Is Freenas right for me? I want to run some other applications on the same box.

[asktoby]

Hello,

Planning to buy an HP Proliant Microserver to bring together all my documents which are currently scattered across many PCs.

I keep reading that Freenas was going to move from FreeBSD to Linux. I'm assuming it is still based on FreeBSD?

I currently run a few key applications on my Linux box that I would like to move to the low-power Microserver:

• OpenSSH
• Leafnode/slrn
• GNU Screen
• alpine
• apache
• mpd
• icecast

This is making me think I should run a linux-based NAS operating system, not FreeBSD, since setting these up is pretty easy in Linux. I don't even know if they're available for FreeBSD, never having used it. Is that a fair assessment?

 

[ProtoSD]

It depends on how comfortable you are with FreeBSD. All of those apps on your list are available as FreeBSD 'ports'. It's possible to get them to work with FreeNAS, but it may be a bit more straight forward doing it on a Linux based system. Everyone keeps wanting to load up their NAS's with all these other apps which kind of defeats the purpose of what is supposed to be primarily a storage solution. One of the main advantages of FreeNAS is it's small footprint and being able to run directly from a small USB flash drive. A fully loaded FreeBSD or Linux system isn't going to take up that much more disk space and it'll be a lot more flexible to load with all the 'other' stuff people want to run and you can still do it on a low power micro-server. Maybe at some point in the future FreeNAS will be a package you can add on top of a regular FreeBSD system and give people the best of both. Just my 2 or 3 cents ;-)