[Project] Building A NAS With Spare Computer Parts

Posted In Site News - By joshua.combs On Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 With 0 Comments

I have decided that I will be posting a how to project. I will be using a spare computer that I have and will be turning it into a Network Attached Storages server. What I am hoping to learn about, are how to get an Apple Macbook Pro and a Windows computer to connect to the device and share files with no permission errors.

I will be deciding on which NAS software I am going to use, they are both going to be based off of Linux/Unix and most important FREE!

The two contenders are FreeNAS and CryptoNAS

FreeNAS

FreeNAS is arguably the most popular open source NAS project. It is a minimal FreeBSD 7.2 distribution with a web interface, PHP scripts, and documentation based on m0n0wall. It is released under the BSD license. It can be installed onto a Compact Flash, USB flash, or hard drive, or booted directly from a LiveCD.

FreeNAS supports the following protocols: SMB/CIFS (Windows), AFP (Apple/Mac), NFS (Unix/Linux), FTP, TFTP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI and UPnP. It also features support for Software RAID (0,1,5), ZFS, and disk encryption.

It’s networking features supports VLAN tagging, link aggregation, and Wake On Lan (WoL). The monitoring features include S.M.A.R.T (smartmontools), email alerts, SNMP, Syslog, and UPS (NUT) support.

You’ll also find extra services: bittorent client (Transmission), UPnP server (FUPPES), iTunes/DAAP server (Firefly), webserver (lighttpd), and network bandwidth measure (Iperf).

CryptoNAS

CryptoNAS (formerly CryptoBox) is a NAS project concentrating on disk encryption. They provide a Linux-based LiveCD that incorporates encryption with a NAS server. Plus they offer a package that’s installable onto existing Linux-based servers, adding the user friendly web-based frontend for disk encryption. They are licensed under the GPL.

Once you activate an encrypted volume through the web frontend of the CryptoNAS, it’s accessible on the local network via a SMB/CIFS share. The encrypted disk partitions are LUKS volumes. You can also open them on other computer, using FreeOTFE in Windows to decrypt and access the files, or directly with modern Linux systems.

The LiveCD requires just a minimum 200MHz CPU, 64 MB RAM, CD-ROM, network connection, and a storage disk. The storage disk can be any drive supported by the Linux kernel (2.6.20), such as IDE, SCSI, USB, FireWire, SATA, and RAID.

The server package can be installed on an existing Linux system with a minimum kernel 2.6, cryptsetup with LUKS support, kernel support for the crypt target of the device mapper, and Python 2.4. It runs on pretty much any Linux distribution, but they only provide packages for Ubuntu and other Debian distributions.

I need to get a new power supply for the computer that I am going to be installing this on, and getting some more SATA hard drives to set up as storage.

I will be starting this project soon.

email me if you have any input on this project or if you want to contribute joshua.combs[@]cincygeek[dot]com