Hello! Another newbie (and a novel)

[Bear Island]

Hello,

I'm a long time lurker, first time poster. Recently I decided to try my hand at FreeNAS with a computer I no longer use. The specs are:

Asus P8Z68-V LX
Intel i5 2400 (3.1Ghz) quad core
8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600Mhz
Seagate 750GB 7200RPM HDD
HGST 500GB laptop hard drive (from Macbook Pro)

Not ideal, but this is just something I want to learn the ropes on. No, I am not storing anything on it that I cannot afford to lose.

I would say I am better than average with computers, especially the hardware side--a casual nerd. However, I quickly discovered that networking is not my strong suit.

My biggest childhood accomplishment was building a computer in the 7th grade (Pentium 4 and 1GB of RAM!!!), installing Ubuntu (then Gentoo) and Apache and selling web hosting for my friends' bands. Since then I've kind of been in and out of the computer world, taking it up again when my primary system dies or I find myself with extra time on my hands.

What do I hope to learn here? Right now I'm in law school and would like to start my own firm down the road. One big problem in the legal industry I see is the older generation of lawyers are not grasping the importance of data security, backups, etc. I'd like to become proficient enough with FreeNAS so that I can have a special skill set in the legal market (most lawyers are not tech savvy, except for some patent folks).

So far, I've installed FreeNAS, set up a couple volumes, Time Machine backups, and AFP volumes. At the moment I am working on setting up OpenVPN in a jail so I can link up to the thing for secure browsing from coffee shops.

Just from playing around with my FreeNAS box, it is clear that I've lost most of my knowledge of the command line! Also, this OS has a HUGE learning curve! I hope you look forward to answering my dummy questions as much as I look forward to asking them!

 

[diedrichg]

AFP is dead, Apple dropped it a few years ago. All Macs can access CIFS shares so you should migrate to that and make sure your test clients can access the CIFS share.

If you really want to take the plunge into networking, you should look into pfSense and Sophos UTM. There after several threads here talking about them. You would fair better to have one of those UTMs manage VPN. Plus, getting a grasp on one of those systems will make you even more valuable for setting up a truly secure office server and firewall.

 

[danb35]

AFP is not dead if you want to use TimeMachine to back up--it still only backs up to AFP shares.

 

[Bear Island]

Thanks for your replies.

1) I can't seem to get CIFS to show up on my Mac, even if I try to connect it manually. What is the advantage of CIFS over AFP?
2) Good suggestion. In the weeks since I first posted I checked out PfSense and really would like to build something to replace my stupid FiOS router. It looks easy to set up PfSense to be a VPN server, so I think I'll do that.

One other question. I am experiencing really low download and upload speeds over wifi (laptop right next to router): about 4MB/s average. Is that probably the result of my only using one hard drive and my 8GB RAM? Or my not-optimal hardware generally?

Again, I'm just learning, so I don't need something fast and reliable yet.

 

[Bear Island]

Also, when I search for many of my newbie questions on this forum, I find that users are dismissing the questions and saying "this isn't a FreeNAS question, it's a [BSD or networking] question out of the scope of this forum."

If I want to learn the basics of those two things, are there any good websites or books you all would recommend?

 

[DifferentStrokes]

You might try the Off Topic section on the forum.

 

[pirateghost]

If I want to learn the basics of those two things, are there any good websites or books you all would recommend?

google.com has been my library for years.