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Saturday, January 13, 2007
Garbage into Gadgets - FreeNAS is Great Have an old PC? There is almost no drive chassis NAS available that will work better than your garbage computer + FreeNAS.It takes less than 32MB, and you can run it from the hard drive, a CD ROM, a Compact Flash card, or a USB drive if your motherboard supports it. In my case, I used an old 64MB Compact Flash card. I bought a CF-to-IDE adapter for about $5 off of eBay, plugged the card in like a hard drive, and started the FreeNAS CD that I had created from a downloadable ISO. It would probably be a lot less trouble to have just installed it on a the hard drive I wanted to use, but they were still en route. It started up and parked itself at 192.168.1.250. I had no monitor or keyboard connected to it, and no problem at all. Connected from another computer and could configure whatever I wanted. Eventually got my hard drives shipped, and threw three in there. Restarted, configured in the web interface, and I'm rocking and rolling. Apparently, I can even upgrade the software as though it was firmware now, so I'll never need to try to connect it to a keyboard or monitor again. So that FIVE pieces of trash that were repurposed into something extremely useful - Old Cyrix 800MHz PC - 3 Old failed hard drives replaced by Seagate under warranty - Old 64MB CF Card I spent $5 on the card adapter, but that was unnecessary really, just for fun. For the simplest possible procedure-- if you have an old computer, you don't to open or anything, you just want it to act as a server as it is. 1. Take the CPU, disconnect everything from the outside. Plug in power and your network. 2. Download the ISO from FreeNAS here and burn it to a CD. 3. Turn on the power, go to another computer's browser and type 192.168.1.250. 4. Click on Disks > Management and follow the directions to prepare the hard drive, I'd recommend the UFS file system. 5. Click on Services > CIFS and name your server on the network. All done! Now you can see the server on your Windows network, and you don't have a wasted piece of junk in your closet. You now have more files to keep track of and worry about backing up. Most likely porn. Congrats.
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Gadgetize: Garbage into Gadgets - FreeNAS is Great