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My freeNAS project


CBaargh

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The goal of this project was to build a NAS as cheap as possible. I live in a flat with 3 other guys and a NAS seemed like the best way to allow everyone access to media, and it gives everyone somewhere to backup important files.

While googling NAS solutions i came across a Hak5 episode on building a FreeNAS box, so thanks to Hak5 for that! Being a cheap / poor student I managed to score an old computer from uni, that gave me a motherboard, CPU, CD ROM drive, and an old IDE HDD. I took all but one drive out of my primary computer and purchased two more 500GB Western Digital drives. Here's the hardware specs:

- ASUS_a7v8x-mx_se FREE

- AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1725MHz) FREE

- 512mb DDR (333MHz) FREE

- SiI3114 SATA PCI controller card $25 US

- 52x IDE CD drive FREE

- Samsung 1TB F1 HDD $100 US

- 2x Western Digital 500GB HDD's $120 US

- Western Digital 320GB HDD FREE

- ancient Maxtor 60GB IDE HDD FREE

- ancient Seagate Barracuda 40GB HDD FREE

- 450W PSU FREE

- Gigabyte GZ-X6 case $30US

Where it says FREE that means i managed to get the parts free from old PCs of people I know.

I don't actually have FreeNAS installed on any of the drives, it just boots up off the CD and loads a config file stored on a usb key in the back of the computer. So easy! After mounting, formatting, etc all the disks I share them in the CIFS/SMB service and everyone can map the drives and access them via my computer.

I'm really happy with how this project turned out, very cheap and it works really well. FreeNas is very easy to setup and requires very little power run.

The old IDE drives are in there so i can set up an experimental software RAID config. Next I would like to install ESXi and run FreeNAS virtually alongside ClarkConnect. Why? Because I can :)

comments?

Cheers

Tom

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i have a Freenas box in a relatives office andi just cannot seem to get everyone setup right. the main boss can access her share and the shares of the other users but the 2 other office workers cannot see their shares. i have a personal share for each of them and a global share so that they can share presentations and such without having to email it to each other and overloading their email system. all of the user names match up right and i have local authentication setup so they log in with their passwords for their local machines to the matching passwords on the NAS.

i just cannot get the 2 other office workers to see their shares at all.

they are all running Mac OS X. and there will be 2 windows PCs connected as well but those are just ancient remnants that will just be doing data backups to (financials and other things like that)

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  • 2 months later...
i have a Freenas box in a relatives office andi just cannot seem to get everyone setup right. the main boss can access her share and the shares of the other users but the 2 other office workers cannot see their shares. i have a personal share for each of them and a global share so that they can share presentations and such without having to email it to each other and overloading their email system. all of the user names match up right and i have local authentication setup so they log in with their passwords for their local machines to the matching passwords on the NAS.

i just cannot get the 2 other office workers to see their shares at all.

they are all running Mac OS X. and there will be 2 windows PCs connected as well but those are just ancient remnants that will just be doing data backups to (financials and other things like that)

Did you enable both AFP and bonjour discovery? this should help the Mac OS X users connect, I have a rather large FreeNAS implementation with many Mac OS X clients and its working impeccably. Failing that you could just create some Apple scripts to mount the desired shares and align them with a hot key or loginwindow item :)

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