FreeNAS

My farther recently reminded me that I had promised some time ago (sorry!) to copy his documents and pictures from an ageing desktop to his new laptop. I duly completed the task, and the topic of what to do with the old desktop came up; Take it to the recycling centre was on the tip of my tongue when I remembered that I had been thinking about setting up a Network Attached Server (NAS) for sometime as my USB hard drives were getting full. So I suggested that he donate the aging desktop (Intel Celeron 1.8GHz, 512MB of RAM….) to me as a candidate to be reused as a NAS.

I remembered reading an article in a recent PC Pro magazine about FreeNAS, and set about setting up the system. FreeNAS is available from www.freenas.org.

FreeNAS is available from www.freenas.org.

FreeNAS is a (Network Attached Storage) program that can be run on a “older” PC that you may have lying around. In my case I wanted to setup a system to keep backups of my laptop’s, and development projects, I also vaguely had the idea to stream MP3’s and video to Sony PS3. The other requirement was to support a RAID 1 setup. Free BSD is based upon the Unix FreeBSD distribution, however please do not let the “Unix” word put you off, the installation is completed using guided wizard and setup is via a graphical web interface, not one Unix command need be entered via the keyboard.

The first thing is to decide if you want to run freeNAS from a USB stick / CD or from a hard-disk , for the former you need to download the “Live CD” and the latter the “Embedded”, you also have the option to download the a VMware images. For this install I want to run the FreeNAS from the installed hard-disk therefore I download the “embedded” and the installation steps are listed as such.

Installation :

1. Download the “Embedded” image from the website, and burn to a CD (If you do not have a image burning tool installed, a good option is ImageBurn.

2. Load the CD into the target machine for the install, during the power-on-self-check enter setup and check that the Boot Order is set to CD first.

3. FreeNAS will boot, it will show an initial menu giving boot options -“Do Nothing Here” – after a few seconds the load will continue. After a short time the console setup menu is shown (see below)

4. Select option”9” – “Install and Upgrade” Menu is then shown (see below).

5. Select option “3” to create two partitions on the hard drive, one containing the FreeNAS software the other to hold the “data” to be stored. A warning message is shown (see below)

6. Select “OK” – You are then prompted to select the CD/DVD device that contains the FeeeNAS install CD, and the hard drive for installation (see below)

7. You are then prompted for the size of the install, the minimum is 128MB, I choose 512MB on the premise that I am sure to want to add something later, and in any-case 0.5GB is not a significant proportion of a modern hard drive.

8. The install will then complete and you are requested to remove the CD and reboot the machine (TIP: If you forget to remove the CD then you are going to have a Groundhog Day experience!)

9. After the reboot you will be again shown the “Console Setup” menu (Note: Option 9 should now be missing – if it is not then you forgot to remove the CD!) – Select option “2” to configure the LAN IP address. When prompted choose:
- Use DCHP -> Yes
- IPV6 -> Yes
- AutoConfig -> Yes

You will then be given the IP address, make note of it.

That’s it for the install, now continue with the setup via the Web Interface.

Configuration via the web interface:

1. Start up the web browser and type in the address, in my case this was as follows http://192.168.0.20/. You will be prompted for a user name (Admin) and password (freenas). You should then see the configuration interface.

2. First we need to configure the disk drive,
select Disks->Management

Click on the plus on the far right of the screen

Now select the disk to add, note if you have more than one hard disk installed you should add all of them one at time.

Once added, click the update to initialise the disk.

If you have more than one physical disk in your system, repeat for each.

3. Now we need to mount the disk,
select Disks->Mount

Click on the plus on the far right of the screen

 

Now, leave “type” as is, select the disk that you added in step 2, Set the partition type, if this is hard drive where FreeNAS is installed (normal situation based on install above) then you must select option 2 (second MBR on the disk). Finally add a name for the share, and click Add at the bottom of the page.

Finally, click update to enable the mount point.

If added more than one physical disk in your system, repeat for each disk.

4. Final setup to allow access to the new storage via Windows based PC you need to setup CIFS/SMB,
select Services->CIFS/SMB

Select shares tab, and click the “plus” on the far right of the screen.

 
Add a name and comment for the mount point, and select via … button the path

 

 

 

Click add at the bottom of the page.
Click update to enable the share.

Finally select the “settings” Tab, click the “enable” tick box and go to the bottom of the page and select “Save and Restart”.

That’s it, the Storage device should now be visible in the network neighbourhood and you can map a network drive to the share.