Anyone used Openfiler or Freenas?

VeNT · 5 Dec 2008 at 14:11

I'm looking at setting up an old desktop as a NAS for the office atm, it's just to share about 50GB of docs etc on a workgroup network with no existing server
I've been looking at freenas SMEserver and openfiler. does anyone have ANY experience with these?
freenas seems simplest to use, openfiler does some fancy stuff I don't need and I've not been able to get SMEserver working in VM yet.

if anyone can give my any advice as to any issues they have had with any of these so I know what to look out for I would be very grateful!

oddjob62 · 5 Dec 2008 at 14:29

I set up openfiler as an ISCSI back end when i was doing VMware testing. No issues really, except at one point in the setting up of volumes, there is more information lower down on one of the pages, but it took me hours before i noticed, hehe.

VeNT · 5 Dec 2008 at 14:31

yeah thats somthing I was annoyed with openfiler, workgroup settings are under A/D for some reason! the layout is frankly crap, also I am not happy with having to pay for a manual, let alone a bad one!

atomiser · 5 Dec 2008 at 17:23

yep, i've used freenas before...dead easy to install...really nice webui...pretty much does what it says on the tin. have you thought about how you are doing to do both redundancy within the machine, and also backup of the data?

VeNT · 5 Dec 2008 at 23:35

nope
currently we backup to USB hard disks using syncback but I'd hope for better from freenas

encephalopathy · 10 Dec 2008 at 13:35

i used freenas running off a 256mb cf card in a cf>ide adapter. its very easy to install and use but be aware that it recommends using its own file system (?u3) rather than ntfs for best stability. i'm not sure if this would make it more difficult to recover data if things went wrong compared to recovering data from an ntfs formatted drive. i had no problems accessing data from windows on the freenas pc whatsoever. i did have problems however with the media streaming from it (fuppes av) not agreeing with my buffalo linktheatre. i did like the way once it was installed and setup you could run it headless - no mouse/keyboard/monitor required to be plugged in

i was running it on a celeron 1200, 512mb ram and an adaptec 2610sa sata raid card with 4x500gb drives