Hi All,
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?
Cheers,
Ewan
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.
On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 09:33:14AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
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.
This last is certainly what I'd do, for a headless machine just use something like Ubuntu Server and it takes very little space and can update itself happily for a long time without attention.
Alternatively for a nice low power NAS box get a WD 'My Cloud', they still have ssh access and so you can do the sort of minor things you want to do to a NAZ fairly easily.
Of-course there's a lot to be said for just installing your distro of choice and just using what you need.
This last is certainly what I'd do, for a headless machine just use something like Ubuntu Server and it takes very little space and can update itself happily for a long time without attention.
Thanks for the suggestions guys.
As it happens I spent some time over the weekend setting up both FreeNAS and OMV in VirtualBox environments.
After that I decided to just build a headless Debian 7 box :-)
Cheers,
Ewan
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Chris Green -
Ewan Slater -
Mark Rogers