As submitted to http://acanac.org/blogs/geek/

Last night I embarked upon a mission to get my media drives back online.  Not sure what I am talking about?  Let me start from the beginning then.  I have a decent sized home network.  I have multiple servers in a rack which include web servers, database servers, firewall and routing appliances, domain controllers, and miscellaneous other devices.  Recently, I did a bit of a server consolidation and merged certain services and servers to create a more efficient design.  The goal was to eliminate a server through this project and that was what I did.  The problem was that when I was done, I had some IDE drives left over that couldn't fit into my new SCSI based system that held the domain controller which used to double as a file server.  That was a mouthful.  So I went a couple of weeks with network storage while I devised a plan.

What I came up with brought back the eliminated system, which totally messed up my plan to green up my server room.  lol

Back to yesterday...  I rebuilt the old AMD 1200+ system with the IDE drives and got ready to learn about FreeNAS.  FreeNAS is a free NAS server built on the FreeBSD platform.  One of the great things about it is that it runs from a CD.  You basically just plug a small USB key into the system to write server configuration to, then set the bios to boot from CD.  It's as simple as that.  Well, there might be a few extra steps, but not many!  When you boot it up for the first time, you have to use a console to complete some very basic setup.  Using the menu based system you can assign an interface and setup you IP address.  Once that is complete, simply load the web interface from any browser on your network and finish the configuration.  I won't get into all of the details here, the FreeNAS wiki has all you need to get up and running. 

FreeNAS will allow you to connect to a domain or run standalone.  It also works with multiple file systems.  I added one UFS drive and two NTFS drives and it had no problem with either of them.  The system will monitor the drives using S.M.A.R.T. and email you if there are any problems.  It literally took just over an hour to get the whole thing going and configured just the way I wanted it.  If you are in the market for a NAS setup, I strongly recommend checking it out!