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A Look at FreeNAS Server
NewsForge (Also owned by VA) has a quick look at FreeNAS, an open source network attached storage server that can be deployed on pretty much any old PC you have sitting around the house. From the article: "The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media."
Would a NAS device not require some pretty good processing power under a bit of a load? I know of course it would be scalable based on the usage, but still, the notion that it runs on 'any old system' wouldn't be entirely true.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Isnt that a software package?
I've been looking for something like this for a while now. I was contemplating one of those pre-built consumer level NAS (like the Terastation), but a nice tailored setup like this could tempt me to build my own. I need storage space for samples, I make lots of music with them :)
Game dev and music blog
But I fell in love with something called a Kuro-box. Here's a link, http://kurobox.com/revolution/what.html From the site: The KuroBox is a small-footprint Linux-based embedded platform for a personal server. The current incarnation of the KuroBox, the KuroBox/HG, sports a 266Mhz PowerPC processor, 128MB of RAM, 2 USB 2.0 Ports, and a 10/100/1000Mbit network interface. I got mine off ebay (with a 250 hdd) for ~$200, and I couldnt be happier!
j^2
What most people forget about these kinds of systems is that they have fairly hefty power consumption. Until the past year or so, desktop manufacturers placed very little emphasis on truly minimizing power consumption. They do manage to hold it within reason, but often that's no enough.
Dedicated storage systems are often designed in such a way so as to minimize the amount of power they consume. Some use several ARM or MIPS CPUs, which can offer suitable processing capabilities without the immense energy consumption of even a single x86 chip. The dedicated hardware itself is designed so as to eliminate unnecessary circuitry.
When it comes to users who have hundreds of these machines, the energy savings of a dedicated system often far outweigh the initial savings of going with a PC/FreeNAS-style combination. Even smaller-scale users, who may only have a single machine, will notice the savings if they choose to use their system for several years.
There is virtually no user security. Any authenticated user has full rights to all data on the system. Fine for home, but until they get user security figured out, not ready for anything more than that. And given that it wants to play nice with Windoze, *Nix, and Apple, the security is gonna be the hard part. *NIX without maddeningly granular security ... who'da thunk?
doc
I have freenas running on an old P2 box, with a couple of 300GB drives in it. Runs nice and backs up my windows pcs, linux box, and mac in my home for less than the cost of a packaged NAS. Apparently it can do RAID1,0 but I've had problems bringing back a RAID1 drive, but it's free.
I have been using DSL ( www.damnsmalllinux.org/ ) for the same job, but I am willing to give this a shot. I like the ability to use CIFS so the all Windows boxes on my home network can share data & printer
http://www.leadmagnet.50megs.com
FreeNAS is necessary, so that all the little Windoze boxes can have a share for viri and other malware ;-)
How is this any different than the OpenFiler Project?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I can set up Samba, etc. on just about any box. What defies me is setting up OpenAFS. How about a server that supports OpenAFS or Coda?
As others have said, been there done that with Linux/BSD. Nice to have a dedicated package, but it's definitely not for the casual user and requires dedicated drives/machines (as one would expect for RAID).
I was amused that he could screw up the installation so easily by just creating a local user and it lacked auto-configuration. Imagine that in a review of a commercial product. "Easy to use and install, but it locked me out of my system and required a re-install and it couldn't find my network card".
Fact is, folks just expect open source to be a pain in the ass to work with and require tweaking or extreme attention to detail. It's almost a right of passage. And users accept and embrace it on a scale they would NEVER accept from a commercial product - particularly 'evil' Microsoft.
Anyway, nice open source addition, but it definitely belongs in the open source group (as in not-ready-for-normal-people group).
And yet, small appliances like this will probably win the day. In the end, they will run on top of xen in their own environment and be easily upgradable.
IOW, this is a good time for Linux to create small appliances like this targeting a xen base.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What's new about this? Been doing that for years!, Where's the difference between this box and a linuxbox with samba/nfs/fstab properly configured?
I would think that a home NAS is a case where I can toss in any spare harddrive i find, plug it to the network and that's it. Not a whooooole PC.
I want a network attached storage device for home but prices vary from $500 to $2000+. I also want to run my own apps like Subversion. But I can't find any cheap, compact, and power efficient hardware for doing this. Any ideas?
