James Cochran’s Blog

For those who don’t know, NAS stands for Network Attached Storage.   No, I’m not talking about the rapper Nas.  Basically, it’s a hard drive that’s hooked up to your network that can be accessed from any computer on that network.  Basically.  It can be so much more than that though.

FreeNAS is something I’ve been running for a while now and, if nothing else, you can’t beat the price.  It runs on top of FreeBSD and allows you to connect to your data in multiple ways including CIFS, FTP, AFP, etc…  It has features like software RAID, a webserver, a torrent client, and Web GUI built in.  Don’t know what most of this stuff is?  A little bit of Wikipedia searching and hanging out in the FreeNAS forums will get you going with no problem at all.

When I started out using FreeNAS it was a few years back and all I wanted to do was use some extra hard drives I had laying around not doing anything useful.  I knew what a NAS was so I started looking for enclosures because, yes, they have dedicated (or embedded) devices that are meant for that sort of thing.  Then I stumbled across some different solutions that would utilize hardware I already had laying around.  Being the geek I am I, of course, have several old machines laying around collecting dust.  I fired one up, threw in the disk, and shortly after I had the whole shebang going.

Today I’ve got it set up as an indispensable part of my set up.  I have all the function I need with plenty of stuff still built into it I’m not using that I can play with.  I  have three 200GB drives and a an external 500GB drive that I can access from my PC or any of my Macs in my house using network shares and the Apple Filing Protocol.  Actually I can get to my stuff from anywhere I have a network connection by using FTP.  I’ve also got an always on Torrent program that I can add torrents to from anywhere I have an internet connection.  Most recently with the newest update I turned on the webserver which means this little box can even serve up it’s own webpages to the internet.  How awesome is that?

If you find this exciting then get ready, because I’m going to start blogging some instructions on how to get this set up.  First we’ll use VirtualBox to virtualize the system on the computer you already have so you can play around with it before deciding if you want to throw together some hardware to run the server.  Your homework for today is to download and install VirtualBox and the next time we’re together I’ll walk you through installing FreeNAS and getting a shared drive set up.  Stay tuned!