Minimum requirements?

[NineNine]

I've been using FreeNas for years. My hardware just died, and I need to re-do my setup. I had FreeNas running for probably the last 5 years or so on a Pentium 3 something, with about half a gig of ram. It was an ancient garbage computer that I threw a couple of large drives into. Now, looking at the minimum requirements, I've found that I'd have to buy a new-ish computer with 4 GB of RAM, and the OS itself takes 2+ GB!

My question is: What happened to this project in the past few years that made it turn into bloatware? It was a great, easy-to-use, lightweight but powerful tool. Now, it has a larger footprint than WINDOWS, but it's still just a file server?!

 

[pirateghost]

you should probably read up on ZFS....

 

[NineNine]

you should probably read up on ZFS....

I read a bit about it. So, FreeNas went from 64 MB to 2 GB just to support one file system? That doesn't make any sense!

 

[NineNine]

I did some reading, and figured out that somebody fixed something that wasn't broke! That's too bad. It would've been good if the project was forked.

I've since found the old versions of FreeNas, and I'm very happy with those. Thanks for the pre-8 software! It's really great stuff!

 

[pirateghost]

considering that version 8 isnt even REMOTELY the same thing that .7 was....its not too surprising. you did know that freenas 8 isnt maintained by the original developers any more, right?
volker moved on to create OMV and ixSystems took over the FreeNAS project from my understanding. someone correct me if i am wrong.

 

[survive]

Hi pirateghost,

You are correct.

I would encourage the OP to take a look at this:

http://www.freenas.org/images/resources/freenas8.0.3/freenas8.0.3_guide.html

Section 1 <- for info about what's been going on over the past couple of years with FreeNAS

Section 1.3 <- for info about why FreNAS has gotten so "bloated"

I would also encourage the OP to keep in mind that FreeNAS 0.7.2 has been EOL'ed and that project has moved on to FreeBSD 9.0 so odds are it might have slightly more "bloated" system requirements as well, should they want to move to a more modern filesystem they might need to finally retire their decade-old filer after all. That said, if the OP has found something that works for them that's great news!

-Will

 

[NineNine]

My fault. I realized that the one I was happily using was 0.686, which is 5 years old! Of course the software is going to change dramatically in 5 years! I didn't think that my little FreeNas box was really running for 5 years!

But, it was happily running 0.686 until I lost a drive. I've tried 8, and it's much too big, and short of features useful to me (upnp). I tried the latest 0.7.2.8191, but it was buggy. So, I slapped in a new drive, and I'm back to using 0.686 again. Maybe I'll be running it for another 5 years!

 

[pirateghost]

My fault. I realized that the one I was happily using was 0.686, which is 5 years old! Of course the software is going to change dramatically in 5 years! I didn't think that my little FreeNas box was really running for 5 years!

But, it was happily running 0.686 until I lost a drive. I've tried 8, and it's much too big, and short of features useful to me (upnp). I tried the latest 0.7.2.8191, but it was buggy. So, I slapped in a new drive, and I'm back to using 0.686 again. Maybe I'll be running it for another 5 years!

i think its awesome that you can keep it rolling that long....i get itchy for new shiny. LOL

glad you have figured out a way to keep enjoying FreeNAS anyway. if it aint broke dont fix it eh?