Few questions before jumping into FreeNAS

[FrenchFigaro]

Hello everyone.

I have the idea of recycling my old desktop (an old Dell machine with a single 250GB SATA disk) into a file server and I am heavily considering FreeNAS for that purpose but before making the jump I had a few questions to which I didn't find any answer on the features page so here they are.

1. I delivered a FreeNAS system for a customer in 2010, back then the CLI used the csh shell and I was wondering if it is possible to install the bash shell, with which I am much more familiar. I know both shells are similar but some instructions are different and I use bash a lot on the side so that would save me the trouble of thinking in csh everytime I deal with the server.

2. I saw on the feature page that BitTorrent plugin was incoming with 8.2, which led me to think that BT is currently unavailable. Since FreeNAS uses the FreeBSD system as a base, I was wondering if I could install the server version of the Transmission client, preferably from the FreeBSD package provided on the website, or as a last resort, could I easily install the libraries needed to build it from source (which I am absolutely and utterly unfamiliar with, but there's nothing a good tutorial can't help you do. And there are plenty of tutorials on the web, aren't there ?)

So in the end these were the two questions I had in mind for the moment.

Thanks

 

[survive]

Hi FrenchFigaro,

1) you could, I suppose, but it wouldn't be supported\likely to survive upgrades. There are tons of threads in the forums about installing extra software and the pitfalls of doing so. That said, I think most of the point behind FreeNAS is to make a system that you shouldn't need to use the shell.

2) Take a look at this thread:

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...8-0-3-RELEASE_MULTIMEDIA&highlight=multimedia

Also, soon FreeNAS 8.2 will be out which has a plug-in framework to allow you to add in all the "extras"

-Will

 

[FrenchFigaro]

Okay, I'll look more into it. Thank you for answering