This past September I came across this great little article. Which took me to this one.
A NAS (Network Attached Storage) sounded like a great idea for my wife's old computer.
I researched it a little more at the following websites:
How I Set Up a Home File Server For Free - A Review of FreeNAS
FreeNAS project website
One of the more important things to realize is that FreeNAS is built on FreeBSD. I found that visiting their documentation site proved quite valuable in taking on this project, particularly the hardware compatibility list for the version of FreeBSD my particular version of FreeNAS is derived from. I decided to use FreeNAS 0.7.2.7903 (the latest stable build at the time) which when I was finally able to boot from the CD I discovered it was built on FreeBSD 7.3. (Note there's really no correlation between FreeBSD release numbers and FreeNAS release numbers.)
That being said, I went to FreeBSD releases page and clicked on the hardware notes for FreeBSD 7.3 to ensure the hardware I was running was compatible (i.e. built in drivers.) (FYI - The little devil caricature for FreeBSD was designed by John Lasseter from Pixar...)
Now, I had experimented with Linux in the past and knew that finding and installing drivers can be a nightmare. But as far as I could tell, everything looked compatible with what I had.
Right....
The first problem I had, was that I couldn't boot from the CD. And the boot process would sometimes get further along than other times. And it didn't matter what I booted from, whether it was a Windows, Linux or FreeNAS boot CD. It was strangely intermittent. It would try to boot from the CD, but eventually it hang up the machine on install.
Describing this problem to a coworker the next day, he suggested maybe my optical drive is done for.
Sure enough, swapping my Mitsumi CR-4802TE with an optical drive from my XP machine fixed that problem. And I was finally able to boot from the CD. Any CD. Now I've got a pretty much useless optical drive. That has a nice stepper motor in it....and a laser.... hmm...future project maybe? We'll see...anyways...on with my FreeNAS project.
Once I had FreeNAS up and running off the live CD, I wanted to install it on an old USB drive and boot from it. Normally, that means selecting to boot from it in the BIOS. But of course my hardware was so old, it was before USB drives were really popular. My options:
USB-FDD (Floppy-not enough space for FreeNAS)
USB-ZIP (Remember zip disks?)
After struggling with this for a few days I found the following helpful sites:
http://www.freenaskb.info/kb/?View=entry&EntryID=157
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/booting-linux-from-usb-zip-on-older-systems/
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/testing-your-system-for-usb-boot-compatibility/
After trying all of these things, I gave up on trying to boot from a USB drive with my hardware. Mostly because the compatibility test didn't work. And just to be sure, I loaded Ubuntu 11.4 on a live CD (now that the CD drive was replaced....) and followed the directions to make my USB drive like a USB-ZIP disk. Which also didn't work. (And looking at my USB drives later, showed that the test does set up a 4th partition on a USB drive so it's like a ZIP disk. So really, if the test doesn't work, and you can't boot from USB, do what I did.)
I bought these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186002
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208338
It's nice because I get a removable media, and my hardware thinks it's a hard drive. Which worked great. It also doesn't take up a drive bay (so more storage) and also doesn't take up any room on networked drives.
Consulting these instructions, as well as Parts 1 and 2 of these instructions, I finally had my FreeNAS operating system installed and had configured my drives through a web browser on my Windows 7 computer.
Now to test it. I started to copy a 6GB file over to the NAS. Transfer rate: 12MB/sec.
Lame.
I then set out to figure out where the bottle neck would be.
No comments:
Post a Comment