Tell me why we don't see cheap network appliances at Walmart and Bestbuy that accept USB drives and printers all in one convenient box.
I see the "cheap" drive sharing boxes and the "cheap" printer sharing boxes but, given how easy it is to set up SAMBA on a VERY low end device, why don't we see any that do both?
And while I'm on the subject, why don't we see cheap server appliances for other services? Is it lack of market demand that keeps me from being about the buy a low power, cheap apache server in a box the size of a cable modem? Same for proftpd and squirrelmail/postfix/mailman? Seriously, I know the market is limited, but it's hardly non-existent! Especially if they made it easy to set up and use, then ANYONE could be an end point. That is the real promise fo the Internet to me.
And before I get those "just do it yourself on old hardware" replies, I have already done so and posted the how-to's for others. What I'm asking for is not an easy way to set up apache. Apache is pretty easy out of the box. I'm asking for an easy, low-power apache appliance that EVEN a relatively non-technical person can set up and use. Seems cool to me. Especially coupled with a cheap DNS appliance box.
These services beg for hardware modularization.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
I can't comment on FreeNAS, because I have never used it, but Quantum Snap NAS devices (which were later rebranded as Dell PowerVault NAS devices) handle decent loads (100+ users at a time), and utilize a proprietary *nix OS with 32MB onboard ram and a MASSIVE Pentium 233 MMX. It's also doing software RAID. I'd say "Any Old Box" is probably a good fit.
Look. Just because MacOS X supports SMB, does not mean that SMB is an acceptable solution for file-serving to MacOS X clients.
Netatalk has some of its own crankyness (and if you run Debian/Ubuntu, you need to rebuild the debian package with SSL support or passwords are transmitted in the clear, thanks to the OpenSSL/GNU idiocy), but it doesn't have nearly the basic functionality problems Samba does for Macs.
Sidenote: looks like they "borrowed" the complete user interface from m0n0wall...and it looks like they MIGHT use netatalk...googling turned up some hints that netatalk might be built-in.
Please help metamoderate.
OpenFiler has it, FreeNAS doesn't. I'd been watching FreeNAS hoping they might add WebDAV, which I would like to be the only protocol I use. It's probably not quite there yet, but I at least want it available as my first choice, with the others as options just in case in the meantime. Guess I need to give OpenFiler a look now that I know about it.
It could just as easily be said that you could do that with a bare computer and an assembler. Sure you could, but do you want to? Starting with a basic Linux/BSD distro is easier. This is easier yet.
This is just a specifically-configured FreeBSD-based distrobution. It makes one moderately complicated setup easy enough for a causal computer dabbler. (Not quite a novice, but not an expert either.) It's useful if it can do a good job, because it makes it easier for people to set this up, with less time, effort, and knowledge on their part.
Which means they can focus their time, effort, and knowledge on something else.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Naslite is way better. No problems with kick butt performance. Even a noob with no *nix experience can set it. If you need storage, then naslite is the way to go.
I always thought the OS and software were the easy part. What do folks like for hardware platforms? I don't care about 2 or 4 drive solutions - those are trivial. I'm talking 8-10 drives in the 320-500 gb range. Most turn-key solutions are Far too expensive when compared to the 'build a box' DIY alternative.
I've been building linux boxes for this and have used Antec cases in the past with 120mm fans. Proper drive cooling and monitoring are very important. Anything beyond 5 or 6 drives means using the 5 1/4 drive bays and that gets old fast.
What controllers? Cheap SATA controllers are a must. I couldn't care less about the $200-$400 controllers. Some controllers don't do dma correctly when you have more than one in a machine. I have played with the Syba SD-SATA-4p under Linux and it works okay (though it does not work with one amd64 machine that has a Promise ATA controller).. Price is right at about $15-$25 for four ports ($4-8/port!). I haven't tried two or more in the same machine. There does not seem to be any SMART support in the current linux driver.
10 320 gb drives = $1150 = 36 cents/GB.
$500 machine + $1150 = 51.5 cents/GB.
Naslite (free version) worked great on my salvaged P-100 32MB system running quiety and headless with nothing but a floppy drive and a 300GB HD. Luckily, it recognized the large HD (since Linux/etc bypasses bios) and I didn't need an IDE card. Performance was acceptable (good but not great) for small base of users but I wouldn't want to stick a RAID in it or have more than 5 nodes. The total system consumed total of 25-30watts (a little high compared to NSLU). Freenas looked good except for higher amount of ram(96m which I didn't have.
http://www.up0.com/
OS X can't do NFS?!
