FreeNAS

Since I had the interest of building my own NAS (Network Attached Storage) for personal use I ventured into something along the easy to install and carry that said platform on a pen drive leaving the rest of the hardware resources intact.

Most of the instruction online might not really give a fruitful result, since different platforms have slightly different installation processes, so I came up with my own way that made the whole process a breeze, it is wise to note as quoted from m0n0.ch you have to play around with the security within Vista and Win 7.

My version of the installation is

1. Download physdiskwrite.exe and FreeNAS.img (Your version of choice)
2. Insert the above software’s in the same directory a good example would be C:\
3. Attach your pen drive to the computer (128MB is sufficient for NAS 7 anything higher is a waste)
4. Disable User Account Control (UAC) right click command prompt (CMD) and run as administrator
5. Change directory to where the file resides
6. Any attempt to write to the disk will fail hence you will need to have a clean build of your pen drive run diskpart to remove the current partition

Follow the steps

Fig 1: Searching physical drives

Step1: Change directory to where the software resides
>cd c:\\

Fig 2: Start diskpart utility

Step 2: Start diskpart to be in the position to remove partition within your pen drive
>diskpart

Fig 3: Successful cleaning drive and ready to install

Step 3: Depending on the number of drives attached to your computer, you will need list disk so as to know how many are attached and what is the number assigned to the pen drive you want to install FreeNAS, for my case is 1, select the disk then clean it to remove the partitions.
>list disk
>select disk 1
>clean

Fig 4: Select the disk to write the img file

Step 4: After you are done, exit diskpart and run the physdiskwrite program and include the name of the file to write, as seen in the screenshots above.
>exit
>physdiskwrite FreeNas.img

Fig 5: Writing in progress

The writing process begins.

Fig 6: Process completed

Above the writing process is complete, since I am in no position to offer screenshots for the GUI of FreeNAS unless I take a photo with my camera, I will retrieve some GUI images from the web until I do.

Fig 7: FreeNAS version 6

Version 6 screenshot, convert any old hardware to home servers without spending at all, the minimum requirements for version 7 which is mostly for home use, of which I have installed on my pen drive requires 400MB Disk (64MB Flash)  and 256MB RAM.

Fig 8: FreeNAS version 8

Version 8 screenshot, this is mostly for organizational use and minimum requirements are for UFS only is 2GB Disk Space and 4GB RAM.

I am currently using a network attached storage server NSA221 and accessing it over one of my DynDNS accounts of which later on I am planning to change my CNAME records from my domain name www.alkathirikhalid.com to point to the media servers package services such as blog, public folder, login portal, etc…

Currently I have incorporated Google Apps For individuals and small teams into my domain name.

www.alkathirikhalid.com

Thank you.