Here’s a a nice feature-comparison chart. <\/a><\/p>\nA rather unique thing about FreeNAS is that they recommend installing the OS onto a USB memory stick or SD memory card, and then configuring your PC’s BIOS to boot from it. That way, all of the hard drive space in the machine can be devoted to sharing data on your network. The CD image you download and burn simply acts as an easy initial installer to get you to this point. In my case, I had no problem installing it onto a 4 GB USB memory stick I had lying around. I believe one as small as 2 GB can be used, however. After the system restarts from the memory stick, you’re presented with a basic menu of options that lets you do such things as shut down\/restart the machine or reconfigure the network card to use a static IP address. (It defaults to getting one via DHCP.) Everything else is controlled via a web browser on any other computer on your network. You log into the FreeNAS box with a username of “admin” and a password of “freenas” to get started using it via web.<\/p>\n
At this point, you want to configure a few basic things like the correct time-zone you’re in, and then configure the hard drive storage itself. In my case, I was able to add all four of my 2 TB drives into a “pool”, with the option to use software “z-raid” on all of them. This configuration gave me a total of about 6 TB of free space, while formatting the drives in such a manner so no data would be lost even if any one of the four drives happened to fail. After that, I had the ability to create the virtual disk volumes on top of it, which might be handy for Time Machine backups if you want to make sure no one Mac on your network can use up more than a certain amount of the total available drive space with its backups. Lastly, I could enable and configure the type of file shares I wanted to be active on FreeNAS. It defaults with NO sharing functionality enabled, but you can create NFS shares, Samba (Windows-compatible) file shares, and Apple File System (AFS) shares in any combination you like. A share specifically for Time Machine backups is done by creating a new AFS share, giving it a sensible share name (like “Network Time Machine”), and toggling an option that tells FreeNAS it’s a Time Machine share type. You need to create a new user account and password (easily doable under an Accounts area in the FreeNAS setup screens) for the client computers to log in with. For one of my Macs to see and start using it for backups, the only extra step is to connect to the share using the “Go” menu in the Finder and selecting “Connect to Server”.\u00a0 Then when the “freenas” server appears with the “Network Time Machine” share listed on it, you’re prompted for the username and password with the option to check the box so your Mac remembers it for future connections, which you’ll want to do. Now, Time Machine can be pointed to that share when you go into its configuration. To make sure your Mac automatically reconnects that share every time you restart it or log off and back on again?\u00a0 Simply drag the “Network Time Machine” share icon on your desktop into the “Login Items” list under “System Preferences” and “Accounts” for your user account.<\/p>\n
I’ve only just begun playing with my new FreeNAS server, but so far, I think it has a lot of potential. I believe the next scheduled update is an 8.01 release that will simply fix a few bugs, but version 8.1 sounds like the one many people are really waiting for. I know I’d like to use the iTunes server functionality, at least, so I have a central collection of music that’s accessible by any computer in the house running iTunes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a member of a family of five who are all avid computer users, one of our growing problems has been sensibly managing an increasing amount of data. I’ve had our home wired with gigabit Ethernet for a while now, which makes the process of copying large files (such as video) from one computer to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,38],"tags":[54,52,711,51,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8126,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/8126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}