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Buy No2 Vaporizer

I run FreeNAS on two different machines. One is on my local network and the other is on my brother's network and it's all linked through a VPN. The FreeNAS machines work real well and there's even a new version out (which I haven't upgraded to yet). The local machine is a Celeron 600 with 256mb of ram. It's got 2 80gb internal drives and 2 external 250gb usb drives. The other box is a Celeron 800 with 384mb ram and an internal 300gb drive.

I particularly like the web interface and it's easy to setup. Both boxes have been up and running for about a year now.

Another good option is an NSLU2 (made by Linksys). I have one of these on the network as well (for basic backup) which my wife uses from her windows laptop (I also have a folder or two mounted through cifs to my openSuse 10.2 box).

My old junker is an 800Mhz so I might give freeNAS a try over the weekend.
What do you mean by all link by VPN?
For your setup, where is the freeNAS os installed? Some use a compact flash to IDE adapter so the hard drive contains only data. I might go simple and install the OS onto the data drive (all on one). Can you offer any other suggestions before I give it a try?

miker
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MEDICAL MARIJUANA DOCTOR

The VPN is a virtual private network. I have a router/firewall attached to my cable modem which creates a secure link to my brother's router/firewall (devices are sold just for this). Then when I look at my network places his computers show up as well as mine. Basically I use it for secure connections between our networks.

As far as the FreeNAS box itself goes, my box was booting from a USB flash drive but I have the os installed on an old 3gb ide drive. If you have one lying around that's 32-128mb then you will be fine. I've tried the install on one drive thing and I had a hard time getting it just the way I wanted. My brother's box is installed on an old zip disk and then the hard drives are just for data. The recommended setup is to install the os on a different drive than the data.

The issue I ran into was that once installed you connect to the box using a web browser (default password: freenas) and then setup your shares. I partially didn't understand the way hardware was named (which is probably part of it) but you create partitions using their tools, which is easy. Then create shares out of them. There were some caveats in earlier versions of FreeNAS which wouldn't let you create the extra partition on the drive where the os is installed (they did this for security reasons) but I think the automatic installer fixes all of this now.

All in all, I would plan on installing once just to see how it goes (install takes less than 5 minutes once the cd is burnt). Then mess everything up and reinstall. Then do your final install where you start copying stuff over to it and have it configured the way you like.

Yes, I just put together a FreeNAS box about 3 weeks ago. It's filling up with HDTV shows I've recorded with KnoppMyth. I first tried the 0.684b version and couldn't get it to format a drive properly. A friend of mine also tried that version and it kept crashing on him. So, I dropped back to 0.68 and it worked right off the bat - using the exact setup steps that failed in 0.684b! (conclusion: 0.684b is BUGGY).

My system is a 700MHz Celeron with 512MB of SDRAM, and a GigE card for communication. It works well. I got a compact flash to IDE adapter and am using a 256Meg Compact Flash card as the boot drive. FreeNAS shares it's data easily over SAMBA (Windows Networking). I can log onto it from any Windows pc in my home and drop files into it. It is a pretty nice use of an older pc!

Eric

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

I've been exerimenting with freeNas, although I am not using it in production yet. The web interface for adminstering it is great and it has support for soft-raid. My box is an old dell XPS T500, P3-500mhz, 386MB RAM. I ran some experiments, and here is where it get's interesting:

1. Tranfsering a ~1GByte file via CIFS/Samba on freeNas, the sustained transfer rate was ~45mbits/second.

2. I then did a clean install of knoppmyth (R5D1), on the same machine, disabled the backend / frontend processes and tried to transfer the same file. The sustained transfer rate was closer to ~60mbits/second.

So my experinece is that the Knoppmyth install can be used to provide a higher-performing NAS server than FreeNAS. On the other hand:

1. freeNas defintely provides a very nice web-based admin tool, and i haven't found any webmin tools that could be used with a knoppmyth install that come close. (This is not a complaint -- Knoppmyth was not designed for this purpose.)

2. freeNas's "soft raid" capability will work with USB as well as fixed drives. The last time I tried, LVM would not work with USB drives.

Choices, choices, choices...

Marc

There were a few posts on the FreeNAS forum about speeding up the performance. Apparently, out of the box, the networking settings are not optimized for TCP/IP networking with CIFS/Samba. I can't remember the settings right now, but one user made some updates and managed to regain some of the speed loss that you are talking about. They also mentioned that the use of a swap partition also dramatically improved performance.

I have a problem when I try to use their forums. When I do a search various ads show for job searchs show up and obscure part of the result. Are you seeing this, and if so, is there a way to get that stuff to go away?

Can you quote any specifics? I tried searching and didn't come up with any FreeNAS forum posts with speedup information.

Thanks!
Eric

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

If you like the UI of FreeNAS you might take a gander at m0n0wall as your firewall/router. It's the source of the PHP web I/F used by FreeNAS and pfSense (another fork of m0n0wall). I've been using m0n0wall and pfSense for a couple of years now and they are absolutely rock-solid. I can push 100M bits/sec through the router in both directions without it even breaking a sweat.

http://m0n0.ch/wall

http://www.pfsense.org

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Do you code to live, or live to code?
Search LinHES forum through Google

I have it bookmarked at home so I'll post the link when I get home.

Anyone try Openfiler?

http://www.openfiler.com/

It is based on rPath (CentOS / RHEL). I am probably gonna try out both OpenNas and Openfiler.

I've tried both and I like the interface of FreenNAS a lot better then Openfiler

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KnoppMyth Folding@home
How to setup F@H
F@H Stats Page

If anyone is interested, here is a how to on setting up Freenas:

Linkage

With the help of the step by step tutorial at: h??p://www.howtoforge.com/network_attached_storage_with_freenas
I managed to get it up and running on no time at all. No problems mapping the drive in XP to drag and drop files onto.

One question:
Lets say I have all my avi files stored on the freenas box. How do I get Knoppmyth to see them in the other box across the network?

miker
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Mary jane