Network Attached Storage

[otester]

I want to increase overall storage on my networks, instead of having localised huge hard-drives, I'd rather have one great big PC stuffed with them.

I have looked at FreeNAS but not sure exactly how to go about this and I am relatively new to linux.

Idea is fill it with 4x1.5TB SATAII drives, each PC can access them like a hard-drive, how simple is it to go about doing this?


Thanks in advance,

oli

[inside-man]

Hello, FreeNAS seems to be the right choice for you, it should be not a problem to install this, download an image, burn it and install it on you machine. You have to make the initial installtion on the console directly on this computer after that it is managable by web. There should no (or less) experience required....
But if you want to make a little bit more with the machine (you have a server which is always reachable..) for instance a groupware solution, you should install a normal server distribution... (for instance debian or ubuntu or gentoo), and enable your features, this should be o.k. too...
You should read about the following topics:
LVM, webmin, SAMBA, NFS

If this is your first installation, you should budget some time for these tasks....
Good Luck
Randolf Balasus

[Ziplock]

Hi,

Haven't had anything to do with FreeNAS, but NFS and SAMBA work perfectly well. Use NFS if it's just Linux boxes you are sharing with. SAMBA is probably better for Windows clients, although NFS can be made to work.

[jmadero]

at my old place we used something like this

Netgear SC101 NAS Network Hard Drive Storage Enclosure - eBay (item 350163100215 end time Apr-07-09 13:15:00 PDT)

with samba installed it worked great. Ours was actually wireless but we wired it to make it a bit faster. Then you can just toss in one or two big hard drives, this way you're not using an insane amount of electricity or buying a whole system just to have extra networked drive space.

Like I said, this isn't the exact one but I'm sure that it would be fairly straightforward to get it to work, almost all of them use a really basic nix setup to get the drives to share