SMB, although not the best method of sharing files in a heterogenoius network, is pretty much the standard in those envoronments. It is not the fault of SMB that Apple had features it does not support.
Dumb n00b question: what ARE the acceptable linux solutions for file-sharing to OS X clients?
If you need to do this, setup a sparse disk image on the SMB share and mount it. Copy files to the disk image. Slow but flawless.
I'm also working on some docs on how to do this with rsync, which actually works much faster if you don't need to use it interactively (big if).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yes, but can you make a Beowulf cluster using it? That's the essential question that no one has yet asked.
Um, in THIS story. Nobody has asked it in THIS story yet.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall."
It's not like they don't give credit...
I love the idea of the FreeNAS. I really need something like this to backup my home network. However, I am a Mac OS X user and the problem with solutions like FreeNAS is that they usually require Mac users to communicate with them via samba rather than Mac-native AFP, AND they don't support HFS+ file system, which is native to OS X. Without native networking protocol and native filesystem the files copied seem to put lots of "." files on the target disk, and file metadata is stripped off. At least from my experience that's what I've seen. I'm very interested to read any comments anyone might have on this.
I have setup a Linux server to server to both Mac and PC clients on the same volumes/shares using AFP with the Netatalk package, and SMB with Samba. Netatalk, in its new incarnations is by far the best non-apple AFP server available. It works seamlessly with modern OSX clients (10.3 and 10.4), supporting precomposed UTF-8 charactersets, long file names (most commercial NAS devices still only support the ancient appletalk implementation with 32 MacRoman charactersets and glacial unreliable performance) and even Bonjour/Zeroconf support.
Netatalk works surprisingly well with modern Samba versions (post 3.0) that support UTF-8 (and now even includes a netatalk module to ease compatibility), and both samba and netatalk hide one another's specific data from the other so that resource forks are kept and if the mswindows option is enabled in netatalk, the worst character problems (?\ etc in filenames) are safe.
What I would really love to see is a system that reliably combines these, PLUS NFS for Linux shares. The FreeNAS looks good, but seesm to be a bit on the young side without decent Mac support, and god knows there are enough Mac using companies that don't want to have to fork over money for XServes.
...and useless because Samba has a maximum filesize of just 2GB, whereas Appleshare 3.1 supports a maximum [volume and file] size of 8 TB.
Please help metamoderate.
I threw a FreeNAS server up on my home network one day. The next day I decided to back up an XP box that had never been backed up before using the included backup program over the net. The following week I mistakenly deleted files in cygwin (watch out for the /cygdrive/driveletter, it is hidden from / and doesn't follow normal rules... that's my story anyway) and had to restore the XP box. I was able to restore the system over the network from the FreeNAS box. It was a *very* quick restore. Anyway, I like FreeNAS as a quick and easy way to do network backups/restores. The install is very quick and painless, and the BSD it runs on is stable and fast. Agreed about the security issues for corporate use, unless it is just a cheap way to make a drive and an old box into a complete recovery device... just turn it off when you aren't recovering.
I never clip my fingernails for fear of dangling symbolic links.
Several years ago I tried to set up my Linux box as an internet router/gateway, using IPTABLES and what-not. I failed just through sheer lack of time to commit to learning all the stuff I'd need to know to do it properly. About that time, the first "Cable/DSL routers" came on the market, and made moot my need.
Now, however, it is very easy to configure the various widgets that you'd need for this task because tools exist on (e.g.) Fedora to make it so.
For myself, I'm glad I can put the effort into learning more in-depth some of the things I can do with Linux, and yet those things I find tedious, or don't have the time to do, have "easy-to-use" tools handy.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Ok, calm down.
SMB has issues. You're right about that. Netatalk has issues. Whether netatalk is a step above SMB is probably a matter of taste. I've used netatalk with about 100 macs for 7 years or so, and it worked just well enough to convince me not to buy an xserve until this past year. Much better, though netatalk was a huge step above the Apple not-even-remotely-servers you could buy when I started.
