Have you ever heard the word "FreeNAS" or "Network Attached Storage" been thrown around, from either the office IT guy or your geek friend? Ever wondered what they meant? To put it short, Network Attached Storage is a dedicated file server which can be accessed through your network or remotely through specific protocols, a free "Home Server" if you will. More on NAS visit Wikipedia. This article will not explain how NAS works but rather how to setup and use a NAS with your Media Center PC, to create centralized storage for all of your media, whether it be movies, music or recorded TV.

There are several benefits to building a NAS unit / file server and we at Fransatech wanted to explore the possibility of integrating the technology with HTPC's and Media Center. We believe that adding a dedicated file server has huge potential in the field of home entertainment and can greatly elevate your Media Center setup, especially if you happen to have more then one HTPCs in your home or office. With a wireless router, you can hook up the NAS unit and have it stream media to any computer in the network, granted they have a wireless card. This setup will allow you to integrate all the recorded TV, from several HTPCs, into the same location. Consequently, it will allow your "Watched Folder" to access the recordings and have them displayed in "My TV" rather then under "My Videos" which most network shared recorded TV end up. Furthermore, since the NAS is dedicated you no longer need to depend on having all the other computers online to access their media.

Since we want to get our "geek on" we will build our file server using FreeNAS, instead of buying one at the local computer store. First off, you need to get the hardware parts to run the unit. These include the usual suspects: Computer case, Motherboard, Cpu, Memory stick,CD Rom, Psu and one or more hard drives. Keep in mind that running FreeNAS requires minimal resources, hence legacy hardware will do just fine, in case you have some old hardware tucked away in your garage or workshop. Whether you're buying all of these parts or just the missing parts, we recommend building a "green computer". A low watt psu, low Hz cpu and 96Mb of RAM will do just fine (512Mb if you plan on running RAID 5). To illustrate the low resource requirement we at Fransatech were able to dig up an old laptop sitting in our workshop. It is an old Pentium III 450Mhz with 256Mb of RAM, a 20gb HD and a non working battery. Obviously using a laptop isn't ideal since you will have to connect your additional (external) hard drives through USB, which will yield in lower transfer rates then with SATA or IDE in a ATX case.

Once you have your rig assembled or powered up you laptop, in our case, its time to install the FreeNAS software. Hook up your NAS computer to your router, download, then burn the ISO file onto a CD and boot up your computer with the FreeNAS disc. During our install we were using the latest realease, v0.685RC1. Before you go ahead with the installation please be advised that FreeNAS will NOT ALLOW DUAL OS. For more information on how to use FreeNAS have a look in their documentation section.

            Boot logoDuring the initial boot you will be presented with a boot menu and a time counter. Choose default
         Console setup boot or let the timer countdown. A new feature to the RC1 release is the FreeNAS boot logo which will hide the text boot. Press "ALT" to jump back into text mode, and let FreeNAS finish booting. Once done, you will see the "Console Setup" as well as the default IP address(192.168.1.250) given to your NAS unit / file server. You should also see " LAN  --> lnc0 " (or something similar, fpx0 or nve0 depending on your network card) just above the console setup. If not, then you will need to assign interface after the installation.

         Partition menuAt the console setup choose 9, which will start the installation and bring you to the partition option menu. If you only have one hard drive hooked up to your unit you will most likely want to choose option number 1 or 2. Option 1 will allow you to install the FreeNAS Operating System on a USB key, which you are going to use to boot up your file server on,  after the installation. Option 1 can also be used if you have several hard drives, one of which is very small that you are willing to sacrifice to run the OS (minimum of 64Mb). Option 2 will let you use one hard drive as both a system disk and a storage drive. Since we are using our laptop and we wanted to utilize the 20gb hard drive as storage, we chose option 2. Do not choose option 3 "full" release. This option is bugged and will cause login failures and mounting problems.

Next you'll be shown the typical warning text about how everything on the drive will be erased, followed by a list of
       CD & HD mount detected CDROM's. At this point FreeNAS will ask you to mount your CDROM. Simply type in the drive detected by FreeNAS, "acd0" in our case. The same goes for mounting your hard drive which you will be asked to do next, "ad0" in our case. After mounting your HD, FreeNAS will start installing the OS. When prompted, remove you CD and reboot by first pressing Enter, then 6(main menu) and 7(reboot).

After rebooting, you will once again see the console setup but without the "install" option. You should also see your interface card i.e. (LAN  --> lnc0) just above the menu. If not, then assign interface by pressing 1 and typing in whatever card FreeNAS detects or by pressing "a" for auto detection. Reboot once interface assignment is complete. You should also see the default IP address assigned to your FreeNAS unit. This can be changed, either manually or through DHCP, by selecting 2 from the console setup. You will need to remember the IP address for future use, since disk management and further setups will be done through a web browser from any of the computers you might have in your home or office.

This concludes part 1 of our two part guide to FreeNAS. Be sure to visit Part 2 were we show you how to add and share the dedicated storage.

Part 1 / 2