DIY: FreeNAS offers Network Attached Storage for free

Someone more comfortable with *nix command line probably would have found it much more self-evident. if you can SCP, the first question a *nix nerd would think; "is OpenSSH or some other SSH daemon installed? Is port 22 listening or accessible to accept SCP connections?" I'm not saying documentation couldn't be improved or your a lesser nerd for not already having a higher comfort level, just that a *nix comfort level easily ports between *nix based distributions. My ReadyNAS is all browser pointy-clicky but made perfect sense when I found my way to a CLI simply because of my comfort level and the common attributes between *nix CLI. Now, why where you mucking about creating users and groups outside of the provided browser GUI interface or was that the interface you where using but implemented ugly by the FreeNAS folks? Full access to the filesystem through an FTP login is indeed a concern. I'm not familiar with FreeNAS directly though so I don't know if there was a "limit user to home directory" option you could easily select or if user accounts are intended to have private home directories at all. ReadyNAS can generate user specific home directories out of the new user GUI though my preference is to not create a home directory and instead create a share that only that user account has permissions for. FTP is cleartext so it's not acceptable unless the NAS happens to provide FTPS and SCP/SFTP over SSH tends to be for admin needs only with my machines. Given your experience, I wouldn't blame you for keeping it out of production systems. It remains something I'd like to look at and will probably to a pentarget VM for but for me doing a distro install, I may as well do a stock Debian or similar unless the given NAS distro has something that makes it more desirable.

True, if the option to re-use hardware is not an option, one may be looking at buying hardware to run FreeNAS on. In that case though, hardware purchases are common to all NAS options. Things like ReadyNAS and Drobo provide a commodity appliance with just enough hardware to do the job. It's unlikely anyone is going to pop open the ReadyNAS case and swap in more ram and a more powerful processor. I'm not sure if Drobo chassis are more or less accessible than the ReadyNAS either. My two experiences so far go like this: Linksys NAS200 - works fine as an introductory model and secondary backup. No SSH. No HTTPS. No SFTP/FTPS. Samba works well enough but for large transfers your hard pressed not to ignore security and just enable clear text FTP. It has two bays with hardware RAID (RAID1 for my preferences) but that's your limit. Best use for it may be a backup target; run your backup on something else that can provide a truecrypt file volume then upload the resulting encrypted blob to the NAS200. At least then the data has some minimal effort towards security since the box it's stored on has absolutely none. For 100$, what does one expect though. ReadyNAS - fantastic option for home or a five person business. HTTPS admin forms, SSH supported for shell or file transfer (SFTP). Samba supported for standard use as is NFS. It's a Debian based firmware also; log into shell and you'll find apt-get waiting. I was able to drop in the munin-node package and easily tap the NAS into my existing monitoring setup. (I've also broken it horribly to the point of re-flashing firmware so be warned if your going exploring.) I can't say enough about the self managed hardware RAID; pop in hard drives and the box will RAID them as most redundantly appropriate. I just popped in a fourth drive, the hardware prepared it and expanded the storage space (4 1TB drives = 3TB storage). To increase the size beyond your four slotted drives; replace each one at a time with larger drives. By replacing my current drives with four 2TB drives, I'd end up with the existing data migrated to the larger storage space (4 2TB = 6TB usable). Drobo provides similar self-managed RAID functionality. The short-comings are mostly due to limited hardware. An SFTP transfer to the ReadyNAS is noticeably slower than moving between nodes like my desktop and notebook. I won't even compare it to SFTP between big boy hardware like multi-processor, expansive RAM enabled rack servers. When a downloads dump from notebook to desktop I work away at another task on one of the systems until it's done. When I move a data dump from desktop to NAS, I set it to run then leave for work or go to bed. It's overnight versus over a half hour. Still fine for home use but I'm not dropping it into an office of more than five users even for use by significantly less encrypted Samba transfers. It is also providing an older form of SAMBA as far as I can tell; works fine with Windows boxes but does not play well with Debian 6 (Samba 3.5.6) or with the mediabox appliance plugged into the TV. For the workstation, SSH fixes the issue once you accept the longer transfer times. For the media box, UPnP fixes the issue once you accept that what the mediabox can see, any other machine on the local network can see (no authentication). Doing a self built NAS gives you the ability to upgrade hardware and economically bridge the gap between a ReadyNAS and IBM/HP/Dell storage server. My only complaint in that area would be giving up hot swappable hardware managed raid. I've never liked user setup RAID under the OS that's supposed to be running on top of it; let the firmware manage the RAID separately where possible. I'd be stuck between the trade-off of hardware that happily processes encryption for multiple concurrent SSH transfers versus hardware that manages the storage layer in a much more stable and fault tolerant way than removable media utilities and user setup software RAID. Granted, having a more full distribution running the box means much more flexibility for protocols supported and software installed. Now, back to the issue of hardware and FreeNAS. Sure, you may need to buy all new hardware rather than simply upgrade the storage in an old desktop (a 2 core proc and 3 gig of ram would provide a very solid base for a NAS). The cost may very well work out to far less than desktop equivalent or better NAS appliance. Even if you went all out and bot a rack box; $2,000'ish for the hardware plus $0 for FreeNAS, Debian or such to put on it versus $2,000'ish for the hardware plus $???? for Windows Server plus $???? for required CALS to support your user base. A similar example is groupware; $2,000 for hardware plus $0 for Debian/Courier Mail/Egroupware plus my time plus very little ongoing maintenance versus $2,000 for hardware plus $???? for Windows Server plus $5,000 for Exchange plus $???? for required additional CALS for our user base plus my time to setup plus lots of ongoing maintenance (spent three hours trying unsuccessfully to do a very simple task with Exchange last week; MSTN directions and five different methods where usless, even going back to the old fashion AD advanced security attributes.. nada.. grrr).