OSDCM

Got a new PC for Christmas and not sure what to do with your old one?

Posted on December 28th, 2007 in Main

It seems that everyone these days has some spare computer parts laying around the house. We cannot just toss them in the trash, so we have old beige cases, power supples that have turned into dust bunny farms, and a museum of hard drives. What is one to do with their supply of obsolete digital do dads?

Well if you have:

• PC, with 96MB RAM CPU Power supply
• A Ethernet Card
• At least on hard drive/CF card USB stick, better to have 2 of the same size.

You can create a FreeNAS file server for your home. FreeNAS is a project who’s goal is to create a freeBSD based Network Attached Storage server. Protocols that this will support are CIFS samba file sharing, FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID 0,1,5 all with a web based interface so that you can configure it from your network. How much space on the hard drive you think it would take to add all of this functionality? 32MB can you believe that!

After some very basic setup you will have the web interface, where you can add or remove drives set up services, and control security. If you configure a RAID you will have a nice safe place on your home network to back up important files.

Don’t have a spare PC? Still you want to experiment with Virtual FreeNAS? In an up coming How-To I will show you how to set up configure, and implement this on a Vmware PC emulator.