questions from a soon to be newbie

[ochohobo]

I have some questions from a newbie
Some History: A buddy gave me a Vtrak 15200 and said this might work. I have a PC desktop and generally run everything on my mac book.
1) From what i read, i can load freeNAS on a USB drive and have FreeNAS run from that which means no PC desktop, right?
2) I can hook my FreeNAS into the router and have always on access?
3) I have a mac at home and a pc at work, so i should be able to have access from both computers from what i read.

am i on the right track?

Thanks
ochohobo

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I have some questions from a newbie
Some History: A buddy gave me a Vtrak 15200 and said this might work. I have a PC desktop and generally run everything on my mac book.
1) From what i read, i can load freeNAS on a USB drive and have FreeNAS run from that which means no PC desktop, right?
2) I can hook my FreeNAS into the router and have always on access?
3) I have a mac at home and a pc at work, so i should be able to have access from both computers from what i read.

am i on the right track?

Thanks
ochohobo

1) Not 100% sure what you mean. FreeNAS doesn't have a desktop environment (just a command line), but you usually control freenas from your web browser from another computer, like a laptop or desktop.
2) yes
3) yes, for work access you'd want to setup a protocol like ftp or sftp.

 

[Stephens]

3) port forwarding on the router will likely be required.

 

[jgreco]

It's unclear what you're trying to do. You're trying to switch the PC over to run FreeNAS, and use the Vtrak for storage? This is not necessarily a great idea. I believe the Vtrak is an iSCSI device, and only really supports iSCSI (effectively a pretty decent SAN device from half a decade ago). FreeNAS could act as a translator and offer NAS-style access to your storage, which could be useful, but FreeNAS doesn't support iSCSI backends as an out-of-the-box solution. Further, I'm pretty sure that the Vtrak has extensive RAID capabilities, and it'd be reasonable - given the limited bandwidth between the host and the diskstore - to allow the unit to manage the RAID, rather than to try to build ZFS on top of it (and watch your performance slag out during scrubs, etc). Further, dedicating an entire PC to that might not be all that worthwhile (certainly not energy efficient).

Now, if you thought that the Vtrak itself would be able to run FreeNAS, um, no.