What should I be learning before diving in?

[punk2g]

Hi All,

I'm currently looking at building a FreeNAS setup for home use - primarily to be used as a file server, but I am also very interested at setting up a few plugins for usenet/torrenting purposes.

I have a good hardware understanding, but realistically this has always been in a Windows environment. Whilst I was consider myself an advanced user that has previously worked in L1/L2 home desktop support roles, I have had little to no exposure to Linux/Unix systems.

Over the last week or so I have been doing a lot of reading into FreeNAS, and feel like it would be a great challenge/project to jump into. I am aiming to acquire the hardware I need over the next month or so, but in the interim I would like to try and arm myself with as much knowledge as necessary, in the hope I wont be running back here with 1,000 questions once I get my system up and running. At this stage, I am planning on throwing together a FreeNAS build on some assorted hardware I have around the house purely to get a feel for setting up some basics.

My query really is where I should be targeting my reading in preparation for deploying my full system? Would I benefit from attempting to learn about FreeBSD? Outside of the user guides, is there any other essential reading for FreeNAS? Am I best to just jump in and learn as I go?

Any advise is much appreciated.

 

[DataJunkie]

Hey punk2g, I was pretty much in the same boat as you. I've been using FreeNAS for about five months now and it's been working great for me. Some family members just switched to Macs so I changed my server from Windows Server 2008R2 to FreeNAS to get AFP shares and Time Machine backups. So far, it's been pretty good with a few minor hiccups.

Strangest thing for me was the OS is loaded on, and runs from a USB stick and drives are not NTFS, they are ZFS which has some advantages I'm sure others will tell you all about.

My suggestion is backup all your data, load up the system and play around with it for a few weeks. Then migrate all your data on and continue to play with it and learn. It's been rock solid for me, but still make a habit of taking backups, especially before you make any big changes to the server. Again, I haven't lost any data but it's best to be safe.