FreeNAS file server

So, I somehow managed to hose my Debian distro last weekend, and decided this would be the perfect opportunity to try out FreeNAS. My old Dell C610 Latitude laptop (PIII / 256MB / 30GB) was already the home network's file server using netatalk for AFP, but (a) this wasn't geeky enough, and (b) I wasn't backing it up. So, I bought another 1TB Seagate FreeAgent external drive to match the one I already had, and got to work.

FreeNAS Installation and AFP Configuration

My original hope was to run FreeNAS as a Live CD distro, with configuration files stored on a USB key flash drive. Needless to say, I never got that working, so I ended up going with a two partition install on the laptop's internal HDD. So, I downloaded the ISO from the FreeNAS site, gave the FreeNAS partition a whopping 256 MB of drive space (TWICE the required space - ya know - just in case), and kept the remaining 29+GB for, I don't know, maybe a temporary torrent storage location. 

Before I did this, I pulled everything off the original drive and on to my iMac for safe keeping. That gave me the confidence to go ahead and format the old drive as UFS (FreeNAS' native filesystem), and start setting up AFP shares. I had some difficulty at first. They seemed to be set up, but my Macs couldn't see them. I did the whole thing from scratch one more time (with help from here), and it just worked. Either I missed something in the allow/deny read/write user configuration step, or a mid-process reboot did the trick. Oddly, the best way to get the files off my iMac and back to the server turned out to be scp. I had a hell of a time with the hidden files and directories. I think this is because I pulled the files off the old server the same way (not through AppleTalk, but over scp with a Puppy Linux Live CD because I'd hosed Debian), and all the hidden Mac files (DS_Store, etc.), came along in a non-Mac-aware way. Now that that's done, the server works as advertised.

RSYNC Configuration

Since a primary objective of this whole project was to get a good backup going, my next step was to configure RSYNC. This was very straightforward. I just added the second 1TB drive and formatted it, then used the WebGUI to set up my regular backup schedule ("local"). The whole thing took about five minutes. Now I have daily (non-deleting) backups from the main share to the backup drive. Now I can breathe a little sigh of relief. 

Once I let the whole setup run for a few days, and everything seems to be working, I'll delete the duplicate files from my iMac, and move the whole file server setup into a closet somewhere. Future geekiness will include migrating to a low-power, small, quiet box built for this kind of thing. Oh, and at some point I need to clean up this swine sty of an apartment.