[ale] NAS

[aaron]

On Saturday 04 February 2006 15:44, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> I need more disk space!  I'm looking at installing Linux on an old PC
> with big drive and turning into NAS.  I have some questions.
> 
> 
> 1.  Are there any Linux distros that are aimed at
>     being NAS.  Just like some distros aimed at 
>     being firewalls.

Your timing for doing this looks about right:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=current
(dated 2006.01.30)

New distributions added to the waiting list
  FreeNAS. FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server supporting:
  CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS protocols, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a full web
  configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 16 MB once installed on
  Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key. The minimal FreeBSD distribution,
  web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on m0n0wall.
  Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

<http://www.freenas.org/>

> 2.  NFS or SMB?
>     Only Linux desktops will use the NAS so I have a choice.

SAMBA seems to be a funcional network file system scheme despite being based 
on M$ protocols.  Using this would also maintain easy file access should you 
ever plug a Mac OSeX laptop or other guest system into your Linux network.

peace
aaron