NASty

So a friend wanted to implement some sort of NAS setup on his old, decaying PC. The friend in question has quite a large amount of legitimate ahem data. I recommended that he use Openfiler. I found the rPath version first and so I decided to check it out. I keep hearing that rPath builds very good task specific Machines, so I decided to give it a spin. rPath linux describes itself as a meta-distribution. God knows what that means, I was too lazy to look it up.

Downloaded a copy of the installation CD rather than a pre-built VM since my friend would probably use a physical install. Standard install, resembles the CentOS installation (It even uses Anaconda, so I’m guessing that it’s a customized RedHat distribution). The CD is about 350 MB or so, after installation it takes up 750 MB of space. Quite a lot for a NAS appliance wouldn’t you say? The application throws up a friendly URL that you can access it with. Like an idiot I logged in as root and didn’t get much of an administrative interface. Upon RTFM, I realized that the admin account is openfiler with the default password as ‘password’. One more reason to always read the fine manual.

Many, many, many configuration options are available. That is to say this is a serious NAS offering. Inbuilt LDAP, FTP, SSH, CIFS/SMB. The sad part is I was too lazy to try any of them out.

Then I read about FreeNAS and their killer 15MB award winning Virtual Machine . So I start up VMware and give it a go. And my, does it work like a charm. Out of the box. Nothing else required. The argument here would probably be that FreeNAS is quite insecure by default, but what the heck, I know what I’m doing and it’s my goddamn home network. I will configure security later. The main feature that I care about, SMB, works perfectly. Haven’t tested other features, but I’m guessing they work too.

Wish I had an old PC to turn into a home file server. Ah well, VMWare keeps me alive until then.