Gazing the FreeNAS server
Have you ever heard about an open source NAS server called FreeNas? FreeNAS is free to draw on and deploy without cost. Interested now? Let us have a look at it.
FreeNAS is an open source project published under the BSD license. The software is popular enough to have gotten more than 20,000 downloads last month. You can download the FreeNAS 0.66 ISO image and burned it onto a CD. FreeNAS can convert a PC into a network-attached storage server. The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, contains an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media.
To embark with FreeNAS, you need a PC or server with at least 96MB of memory, a network adapter, and at least one hard disk. In example, if you use an older PC with four IDE drives attached, you can install FreeNAS on one of the disks and use the other three as a RAID 5 set. If your test machine supports only four IDE drives, you are allowed to provisionally modify one of the drives for a CD-ROM drive, install FreeNAS, and swap back the hard disk before configuring the disks. Booting the PC from the CD gets FreeNAS up and running, but you still need to configure it. Follow the instructions in the FreeNAS setup and user guide.
Remember, while doing the initial configuration, the FreeNAS server does not do any auto assignment of the network card. You must assign the network card as laid out in the "LAN interface and IP configuration" section of the user guide. Once you have the box working, enter the IP address you assigned the FreeNAS server into the address bar of a Web browser. You will be impelled for a username and password. The defaults are "admin" and "freenas". The start page shows some system information, such as the version number and memory usage, with a menu on the left side.
Subsequently, to get the RAID disks working, first thing to know is that only whole hard disks can be used for RAID sets, so if you install the FreeNAS server onto one of your disks (rather than onto a USB pen drive), then that disk cannot be used as part of a RAID set. Also, to get the maximum space from your RAID sets, use disks of the same or similar size. Some versions of FreeNAS insist on the drives being exactly the same size due to some bugs in the software. One other thing to watch while creating a mount point for a RAID set is that you must change the partition type to Software RAID.
The final step to make the volume available on the network is to configure the network services, such as CIFS and FTP. Windows machines use the CIFS protocol to access files over the network. CIFS is configured on the CIFS page in the Services section. To enable it, tick the Enable box at the top right and then set the workgroup name. Anonymous authentication is the easiest to get up and running, and you will hit upon options for authenticating locally defined users and using domain-based authentication. After clicking Save, you will proficient to access the FreeNAS server from a Windows machine. While you copying over some files, all the little LEDs will blink rapidly as the disks worked in unison. That means your FreeNAS server is fully functional!
For the basic user, the Web management interface will be sufficient since it is comprehensive enough, that to administer the server you do not need to use the command line. There is provision for full shell access via SSH but it is not necessary to try it. Reading the forums on freenas.org, which are the primary venue for support, shows that some people do use the command line for some more exotic configurations.
In most testing, the core FreeNAS system was stable, but it is possible to get the system configuration into a confused state. For example, when creating your first local user, you might ignore the message that a group must be created first and blindly went ahead and tried to create the user. This resulted in some internal errors, and from that point on all local user authentications failed. The only way to fix the situation was to restore the FreeNAS server to the factory defaults and reconfigure the system from the beginning. If you respect the warnings and messages, you should not have any problems.
To safe and sound your server you need to change the default password for the Web management interface. It also might be worth disabling the console menu if physical access to the server is not limited.
One drawback of the software is the lack of granularity in setting access rights to shares. The local user authentication model is an all-or-nothing affair. You cannot set some users to be read-only or others to only have access to certain shares. Once a user is authenticated, he has full access to all the shared storage.
The FreeNAS server has lots of potential and is under active development; there were 11 point releases in the first four months of 2006 alone. It is a good alternative for building a simple network server without having to install a full-blown version of Linux or FreeBSD. It is also a good way to make use of aging hardware, as its system requirements are quite modest by today's standard.
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