That said, the naming issues that SMB exposes aren't really a problem if you're storing audio, video, or stills. Besides, there's always nfs if that's an appropriate fit with your architecture. And OSX can mount directories over FTP if you'd rather go that route.
And if you absolutely MUST use SMB and MUST back up wacky OS files, use a disk image with a boring filename and store your mac files in that.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Why on earth would run run it inside xen? Just run it as a plain old process. Sheesh. It's like we're regressing to the days of VM/{CMS,MVS,etc}.
The web-GUI looks exactly like the one in m0n0wall? Is this a conspiracy?
yeah and you know whats even funnier (in a sad clown way)? that this FreeNAS thing is built around FreeBSD. now wheres my LART...
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Knoppix and OpenAFS.
Tell me how well it works.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Clearly you have never used a real NAS solution. Only somebody who hasn't used a dedicated device would make such an absurd statement.
No, professional NAS devices are not simply repackaged x86-based computers. As stated before, only the most recent x86 processors even come close to offering a suitable level of power consumption. Even then, they're often vastly trumped by PowerPC, MIPS and ARM processors in terms of the power necessary per operation.
The use of a proper NAS solution can save a company thousands of dollars per year. Maybe your friend Jim Bob does run a PC-based NAS device. Let me just tell you something: your friend and yourself do not know shit about the real world.
Many large companies will have 1500+ of these devices. And that's per office building! These devices can save $10 a month, if not more, when used instead of an old PC. If you had any management duties, which clearly you do not, you'd realize the benefit of saving $15000 per month is immense. And that's just money saved powering these devices, ignoring all the other benefits of using a professional piece of hardware.
Please refrain from making such ignorant statements in the future, for your own sake. If you've never worked with these devices on a professional, as is the case, it's best if you say nothing at all.
By saying Linux, I did not say Linux a company, but Linux a community. While that does include groups (such as debian), it also includes companies (such as novell and redhat, and the little distros such as DSL) and even small hackers(such as a starting Linus or Alan Cox).
Just for the record, I have coded in the linux Kernel (side work and have submitted patches for Linux), I have done work on KDE and perl. Yet, I do not find it really all that necessary to be derogitory towards others that do not say things exactly the way that I want.
It is your attitude that makes it hard for others to want to adopt it. My question to you, is why take the attitude that you have? I have been working with and on Linux since 1992. Somehow, I seriously doubt that you have that much time associated with OSS, let alone with just one piece of it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Software RAID is documented. If it fails, you can plug the drives into another system that understands the RAID format and get at the data. Hardware RAID is often propietary and all-or-nothing. You're not going to get much help on recovering your data from Promise or Adaptec when one of your cards go south. They'll say: "But didn't you keep recent backups???" (which is The Truth (tm) but still...)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Don't run cron jobs on NAS. Bad, bad!!! ;)
You don't need to run slocate on a system you never use for interactive processing.
Hell, don't run anything not directly related to moving data in and out of the system. Demand-based load is easy to model and there's less chance it'll fail unexpectedly (like when you're on vacation or something).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You seem to have an opinion on the subject, so I'll ask the same question others already have: what network filesystem would you recommend for sharing files from a FreeBSD (or possibly Linux) box to an OS X system? I'm currently using good ol' NFS to serve media files across a LAN. Is that a reasonable setup, or is there something you think should work better (faster, more compatibly)?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The following practices will remove many of the irritations of using Netatalk.
/dev/whatever
/dev/whatever into your fstab, mount, and modify Applevolumes.default accordingly.
Use jfs formatted with the case-preserving option so that the resulting share will have the filename case-preserving behaivor that Macs expect. Samba imposes case-preserving semantics. Netatalk doesn't so you have to use the underlying filesystem to do it. I've found that JFS is the only viable way to do this in Linux. This is because JFS filesystems can be created and fscked entirely on Linux systems and also don't do hideous things to charsets and filenames. Keep in mind that you pretty much have to just use the share to service Mac clients; every once in a while you can really confuse Linux scripts that expect case-sensitive behaivor.
No end of application flakiness disappears this way. Since Macs are case-preserving, software devs play fast in loose with the filenames they are passing around. If your application is using data from "Database.dbx" but writes updates to "database.dbx" then hilarity ensues. Using a case-preserving filesystem on the server prevents such nastiness. . Create your netatalk share filesystem thusly:
mkfs.jfs -O
Put
The -O is an uppercase letter O.
