Running as Root

I ran out of space on my home file server about 4 or 5 months ago. Since drives have become so cheap I went out and got a pair of 500GB Seagates with the intention of running a software RAID (level 1, two drive mirroring–let's have the 4/5 debate some other time). As long as you're not doing a software RAID using Windows, my understanding is that it'll be stable and reasonably performant. Besides, I'm not an IT shop, just a home network and I also didn't feel like purchasing and dicking around with new hardware for this project. Of course, being lazy I just now got around to actually doing the work.

My first idea was to just put good old Ubuntu server on there and set up Samba, SSH, etc myself. It's not all that difficult to do. Then, I ran across a project calls FreeNAS. It's a FreeBSD-ish network attached storage project that borrows some of the configuration pages / scripts from m0n0wall (another project I started using instead of Freesco or Coyote Linux for my routing and firewall needs).

After deciding to give FreeNAS a try I pulled down the live CD, currently version 0.685RC1, and burned a CD. I slapped the drives into the old box (400Mhz Pentium leftover), threw in a CD and booted up. Running in this configuration I would boot from the CD each time, read the specific configuration from a floppy, and use the full space of both drives for data. It took a few minutes to figure out the correct order of doing things (add drive to configuration, format drive, create raid volume, format raid, create mount point, configure CIFS, configure SSH, add users and groups) but the whole thing took well under an hour. You have the option to use the web interface to configure everything, back up your config floppy, and even add and rebuild new drives in the RAID.

Once I was done with all of that I had a file server I could access from both Windows and Linux. I moved some files out there and played around testing the performance. Everything seems good. Yay. Finally a home IT project that wasn't a huge pain in the ass. If nothing breaks I'm a convert. I'll just have to move over the old files at some point and I'll be fully done.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.