FreeNAS–It’s a Free NAS
The latest thing I’ve been playing with in the Seanco labs is an incredible NAS solution built on BSD which is completely free. Well, I should say the software is free. You need to provide the hardware and of course the drives. If you’re looking for a network attached storage solution that is extremely flexible, you don’t mind doing some light to moderate geeking and you have a junker PC and some high capacity drives lying around this might be something you’d want to play with. You may ask yourself why would you want to roll your own NAS when there are some decent Network Attached Drives on the market already? First, it’s fun. Second, I like to have some degree of control and customization which a Linksys or similar NAS may not provide. I also like having some expandability. True, some consumer NAS devices offer the capability to add another USB drive, but generally speaking if you want more NAS space, you may very well need to buy another NAS device.
FreeNAS is built on FreeBSD and serves shares primarily via CIFS/SMB (Samba) and also provides FTP, NFS, SSH, RSYNC and AFP services. It supports UFS, FAT32, EXT2/EXT3, and NTFS (read-only) filesystems. FreeNAS could not be easier to set up. First get your hardware together. You’ll need a PC with at least 96 MB of RAM. A minimum CPU spec is not specified, but any post 1995 computer should do. I installed my FreeNAS on an HP Vectra with a PII 300Mhz and a little over 300MB RAM. There is some initial on screen configuration so a monitor would be good to have. I believe there may be a way to do initial setup over the network, but I chose the text method. Since it’s a NAS you should have at least one high capacity hard drive in the system. My NAS box has one internal 30GB drive and a second internal 120 Gb drive to start off with. The OS can be installed on the hard drive or on a flash drive. FreeNAS supports IDE, SATA, and attached USB drives, hardware RAID as well as software RAID 0, 1 and 5. Next, download the ISO form the FreeNas website ( http://www.freenas.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1 ) and burn to a CD. Boot your soon to be awesome NAS device from the CD and follow the super simple install directions, and your NAS should be up and running in about 15 minutes or less. After the initial configuration, you can administer the device from a browser, and the browser interface is as good as any of the commercial NAS devices and offers a good deal more configuration options. The FreeNAS also has ZeroConf networking using mDNS so Apple’s Bonjour has no problems finding it. Windows XP was also able to find the NAS device without problem through the network browser of through a plain old UNC path.
I would definitely recommend downloading the User’s Guide as it offers detailed information on the various configuration options, and instructions on initially setting up your drives although the fun does not have to stop there. Since the underlying minimal BSD installation is completely accessible you are able to play around with its configuration. For example, I was able to alter ssh on my FreeNAS to accept private key authentication so I could seamlessly scp files from my various machines as well as do file transfers from mounted SMB volumes. One bit of tinkering I found necessary was the send and receive buffer sizes on the CIFS configuration screen. Windows did not have a problem with the defaults, but file transfers and reads were dog slow on the Mac. After a bit of research I found that I needed to set them to 16384 and 32768 respectively.
FreeNAS is still listed as Beta (what isn’t these days), so make sure it’s stable before copying your sole copy of all your baby pictures to it. Some things I’d like to see for future releases is the addition of an mt-daapd daemon so it can double as iTunes music server and support for encryption. These are two things I could easily do on any Unix box, but because of the minimal BSD install many of the required libraries are not there. However, with the features it already has FreeNAS is an excellent, scalable solution to add Network Attached Storage to your network which can be used for large media files that need to be shared between multiple computers or the ever popular network backups–I know you’re all backing up regularly, right!
January 16, 2007 at 8:22 pm
I have been using FreeNAS for quite some time and I am a really big fan. In fact, I have made FreeNAS one of the focuses of my blog Daily Cup of Tech (http://www.DailyCupOfTech.com).
One of the things that really impresses me about FreeNAS is the fact that this free OS can be up and running in a matter of minutes, opening you up to the ability to store file on the system using Windows, FTP, RSYNC, and more! And it only takes up 32 MB on the disk!
I have written a number of articles about FreeNAS. A lot of it is about how to set up and configure the system to work with your Windows network. All of the articles can be found at http://www.dailycupoftech.com/category/freenas/. I hope you find them to be useful.
Tim
January 27, 2007 at 12:09 am
TechRepublic had a pretty good write up on FreeNAS, although they are more geared toward Enterprise customers.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/networking/?p=198&tag=nl.e040
I wouldn’t recommend Enterprises put their business critical data (or more to the point my business critical data) on something like FreeNAS or anything that has no supprt. However, for small businesses and home users who aren’t scared of rolling up their sleeves a little, FreeNAS is perfect
One of the commenters on the TechRepublic story also mentioned OpenFiler, which I haven’t tried, but looks intriguing. They commenter says it is more mature
February 10, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Just a note. I’ve found that while FreeNAS will mount ext3 drives, that support isn’t 100% native. FreeNAS actually sees them as ext2 drives which is fine unless your drive is not unmounted cleanly. Since FreeNAS doesn’t know how to read or deal with the journaling of ext3, it sees the drive as being unclean. I have had to boot the FreeNAS from Knoppix CD, mount adn unmount the drives so it’s marked clean and then re-mount in FreeNAS. If you’re mounting an ext3 drive from another system to FreenAS I recommend moving the data somewhere else temporarily and then re-formatting the drive as UFS. I’m using the 6.8 version of FreeNAS. Future versions may have better support.
February 12, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Found a very detailed tutorial on setting up FreeNAS
http://www.howtoforge.com/network_attached_storage_with_freenas
October 5, 2007 at 3:40 pm
@seanmcgrath The howtoforge article was very thorough. Gave me the confidence to set it up this morning!
October 13, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Good Luck with recovering Raid 1 Drives? I have been running FreeNAS for a month now and one of the drive in the mirror array went down and instead of degrading the mirror it crashed the Raid and it became unaccessible. Cannot even mount the UFS individually.