So, here I am thinking that it’s time to update my home network’s file server. My antique Pentium 1 box is starting to show it’s age. Sure, it’s OK and is managing when it’s only me accessing it but put a few more people on it and it dies. It’s got a great, old mega-tower case with heaps of space for hard drives, but it’s power supply is running *really* noisy. This plus the slow-down when transferring huge files or supporting multiple clients and, well, sure, it’s time to kill it.
Talk about serendipity, I stumble over FreeNAS, a FreeBSD based network storage system. Awesome system. You download a 30Mb ISO, burn it onto CD, boot from it and (with a few checks of the manual :) set up your server. Once you’ve got the network card selected and IP address specified, you can start managing it via the web based interface.
Wow – talk about easy – want to add new hard drives? Piece of cake. Want some of them in a RAID structure? Hell yeah – sure, it’s software based, but with a Pentium III and 256Mb of RAM, who cares ‘cos damn it’s fast. Plus, it’s a breeze to add support for Windows, Apple, FTP, etc. Litterally just clicking and configuring and it’s done.
So so so happy with this. Definitely a recommended way of converting an older machine into a useful network file server.