Hi! I'm new to FreeNAS

[CP2]

Hello all. I am here wanting to find out more about FreeNAS. I am planning on making a MASS storage volume that all 4 our home computers can access. 2 Macs, 2 windows, with one dual booted to Linux Mint.

I am conflicted as to what I want to do to make this Network storage possible. For starters I am not sure how FreeNAS is implemented. Is it a full OS in itself, or is it something I install on a NAS box? When I say NAS box, I mean those prebuilt blocks bought from the store. Or is it something I install ontop of a Linux/*BSD OS simply for the use of network storage? I was told I should use Samba on top of my Linux. Then someone said freeNAS is the way to go.

So can someone help? Or point me in the right direction?

 

[marcusmarcus]

It's an OS itself that you install.
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Introduction
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page#Introduction

 

[CP2]

Alright. So can i connect those NAS boxes to my freeNAS computer and run it? Or will a NAS box not work and i have to use regular hard drives? Im still not sure how those prebuilt NAS work. I saw some on best buy but it seemed like they would only work with windows. I know that freeBSD isnt advertised as a compatibility set but is it possible to use that?

 

[anthony]

I think that you need a 10,000 foot view of what FreeNAS is. An approach and explanation is as follows: You dedicate a computer to FreeNAS for your "network attached storage" needs. You do not need to buy any NAS boxes from BestBuy because with FreeNAS you are making your own NAS "network attached storage" solution. In the end it's a complete computer system (file server) including the FreeBSD operating system and applications and mostly importantly the FreeNAS software that allows you to serve files (read/write/modify/delete) from the computer clients of all major operating systems (i.e. Windows, Apple, FreeBSD, Linux, etc.) . I just joined a week ago and had the interoperability question and the answer is yes FreeNAS is interoperable with all major Operating Systems and also speaks a variety of protocols that will allow you to access the FreeNAS file server from all of the aforementioned Operating Systems. In regards to the technical reasons to choose FreeNAS is probably strongly founded in the high availability/reliability of FreeBSD, the ZFS filesystem, hard drive redundancy capability support, snapshot capability, streaming audio server, and interoperability with various Operating Systems among lots of other reasons but the not to forget the excellent quality and capabilities of the FreeNAS software. There is much information available online. You typically want to maximize the number of hard drives in your computer so it's recommended that you do not load the operating system onto a hard drive since it takes up a precious hard drive resource allocation in your computer. Instead you can run FreeNAS from a USB Flash Drive or a Compact Flash Drive. So that's a quick view but it's too general and you need to read up on all of the online information such that you will have completed a due diligence prior to committing to building a FreeNAS system. Everyone building a system has different requirements so you need to determine what your requirements are and design a solution for your own needs and wants. Good Luck and Welcome.

 

[CP2]

wow, thats some heavy stuff there man! Thanks for the grand scheme description. See, I'd like my server to do some transcoding and downloading as well. I'm sure with some messing around it could possibly do this. I mean, it's on FreeBSD. So I assume it would have the capability buried in their somewhere.

 

[kingtj]

Yeah... I'm fairly new to FreeNAS myself, but I've been running a server based on v8 for a few months now. I can tell you though, if you plan on modifying the program to do other things (like transcoding video on the fly), you'll need to be pretty good with Unix type operating systems and FreeBSD in particular. As FreeNAS is distributed right now, it's a pretty heavily customized FreeBSD installation, optimized just for the features the developers wanted to include in the product. In particular, I've found that the ZFS filesystem and "zraid" uses a lot of system memory, so it's fairly taxing on your server in that respect. If you want the system to do a lot of other things, you'll definitely need to use a motherboard capable of adding a lot of RAM, and probably want a pretty high-end processor too.

 

[CP2]

Ah, I see. initial setup seemed confusing so I abandoned it. I don't do command line in UNIX very well. Must def not for beginners. I may keep trying though.