On 30 December 2013 17:26, Ewan Slater ewan.slater@googlemail.com wrote:
Looking at rebuilding a redundant machine as a home NAS.
I'm trying to decide between FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault. Has anyone deployed either or both of these, and if so, what was your experience?
I've looked at both of these (see also NAS4Free, a fork of FreeNAS), and installed them but never used them in anger.
It really depends what you want to achieve. If *all* you want is a powerful NAS box then I'd go with NAS4Free, which is as easy to set up as many commercial NAS boxes (ie not, in my opinion, very easy) but it'll deliver what you want reliably and without any substantial maintenance.
On the other hand, if (like me) you decide that since it's sitting there on your home LAN, behind a firewall, and you might like to "play" with some other options later, then OMV would be (and indeed was) my choice. The only reason I never progressed was that OMV was between versions - if I was going to bother installing it I was going to go with the latest version but some of the plugins I wanted to play with (specifically a VirtualBox plugin) had not been ported to the latest version and when I looked into doing it it went beyond what I was able to solve at that time. This was a few months ago though, and I need to revisit it (at the moment the shiny new HP MicroServer I bought for the purpose is still sitting in its box under the stairs waiting for some attention...)
Of-course there's a lot to be said for just installing your distro of choice and just using what you need.