Not entirely new to FreeNAS but have a question

[ddebruin536]

Jacques here, Have a FreeNAS unit for nearly 4 years , it is old but still the muts nuts.

We been removing a lot of older out dated CCTV network recorders where as there is no more updates available nor cameras that they support..

Has anyone ever tried to re-flash one of these to become JUST a NAS?

Some of them does have a ftp and a share drive which is cool to use if you not recording anything to them BUT , some don't .

Would be a waste to just chuck them in the bin as some of these units has up to 8 HDD bay's available.

Have tried to do a usb drive and boot it too see what happens but no results as it boots to the internal Os.

The Brand in Particular is Hikvision..

Would be nice to hear if there have been any experimenting happening in that kind of environment..


Thanks guys..

 

[nightshade00013]

I highly doubt it would work. Those CCTV recorders while having a HDD and CPU are dedicated to do a simple job. It would be like trying to take a linksys router and put windows on it.

I would pull the drives to repurpose and sell the recorders on Ebay for someone who doesn't mind having older stuff.

 

[Jailer]

It all depends on what hardware is in them and if it's supported by FreeBSD. If I had to venture a guess I'd say that it's not.

Some old hardware can be re purposed and some should just be recycled. This is probably the recycle option.

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, you're unlikely to be able to use those for anything at all. They're woefully unsafe with their stock OS and it's pretty much impossible to replace it.