Build your own NAS at under 80K

Network Attached Storage, or NAS boxes have become a necessity for just about

every organization today. Even the most entry-level NAS boxes can cost you more

than a Lakh. If you're on a tight budget, or would like to get a feel of a NAS

box before choosing a commercial product, then you can build your own using an

open-source software called FreeNAS. We used it to build a 1.3 TB NAS box based

on an ordinary PC and SATA drives. The machine had an AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU with

512 MB RAM, four SATA drives and a LAN card. Out of these, four were of 500 GB

capacity, and one of 80 GB.

FreeNAS supports all the commonly used protocols on the network, such as CIFS

(samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC and AFP protocols. It supports software RAID (levels 0,

1, and 5) and requires less than 16 MB disk space.

The installation



Boot your machine from the ISO image of the software, and you'll get a list of
nine options (see the following screenshot). From these nine options, select the

seventh option 'Install On HD/CF/USB Key'. 

This will lead you to two more options 'Install on HD, CF or USB key:

Create one UFS partition' and 'Install on HD: Create two UFS partitions (FreeNAS

and DATA)'. Both options are pretty much self-explanatory. You can't use the

drive in which FreeNAS has been installed for storage, but you can do so in the

second option. As we were already using five drives, we used the second option.

Next it asks to select the source CD drive, from where the installer can read

the installation files. In our case, it was 'acd0'. You will be shown a list

of HDDs along with their device names.

Here select the destination HDD that you want to install and then boot

FreeNAS from. In our case we used the 80 GB HDD for the job.



The complete installation process takes some time to create the file system and
copy files on the selected HDD. After installation, it shows the main menu where

you can select the fifth option to reboot the system. Once the system has

booted, you're ready to configure FreeNAS.

Network setup



Now, you need to configure the NAS box for your network. From the menu, select
the first option and enter the name of your Ethernet interface (fxp0 in our

case) and press Enter. It will prompt you to reboot.

Once the machine has rebooted, the menu will come up again on your screen.

Select 2 and enter your IP address settings (192.168.5.100 and /24 in our case).

Then from the same menu select 6 and ping another network device on the subnet

to test network connectivity.

Configuration



In order to configure the NAS box, open a Web browser from any node and type the
NAS box's IP address that you just defined in the step above. You will be

asked for a username and password.

By default, username is admin and password is freenas. On successful

authentication, it will open a Web interface of your NAS device.

The Web page shows a navigation tree on the left side of the page and on the

right side the data entry part is displayed.

From here, you can configure and manage the entire operation of your NAS box.

Configuring disks



Now comes the important part-configuring the remaining disks in a RAID
configuration of your choice. Make sure all drives you're using in the NAS box

are of the same size. If you're configuring RAID 5, which is usually the most

commonly used option, then four drives are recommended, one of which would be

completely consumed by RAID, and only three drives would be used for data

storage. In addition to software RAID levels 0, 1, and 5, FreeNAS also supports

hardware RAID.

We were able to build a NAS box with 1.3 TB storage, RAID level 5, and integrate it successfully into an Active Directory domain

To configure RAID on FreeNAS, first you need to allocate the drives to your

NAS box. For this, add disks one by one, by clicking Disks/Management page of

the NAS interface and then clicking on the '+' sign on the right hand side.

It will open an 'Add Disk' page, where you have to select the drives that

you want to add in your NAS box-in our case the disk device names were ad1,

ad2, ad3, and a4. After adding the disks, they should appear in the table and

the Status should be Online.

Now, from the same page click on the Format tab and from the drop down,

select the drive you want to format and then select Software RAID as the file

system and click on the 'Format Disk' button.

We were configuring RAID 5, so we had to format all the disks one by one in

the same way as mention above. After formatting all disks, click on the

Disks/Software RAID page and click on the '+' sign on the right hand side to

add a new RAID. Give your RAID a name, and select the type (RAID 5 in our case).

Then select each of the drives from the list that needs to be used in this RAID

array. Once you have created the disk array, it will show the RAID array in the

list with Status shown as Up.

Open the 'Format RAID' tab and enter the RAID volume name. Choose the

format type as 'UFS', and click on 'Format Disk' button. Once the RAID

array is formatted, all that is left is to mount the RAID array.

To do this, open the 'Disk/Mount Point' page and click on the '+' on

the right hand side. Then from the Disk drop down, select the RAID volume name

that you have configured previously. Set 'Mount Point' partition to 'Software

RAID', set File System UFS and give a share name for your RAID volume and

click on Save. With this your NAS box is ready to serve your network.

Configuring file sharing



FreeNAS supports all the common file sharing protocols, such as CIFS (samba),
FTP, NFS, RSYCD, SSHD and AFP file sharing services. CIFS is used for Windows

file sharing over the network, which is what we configured. For this, open the

NAS interface from a Web browser and select the services/CIFS and select the

enable check box.

Leave all other fields to their default values for the moment. You can tweak

them later. Click on the Save button, and your NAS box will be available to all

the Windows machines on your network. For example, to test the NAS share, go to

any Windows node and click on Start>Run and type \\ followed by the NAS box's

IP address.

Security of the NAS box



FreeNAS gives you two types of security in this version, Local User access and
Active Directory based authentication. Though it has provision for NIS and

RADIUS authentication as well, it's not operational in this version. For the

Local User level, you have to create users and groups by clicking on

Access/Users and Groups page. Here, select the Groups tab and click on the '+'

sign to add a group. Then click on the User tab to add users and assign users to

the groups you just created.

Click on Add and Apply changes. If you are using CIFS (Samba) for the file

services, go to the services/CIFS from the NAS Web interface and change the

authentication to 'Local User'. If you are using ADS on your network, you

have to change the CIFS authentication to Domain. Then select MS Active

Directory and fill in the entries such as your ADS server name, its IP address,

the domain name, and ADS administrative username and password. Your NAS box will

now get authenticated from an active directory domain.

Disaster recovery



Let us now see how fast the NAS can recover data in case of a disk failure. For
this, we removed one of the 500 GB drives and replaced it with another

one. 

The NAS software RAID automatically detected the change and was able to

rebuild the entire RAID 5 volume in 15 to 20



minutes and even go back online.

As you would have seen from this, FreeNAS is a useful software to build your

own NAS boxes. It has all the standard features once would expect from a NAS

software, and is lightweight as well. The fun is not over yet. In the next

issue, we also compare its performance with a branded NAS box.

Sanjay Majumder