Disk Management and MCE integration

Part 1 / 2

 Welcome to part 2 of our guide to FreeNAS, where we will discuss how to add, share and access your storage on the NAS unit / file server. We will aslo show you how to integrate the storage with Windows Media Center as discussed in part 1.

After installing FreeNAS you'll need to login through a web browser. In the address bar, type in the IP address of your NAS unit. When the login window appears use "admin" and "freenas" as default username and password respectively. This will bring you to the main screen called System information. Start by selecting General Setup from the left hand side bar. There is no need to change any of the settings, but we do recommend to at least changing the password. Remember to click "save" at the bottom of the page. Next it's time to add your disks. From part 1 you might remember that we were using an old laptop and chose to install both a system and data partition on the laptops hard drive. Therefore, we will start by adding that second partition and then any additional disks we might have to connect to our file server.

To add disks go to the left side bar and choose Management, which is located right under Disks. Click the "+" icon on the right and choose which disk you want to add. Since we were using our laptop the only disk we saw was the 20gb internal hard drive. After choosing disk, leave all settings at default. If you are adding a disk already formatted by FreeNAS, please specify what file system, otherwise leave it as unformatted. Hit the "Add" button and then Apply changes. After this step you would normally format the recently added disk, however since we choose option 2 during the install (in part 1) this was already done, hence next step will be to "mount" the disk.

Choose Mount Point in the left side bar and click the "+" icon to the right then select the recently added disk. For the Partition option we chose "2". Note that this is only done if you chose partition option "2" during the installation of FreeNAS. Next give the disk a share name(required) and description(optional). Choose "UFS" as file system, which is the default file system used by FreeNAS. Hit "Add" and and Apply changes at the following screen.

Since 20gb isn't enough space for us we decided to add another disk. Likewise, if you installed FreeNAS on a Flash Disk or a small HD, you will need to add additional disks as storage. Start by once again going to Disk Management and add the new disk. In our case we connected an external 400gb Samsung Spinpoint drive through the laptops USB port. Like before leave all setting at default. Next it's time to initialize and format the newly added disk. From the left side bar choose Format, select the new disk, choose "UFS" as file system and leave minimum free space at 8%. After clicking the "Format" button, a progress box with the word initializing should appear. Let the process finish, which should take a couple of minutes.

Once the format it complete, it's time to mount the new disk. Head on over to Mount Point, click the "+" icon, select the newly formatted disk, (in our case the 400gb Samsung), select "UFS" as file system, give it a share name and finally click the "Add" button.

Now that we have added all our storage, we need to test whether we can access and share the newly added disks. To enable access for MS Windows you'll need to configure the CIFS settings. Choose CIFS from the left side bar and click the "enable" box in the upper right corner of the CIFS screen. Change the Workgroup name to the current workgroup you have setup for your network. Fransatech in our case. Next click "Save and Restart" located at the bottom of the screen.

Finally you will need to share your disks, which is done by choosing the Shares tab located in the CIFS setting screen. Again, click the "+" icon, choose a name and comment for the drive you are going to share. Select which mount point and hit "Add". Once this is done you should pretty much be done with the disk management setup.

 To check whether you can access the storage, go to "Start --> Run" and type in the NAS hostname, which is "\\freenas" by default. (If that doesn't work, try typing \\Workgroup(other if changed)\freenas\) You can also find the NAS disks by browsing the network. You should now be able to see your shared mount points. Try them out by creating a folder or copying over some files.

Lastly, we are going to integrate the newly created NAS with our Media Center. Head over to your HTPC and access the NAS Disk you want to use for MCE. Create a new folder, name it as you please i.e. RecordedTV. Copy the pathway, \\freenas\400gb\RecordedTV in our case, and start TweakMCE within Media Center. In TweakMCE select TV then Storage Location for Recorded TV and paste the pathway to your "RecordedTV" folder on your file server. Click the "save" button. From this point onward all your recordings will now be saved on your file server. To later have your HTPC access those recordings, in TweakMCE go into TV then Watched Folders for Recorded TV and paste the same pathway. Once again hit "save". If you have multiple HTPC's or computers in your home or office they can now access the same media by changing their "watched folder" as was described above.

Please note that if you are using Vista MCE you will not need to use TweakMCE when specifying Storage folder or Watched folders.

This concludes the final part in our two part guide to FreeNAS. If setup properly this guide should have provided you with enough help to create a centralized storage unit which can be accessed by any computer or HTPC's in your network. For Media and Recoded TV purposes we find this setup to be a great addition to our Media Center experience since we no longer need to have all of our HTPC's or computers turned on to access each others media.

Part 1 / 2