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A Look at FreeNAS Server

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the you-can-never-have-too-much-storage-space dept.

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."

10 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. I know it costs money.... by j2crux · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

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    j^2
    1. Re:I know it costs money.... by sholden · · Score: 3, Informative

      There are a bunch of consumer level devices designed to have a USB hard drive plugged into them and export SMB shares from it. They are all around $80 or so. I have this one: http://www1.linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid= 640 but there are a bunch of ones by other companies.

      It runs linux out of the box, but I've flashed mine to run a full debian system, only 32MB of RAM is the main draw back. But its attached to 3 USB drives in a software RAID, and a CD storage device, and a thumb drive (for the main system - so the disks don't get hit by every cron job). Plus plugging my digital camera into it downloads all the photos into dated directories on the 'photos' share. It also serves some web pages, mainly a cgi interface to eject disks from the CD storage device.

      Works well for me, and it's a reasonably cheap and pysically small (and very underpowered CPU/memory wise) linux machine with 2 USB ports and a network port.

  2. Dedicated solutions are often better. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:NAS by Orange+Crush · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why? All it's doing is serving up files via Samba shares. I have 20 clients connected to a Debian/Samba box with a 1 ghz P3, 1 gig Ram, and a couple 80 gig IDE drives (no RAID or anythign) . . . not under much strain at all, actually. I know intensive IDE transactions need a lot of CPU, but we're talking about shared office docs. I can't imagine drive operations getting all that intensive when the major bottleneck in this case is going to be to 100mbit ethernet card.

  4. Re:NAS by questionlp · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think the bottleneck will first be with your network connection (primarily if it's 100Mbps). With Gigabit Ethernet, your hard drives or drive array would be the next bottleneck (mostly if your network and storage controller are on the same PCI bus).

    A lot of the SOHO NAS boxes run off of ARM processors, which are both power efficient but also able to handle the basic I/O needs of a NAS box. Granted, SOHO NAS boxes aren't meant for large companies or large workgroups, but would fit in as a departmental file server for testing or near-distance storage.

    Higher end NAS boxes due use more powerful servers to handle 1+ Gigabit Ethernet connections, iSCSI or Fibre Channel, multiple PCI-X busses or multiple 4-8x PCI Express drops, and large amounts of RAM for caching and such. For instance, the latest corporate NAS boxes fron Snap/Adaptec use Opteron processors.

    I've ran a small workgroup file server off of a Pentium Pro 200/256K with 256MB of RAM and several 9GB SCSI drives in RAID-5 and the bottleneck was definitely the two 100Mbps Ethernet connections. Of course, YMMV.

  5. Not necessarily.... by PainBreak · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Arrrg! Samba is not acceptable for macs! by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

    Look. Just because MacOS X supports SMB, does not mean that SMB is an acceptable solution for file-serving to MacOS X clients.

    • SMB is absolutely glacial at file metadata/folder retrieval compared to Appleshare. Do the following test: back up a large volume via SMB using Retrospect or a similar tool on the Mac. Then repeat using Appleshare. Using SMB, the file/folder scan will progressively slow down and take hours to finish.
    • SMB does not support the character set or file-name lengths Macs REQUIRE. Yes, I said, REQUIRE. You'll discover this when you go to make an emergency backup of a mac to a SMB share and get errors about filenames that are too long, or have characters that aren't valid. A lot of applications contain files in their internal structure that violate SMB naming restrictions.
    • When Samba runs across a file that it can't display the name for...IT IGNORES IT!
    • Samba requires a lot of tweaking to get it to perform decently, and despite the usual recommended config changes, I've never been able to get Samba to perform as well as a "stock" Appleshare client.

    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.

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    Please help metamoderate.
  7. Re:OK, a serious question by Jim+Buzbee · · Score: 3, Informative

    Plenty of places do sell them. I don't know about Wallmart, but they are available. See:
    This one for an example. I should know, I've written reviews for a dozen or so of these things...

  8. Re:samba doesn't do +2GB by pehowell · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's actually the Samba client that limits you to 2GB or less. Use CIFS to mount the Samba volume, if you have files over 2GB in size.

  9. Google is your friend by twitter · · Score: 3, Informative
    I can set up Samba, etc. on just about any box. What defies me is setting up OpenAFS.

    Knoppix and OpenAFS.

    Tell me how well it works.

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    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.