7 HDs and big, quiet fans), an Asus AM2 board with 6 SATAII connectors and 2 x gigabit ethernet, I installed a low power Athlon X2 BE-2350 and 2GB RAM as well as 6 Seagate SATA disks with 250GB each. I partitioned the disks to contain a small (2G) partition for RAID-1 and swap (2 x RAID-1 for the root/boot fs - Linux can't boot from software RAID 5 yet, 4 x swap partitions) and the rest of the disk is used for a 5+1 disk RAID-5 setup.

Performance is very good, I can saturate at least the gigabit ethernet LAN connection of my desktop PC both at reading and writing (it chokes at 44MB/s - local speeds are much higher, mail me if you want a benchmark run) and I can also run various server stuff on the box that a normal NAS wouldn't support. The box is extremely quiet, so I'm very pleased.

i would go for the cheap PC with 2 or 3 large harddrives, and since it is just for backup purposes you dont even need to go with RAID, and should get by with a PC that uses IDE disk drives (3 harddrives and one CDRW drive - in case you want to burn something to CDR) install something small & simple that wont take up much disk space like Debian or Slackware or maybe FreeNAS and just connect it in a LAN configuration, then use rsync or some other similar back up method...

http://www.freenas.org/

Usually people have older hardware laying around doing next to nothing. If this is the case for you, have a look at FreeNAS. It's really robust and works well for me.

Internal drives are cheap these days.

Get an old box, age doesnt really matter.

Insttall FreeNAS, http://www.freenas.org/ .

Raid-1 (mirror) a pair of reliable disks (hitachi or seagates).

Set up CIFs shares.

I'm curious if you have any basis for this, because I'm actually looking at EMC's Clarion based iSCSI solutions. Certainly its not the cheapest solution out there, but what I want is reliability, esp given my new companies last foray into SAN was Dell's disastrous in-house product, and they are a bit gun shy, and at the end of the day the companies business depends on this thing being up 24x7x365.

Thats the risk of SAN, Fast & Flexible, but downtime is VERY painful.

If I'm shooting for the low-end hardware, I might as well get the best price I can, no?

This statement makes me think I should discount you out-of-hand. I have a size and performance goal in mind, with a tiered performance goal. I'm opting for iSCSI because 1Gbps my performance goals while eliminating enormously expensive 4Gbps FC cards (2 per server!) and FC switches. In the past the cost of connecting a Dell Poweredge 2850 to my EMC properly almost exceeded the cost of the server ($2,900 vs $2,800), and thats before I factored in Fiber cables (which I somehow had a huge supply of).

If cost is my only concern I'd be buying whitebox desktops stuffed full of SATA drives running FreeNAS or some such.

It's simple. Don't rent music. It's so cheap and easy, that even a minor geek can keep a permanent music collection. It's simple:

1. Throw two or three (or more for the paranoid) cheap 500 GB hard drives in an old thrift store quality PC. Install FreeNas.
2. Buy CD's used and cheap.
3. Rip to FLAC.
4. Set up Freenas to mirror, or backup occasionally.

Bammo! Dirt cheap, very permanent, perfect music library! Because you're smart and used FLAC, you can always burn a perfect copy of any CD you'd like from your own collection. The chances of multiple hard drives failing at the same time is slim, so as long as you replace hard drives when they fail, there's very little chance of losing any of your collection.

My point is that it's cheap and easy. There's very little reason to rent music these days.

I have encountered this predicament before and my solution was to get a mini-atx case and put some hard drives in it and then load FreeNAS on it. With FreeNAS there are plenty of options to work with the different file sharing protocols supported by each of the operating systems over the network. Just an idea, may not be practical for everyone but it is just another solution to be added in to the nine-million already out there.

Well, it's already done. It's called FreeNas. Typical OSS advocate. Re-inventing the wheel... yet again.

1. download FreeNAS
2. install to USB/CF drive (it needs ~32Mb)
3. configure * reboot on the USB/CF drive (or if your mobo cant boot to those, maybe a CD or spare HD)
4. ?
5. Profit!

Tm

I'm not whining. I'm saying that $50 isn't going to convince anybody to switch. That's absurd.

Good for you if you get to save $50. That's great.

And for the record, I have a FreeBSD box that I'm using at home right now for my music collection (FreeNas).

