Build your own Network Attached Storage NAS for FREE see this Video Tutorial
Its true that building a storage infrastructure is an expensive exercise. But you can also build an inexpensive storage solution if you dont want a mission critical solution.Here are videos explaining how you can build your own Network Attached Storage NAS.You can build a NAS storage target using any of supported old PC but if you can put a good enough machine(P4 processor,around 512megabytes of RAM) add 2-3 Gigabit NIC cards(1000Mbps Network cards) then you can build a heavy duty NAS box. The beauty of this whole story is the software which is the heart of this whole storage solution is free its called "FreeNAS". Its a FreeBSD based OS which you can download for free from freenas.org. You can get the embedded version or live version - you can download the iso .
Burn this iso file on a CD.
Boot your machine with this FreeNAS live bootable CD.
Do necessary configurations like : Add drives,Format drives,Mount drives,Enable services like : NFS,FTP,CIFS
NFS(Network File System) > To access NAS volumes from Solaris,Linux or Unix flavours
CIFS (Common Internet File System)(Same as windows file sharing protocol) > To access across Windows OS machines
FTP(File Transfer Protocol) to access from any machine(Win/*nix) as long as you have a FTP client installed
other services like ssh etc/
Next configuration is if you are choosing NFS allow permissions to the IP or IP address range so that they can access these NAS volumes.
Thats it the whole NAS configuration can be completed in less than an hour including boottime.
Watch these videos & write your feedback to roger.smithson @ gmail.com about your experiment. More advanced Storage videos are being created by some of my blog readers.
I'm in the process of creating a separate website where you can access lots of Storage advanced tutorial Videos. Its all going to be video based tutorial to help you learn fast. Access to this Membership website will be a paid service. Do write & tell us if you are interested to pay to get access to this site.I want to limit the number of members to the paid site to just 50 members. So email today roger.smithson@gmail.com if you are interested in this paid service.
Yes information is available on loads of other sites for FREE why am I charging for my website access. I've kept this blog growing for more than a year but the support recieved in return for this effort was not that great. So I thought if I wanna build something much more advanced & efficient keeping it free will not help since people dont take it seriously. I'm sure there are hundreds or thousands who got benefited from this blog but hardly few have done anything to help this grow. For those of you who supported me till now I'll give free access to the membership website.For others it will be a paid website. Because to succeed you need filtered information. Information which helps you take less time to succeed in your career.
Do email if you are willing to pay for special member site access where advanced Storage tutorials are being made accessible.
FreeNAS configuration steps explained in detail
Need patience video : FreeNAS booting & commandline configuration in DOS kinda scree
Find out how many servers being made to run on FreeNAS
Making a 4 Terabyte Server with Freenas.
