FreeNAS is just what I needed to make use of an old Dell Optiplex 745 for some useful backup and shared files. I had juiced it up to 8 GB of RAM and put a 750 GB hard drive, plus its original 160G, and a USB-connected SSD. It took me a while to get it set up and work with Windows SMB. I consider myself fairly tech-able as far as setting up new systems, loading linux from scratch, stuff like that. Note to anyone else new to FreeNAS reading this: don't be surprised if it takes a minute to figure out how to use Rufus to write the iso to a flash drive and all that good stuff. And don't be surprised if it hurts your head to get SMB working.
A couple things I noticed about FreeNAS. The nameservers were not set up or did not "populate" from the DHCP server. So FreeNAS could not find its own update servers to check for updates. I added 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and restarted the network interface, and that was fine.
As a newbie to this whole field, I did not understand the idea of a pool and dataset, and then a separate setup step for the SMB share. It makes sense now that I see the power of multi-disk setups, RAID, and all that. Of course with my small setup, I couldn't do much with RAID. That will have to wait until a better piece of hardware becomes available.
Permissions were a bit tricky to get right for Windows 10. It appears that the user names need to be the same as the Windows login names. When I had a different username on FreeNAS as on Windows, Windows just seemed not to like it. That was counter-intuitive to me because Windows would (sometimes) present a login dialog box that let me put in user and password. I would think I can have any username I want. Anyway, that's my extent of knowledge.
I noticed some weirdness when copying or moving files from Win10 to FreeNAS SMB volume. Sometimes the folders don't appear (in the Windows10 view of the SMB share) where they are supposed to. Hitting F5 to refresh the view from Windows doesn't seem to help.
I am very thankful for FreeNAS. Thank you all who have worked on it.
A couple things I noticed about FreeNAS. The nameservers were not set up or did not "populate" from the DHCP server. So FreeNAS could not find its own update servers to check for updates. I added 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and restarted the network interface, and that was fine.
As a newbie to this whole field, I did not understand the idea of a pool and dataset, and then a separate setup step for the SMB share. It makes sense now that I see the power of multi-disk setups, RAID, and all that. Of course with my small setup, I couldn't do much with RAID. That will have to wait until a better piece of hardware becomes available.
Permissions were a bit tricky to get right for Windows 10. It appears that the user names need to be the same as the Windows login names. When I had a different username on FreeNAS as on Windows, Windows just seemed not to like it. That was counter-intuitive to me because Windows would (sometimes) present a login dialog box that let me put in user and password. I would think I can have any username I want. Anyway, that's my extent of knowledge.
I noticed some weirdness when copying or moving files from Win10 to FreeNAS SMB volume. Sometimes the folders don't appear (in the Windows10 view of the SMB share) where they are supposed to. Hitting F5 to refresh the view from Windows doesn't seem to help.
I am very thankful for FreeNAS. Thank you all who have worked on it.
