Tried Out FreeNAS

Wow. Things have been pretty crazy this month. Classes all worked out so I've been running 1-2 midterms a week for a month now. Took the last one today, so only two more weeks and I get a week off before plunging in again.

The craziness means that I haven't gotten to work on anything too exciting lately. One thing I've been testing out this week is FreeNAS. This was my first serious foray off my well beaten path through Debian-based Linux, and I was pretty impressed.

FreeNAS is a BSD based system that you install on a computer and then log into it's web interface to configure all the different ways to make its hard drives available to the network to back up and share files. I loaded it up on KWF4, with its 100GB and 120GB hard drive. Samba and FTP worked just as I liked it to out of the box, which is contrasted with Linux, where things are a little lacking. A system like this would be outstanding at any kind of LAN party for game patches, music, etc.

The one thing that bothered me was a lack of an easy lvm-like system. It very well may be buried somewhere in the RAID system, but I've mighty used to having a 220GB virtual drive in this computer when I'm running Linux. As it stands now, it's two seperate samba shares, one for each drive, which is fine, but I know that better can be done.

More than anything else, my ignorance of BSD is showing. As an appliance operator though, I'm having a good time.

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