Hi,
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by your server is "off the network". Let me ask a few more questions. Can you ping the Netgear router from your FreeNAS machine? For example, if your FreeNAS box has a monitor connected to it, drop into a shell with option 9 and use this command:
ping -c3 [ip address of Netgear router]
for example if your router has an IP address of 192.168.2.1, try this
ping -c3 192.168.2.1
Are any packets being reported as lost?
Can you ping the network card that the FreeNAS server is using?
ping -c3 [ip address of server's network card]
To find out the status and ip addresses of your server's network devices, run this command:
ifconfig
This will tell you the status of all the network devices on the box. Look for the one that you believe is your network card. You should see the IP address for it. It will be listed by the interface name, such as 're0' or 're1'. My own Intel network card is 'em0'. You can ping the IP address for what you believe is your network device, to see if it is working.
You should also look at your log messages. There is a file on your FreeNAS system that you can inspect. It is /var/log/messages. You can read it by going into the FreeNAS shell (option 9 again) and
cat /var/log/messages | more
(then press the space bar to page through the file)
and you can monitor the log with
tail -f /var/log/messages
which will cause messages to print to the screen as well as be added to the log file. It is worth checking these messages.
Finally, one last suggestion I would like to make. Have you configured your FreeNAS system with the ip address of the gateway and the ip address of your DNS server? I bet that your Netgear router is effectively both the gateway and DNS server. You should go in the FreeNAS web GUI and configure these IP addresses in the Network settings pages. This is a very important step to take for any network-based computer. It has to know where to find the network gateway and how to lookup other hosts.
My own gateway address is 192.168.1.1 and the DNS server address is also 192.168.1.1.
If the FreeNAS server is getting it's IP address through DHCP, it should also have the gateway and DNS information from the DHCP server, but sometimes this does not happen. And in any case you should really assign a static IP address to your FreeNAS server rather than use DHCP. My own FreeNAS server has a static address of 192.168.1.25.
Thanks
Bob