I used to use gentoo for everything; it's sweet inasmuch as you can do anything with the time. The problem with Gentoo is that it has a HUGE up-front time investment to learn. I'm too old and have too many kids now to keep making that investment. There are good alternatives here and here if you want something easier to use with good management tools. If you want a little bit more, look at smeserver. I seem to recall that there are one or two more like smeserver, but I'm too lazy to look.

Good luck.

The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall.

http://www.freenas.org

There's also FreeNAS. The rub here, though, is that, at least when I last tried it, it's the only thing that should be installed on the box. On the other hand, if you have an old PC and a couple of hard drives, it'll let you make a software mirror between them and share files on it. I won't claim my experience with it is authoritative, but it was pretty easy to figure out.

You only need machines with 32-48 MB system memory for LTSP, machines with 4-8 MB are a bit stuck although they could be purposed with SVGALIB VNCviewer or SVGALIB rdesktop. It should be possible to acquire suitable machines for under $100 used, or $150 new.

To minimize the hardware needed and improve administration you might want to try running Edubuntu (a Linux terminal server specialised for education) diskless, and use a directory to store all account information in. There is a directory server project dedicated for small Linux terminal server environments to act as a boot manager for LTSP clients and servers, and account store for users. Team this up with m0n0wall and FreeNAS and you have a complete solution.

It doesn't have to be rackmount, if you don't have the space. Instead of the rackmount Travla C146 cases, check out the Travla C134 (http://www.mini-itx.com/store/images/c134-black.j pg) or C137 (http://www.mini-itx.com/store/images/c137-black.j pg) cases, they're really small.

As for setting up the necessary software, there's a number of projects that scratch that itch:
http://www.collax.com/en/resources/download-cbs.ht ml
http://www.openfiler.com/
http://www.freenas.org/
http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/index_html
http://www.ubuntu.com/server

All of these are really easy to install and work exceptionally well.

Just to see how reasonably low I could go, I spec'd out an even cheaper do-it-yourself Micro-ATX software raid5 box:

$34-44 - MicroATX MINI-tower case w/ 300-400W PSU, 4x int 3.5" bays + 1-2x ext 3.5" (or 5.25" bays w/ brackets)
$79 - MicroATX Asus Socket 939 MB w/ 4x SATA2, 2x PATA, pci-e, gigabit, integrated vid&audio
$92 - AMD Athlon64 3000+ (cheapest socket 939 cpu)
$22-$40 - 256MB DDR400 (or $40 for 512)
$25 - 1GB CompactFlash (80X)
$12 - IDE-CF Adapter
$14 - 1x SATA PCI-e controller (1 + 4 onboard = 5x sata and no PATA crap); micro-atx MBs with more than 4x sata aren't common. Would like 6x for a hotspare option.
$0 - FreeNAS, or roll your own.
= $278 - $306

Add 5X Seagate 320GB SATA2 drives @ $100 each, which comes to $773 total for a 1,280GB RAID5 NAS box. Not too shabby. Could get the drives even cheaper than $0.31/GB by waiting for a better with-rebate-hassle deal.

Biggest downsides to this kinda of thing:
1) setup time for h/w and s/w
2) no easy hotswap bays with blinken LEDs to tell you "THIS DRIVE IS DEAD/DYING; REPLACE ME!", so you have to rely on mdadm alert emails and SMART monitoring, then crack the case open and KNOW the sata order so you replace the RIGHT sdX drive.
3) ugly and bigger than it needs to be

When some company comes along and sells a 5-6 drive raid5 box like this for $150-$250 (instead of triple that) I bet it'll be a HUGE hit.

I built my own system at home. A dual-core Opteron with 2GB RAM and four 300GB hard drives running in RAID5. I got an Areca RAID card which only has 4 SATA II ports, but you can get models of the card that has 8, 12 or 16 ports. With the PCI Express bus, I don't think you will have any bottlenecks there. My only complaint about the card is the lame looking web interface, but other than that, the card is well worth the money. I tried using FreeNAS, which seems fairly cool, but ended up going with Windows Server 2003 because of other needs. If you are looking for a free and simplistic interface (same as m0n0wall), definitely check into FreeNAS.

yeah and you know whats even funnier (in a sad clown way)? that this FreeNAS thing is built around FreeBSD. now wheres my LART...