I found a bit of NAS happiness on the road recently. I could never get NASLite to actually work. Try as I might, installs would just not work so I reserve opinion on that one. It must be cool; but i could not testify it. Next stop was FreeNAS. This is probably the best one of the breed. OpenFiler seems cool but it wants too much. It wants authentication set up front and won’t let me create users. How about just taking it to the next step OpenFiler and just offering me a default authentication module that works when I install and then the chance of adding OpenLDAP if I so desire?
But here’s the real thing for a small workgroup NAS device. You can do it without this stuff. Consider what it is you want. Backups, file sharing, rsync, samba, web? Document and music sharing? How about media sharing using an iTunes server and using web? Firefly media server will do it for the iTunes easily or pretty easily. The following are the tools that went into mikesnas:
- Samba - glue and stuffing for the modern warrior. This thing just rocks and makes things into integrating pieces.
- Rsync - set it up, write a script, find something. Use the force.
- Network aware backups - how about a nice rsync or other backup program? I found backup-manager but I’ve used others that are rsync based too.
- NFS - this is handy and makes sharing files easy.
- Lightweight web - how about lighttpd?
- Firefly Media Server - cool geeky suiteness. it will appear as if by magic in iTunes shares and let my family play with my gigs of mp3 coolness.
- Then there are the under the covers tools like ssh, screen.
But I can hear you saying, “but this all takes time and effort and work. I want a thing that’s all pulled together and integrated”. True. I started with Ubuntu Server 7.10 and selected the LAMP, Mail, and SSH server tasks. Then I did an apt-get like this:
apt-get install samba, nfs-kernel-server backup-manager mt-daapd portmap postfix
but I’m left with all the pieces but they’re not talking well. Its the curse of the self-built NAS appliance maker folks. You have to edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and the others. Most of all you have to “know” what you want and what it takes to get there. I added in almost 2tb of space that I mapped out as XFS drives including a RAID array and 1 tb usb drive which is very well behaved on Linux.
IF you don’t want to learn because learning means reading and it means lost time; try FreeNAS. It will get you close and close is better than being far away. I would say that building a NAS like server is not so easy and not so hard. You get the thrill of doing it yourself; or perhaps the frustration. The downside of finding a ready made is that you will always say, “if I could have done this part, it woulda, could shoulda…”
I foretell you will graduate from the all-in-one solution and build your own.