Secondly, make sure you are running the cnid_metad daemon and use the dbd cnidscheme for your shares. That will keep your Mac OS aliases nice and happy.
Especially if they made it easy to set up and use, then ANYONE could be an end point. That is the real promise fo the Internet to me.
:-(
What makes you think they want you to do this?
It's pretty obvious that the big companies like to stay big companies -- it gives them more monies -- and keep you small. Everything about today's system is "them=big producer, you=small consumer":
- cable/DSL providers give you lots of downstream bandwidth, but much less upstream bandwidth (or charge a lot more for good upstream)
- to offset this, they provide a small place to put a "personal webpage" (a few HTML files)
- Microsoft sells Home, Professional, and Server versions of their OS; if you're a Home user, why would you want to run a web server? It's contrary to their whole business plan.
- Most ISPs/IAPs don't let you resell access: you're an endpoint, a consumer, and you're not just buying access
- Most ISPs block lots of ports for you, so you couldn't run a server even if you wanted to (well, you could run it on a funny port)
- They keep selling things like NAT boxes/programs, that make it easier for lots of clients to connect to the internet, but not have the full functionality of a plain IP connection
- They don't upgrade to IPv6, which would help move the balance from "we provide services for consumers" towards "a bunch of equal peers connected by IP"
- and so on...
I agree that this would unleash the real promise of the internet: everybody reads and writes, and is not simply a "consumer" of streams of data that big companies produce for you. I would love to see it happen. But how would the big companies of today increase their profit, exactly, by producing cheap server appliances for you?
It supports NFS. Why would you even care about Samba?
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
A question for anyone who feels that they have a decent idea of what's going on these days when it comes to network filesystems... what do you think is the best candidate for the network filesystem of the future, particularly from a UNIX point of view? NFSv4? Some AFS descendant? I watched Coda for a while during its active development but it seems to have grinded to a near-halt and has always seemed fragile.
I was looking at creating a server just for my electronic documents (which, due to professional reasons, are growing to a much to large ammount). But I don't have time nor skills nor wish to administer a full-blown professional server; I thought of creating a safe server on a BSD, in some off-the-beaten-track programming language (like Oz, or Erlang), or just use Common Lisp (Araneida web server). Put the thing in my home network for my use. Now I read about FreeNAS.
If I understand this correctly, this would save me a lot of work (writing the little server software notwithstanding). Right?
So, does this thing have a firewall? Is it safe?
Can I install other softwares on it (suppose I want to write software for indexing my documents)? Can I install a FreeBSD port (like if I need a lisp port)?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
This really appeals to me as being relatively easy to deal with, however, my current BSD server box is also a CVS and Subversion server. Can FreeNAS do that too, or is it outside the scope? If it's already running Apache it seems like Subversion wouldn't be too much of a stretch.
I've been looking at FreeNAS, but have been reluctant to try it because it seems to lack support for expandable volumes (ala EVMS). So if you fill up your hard disk you can't just expand the storage onto a second disk; instead, you copy the first disk over to a second, bigger disk, put the second disk into service in place of the first disk, then throw the first disk out. Rinse, lather and repeat every time you fill up a disk.
Am I missing something? If FreeNAS doesn't have this capability, are there any other dedicated NAS distributions that do include, e.g., EVMS?
... And your NAS will follow!
Use netatalk. Most people know of it (if they know of it at all) because it provides AppleTalk/DDP access, but it also does AppleTalk/IP.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can't find any specific comparison between it and NFS. What does it do better than NFS?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I recently setup a NAS at my father's house using Slackware on a Pentium 233 and if you know Linux, it is easy.
1- Boot Slackware CD
2- Create software RAID with raidtools (included on the boot CD)
3- Install Slackware on RAID partitions
4- Activate Samba and SWAT
5- Add users and configure network shares
6- Done!
heh, RTFM!
Does either FreeNAS or any of the alternatives discussed here offer HD encryption? Ideally where the key can be stored on a thumb drive that can be removed after boot?
I have checked the site and couldn't find anything, but maybe someone has some experience integrating this in or knows of another project.
Since everybody here is a geek, nobody has a (non-inflatable) girlfriend.
