On Sun, 2009-02-22 at 11:27 +1300, Don Robertson wrote: > Phill Coxon wrote: > > I'm trying to figure out how to update the bios on an old Compaq > > Presario that I'm using for FreeNAS (www.freenas.org). > > > > I would be interested to hear your experiences with freenas.
Awesome so far. It is only 34Mb so requires a very low end PC to work. I have it booting directly from a 128Mb usb drive plugged into the back of a 2.7Gz Celeron with 512Mb RAM. Once it's booted (around 2 mins) you can control everything through the easy to use web interface. Very CPU easy - I copied a 450Mb file to the FreeNAS via SMB and CPU load peaked at 9%. It has a huge number of configuration options and features. The interface is very intuitive. Adding storage disks and formatting them is a breeze. You can also have raid configurations and encrypted disks. After your storage is set up you decided what services you want to offer: CIFS/SMB FTP TFTP SSH NFS AFP RSYNC Unison iSCSI Target UPnp iTunes/DAAP Dynamic DNS SNMP UPS Webserver BitTorrent Each service can be configured and running in seconds. Easy to configure users and groups to control access. You can enable S.M.A.R.T. for drives so that drives will spin down after a specified number of minutes if not being used, run in quiet vs performance mode, send email alerts if drive temperatures get too far out of range and schedule automated drive tests. All this and a bunch more running in 32Mb. I'm very impressed.