..... I'm guessing that there's no real need for ANYBODY to get into a "my dick is bigger than your dick" pissing match.
So
I doubt it - there are plenty of us who enjoy the "set and forget" aspect of Linux servers. I've been using SME (used to be E-Smith) server Contribs for the past five years.
That's probably the only objection I'd have to FreeNAS - it doesn't do as many nice things as SME, which also sets up some fairly handy services like "iBays", which are web/intranet pages made simple. Worth looking at if you want more than just fileserving but still want to keep it simple.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Suriyan has an installation and configuration procedure that is extremely simple - the only question normally asked during install is which disk to use. The partitioning takes place behind the scenes, as does all of the rest of the configuration.
:)
There is a web-based UI that relies heavily on moin. There is support for establishing groups with mailing lists, their own wiki and samba share. Users can create user accounts, which gives them local mail addresses, their own wiki page, samba share, and webpage. File ownership and permissions were considered.
Backing up the system and restoring from a backup are very easy to do. There is a web based updating system that utilizes apt. Postgres database is on board. Many other services (jabber, moodle, request-tracker) are being developed and implemented with similarly easy configurations. There is support for adding ISV applications in a very straightforward manner.
Any thoughts? Feedback appreciated
Another one that I like is Infrant's ReadyNAS. There are several different forms factors - I've really liked the 4-SATA bay ReadyNAS NV, it's a solid piece of hardware (and runs their embedded version of Linux, has web-based configuration of everything including its Samba, servers as a printserver, supports external USB drives for backup, etc).
They have a default hybrid RAID 5 option that automatically grows volumes incrementally until the disks are full - and in order to grow the volumes you just slide in another drive without any configuration (the first drive becomes parity, and then further ones expand the space).
The only two gripes I have with the unit are related: they incorrectly portray SMB/CIFS as being the default network file system for MAC OS X (as opposed to AFP, which they say is only for Mac OS 9 and before), and they do not let you turn off SMB/CIFS.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
"...In the end, they will run on top of xen in their own environment and be easily upgradable."
Ah...you're joking, right?
Let's see...running "Xen" to virtulize a network and NAS server on my own machine to serve up extra disk space for my own machine. Is it me or would trying to run NAS servers virtualized on my own machine to provide extra disk space seem a bit unproductive?
-l
I've been using FreeNAS for a while on an old laptop - I use this for simple home backup. The benefit of using an old laptop is that it is battery backed, low power & heat and has a small form factor. FreeNAS is great for rejuvenating laptops that have buggered screens. I've had a lot of experience installing enterprise NAS systems - including Microsoft's appalling 2003 storage edition. I bought about 6 of them for client (pre-installed on HP hardware) and found them to have very poor failover with clustering that really didn't work. These NAS's had HBA cards in them for SAN Access (HP EVA5000's) and basically the Windows could not cluster SAN connected disks. So, a copy of RHEL, Serviceguard and a fresh updated Samba and the exact same hardware performed as a properly clustered NAS and I also had a client whose eyes were opened to Linux. I found FreeNAS easy to configure and certainly headed in the right direction (when user rights are sorted out). It has a stronger feeling of solidity than Windows Storage edition - i.e. "It does what it says on the tin" functionality rather than a hacked down version of 2003 Server where you are never sure what you have got and what will install on it. e.g. Can Windows 2003 SE use veritas clustering? who knows? win 2003 server can.
Gee thanks! This is just great; your way of using it is exactly identical to what I had in mind. Plug-in, auto-copy, manual check and delete. Incidentally, even your "useable by $wife" criterion is identical to mine. :)
I have very poor bash-fu so I can't say if this will work for me, but thank you ever so much for providing the first "end-to-end" solution I have seen so far. BTW, my camera is a Canon Exilim, and I seem to remember gphoto having 'some form' of error accessing it. Nevertheless, I shall try this soon.
Thanks!
"Good news, everyone!"
I've found NFS works better than Netatalk for my 2 Mac home LAN. File transfer speed is considerably faster and I've had many fewer configuration/compatibility headaches. In the case of FreeNAS, I literally turned the box on, pointed my Macs to nfs://boxname and went on with my life.
My journal
I'm using NFS on a couple of my Macs talking to FreeNAS without any issues. I switched to NFS after getting cranky at how slow Netatalk and Samba were for my daily backup operations.
My journal