Build your own NAS box (Part 1)

If you are like me, you will have alot of music, films and documents that you use alot but they are on one computer, bits a pieces on multiple computers. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a central area for your files so you could play your music and films on the Xbox or PS3, access your files from your laptop and download bittorrent files without your main pc. A NAS box is your answer.

What is a NAS box?
In simple terms a NAS box is a computer that acts like a hard drive connected to your network. NAS (Network Attached Storage) lets you share your documents, music, videos with any computer or device in your home.

This is my guide on how to build a NAS box using an opensource project called FreeNAS.
FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD which is a very secure and free operating system.

What you need?

• An old computer (500Mhz+ CPU with at least 256MB RAM)
• Large hard drive (I’m using a 500 GB SATA drive but there is no limit)
• Router (wireless or wired, as long as their is a Ethernet port free on the back for your server)
• FreeNAS CD
• Some time to play around with     (it took me roughly 15 mins to install FreeNAS)

So on with the guide…

First thing you need to do is download and burn the ISO from http://www.freenas.org (Version 0.7 is latest)

While its downloading, make sure that the large hard drive is installed in your old computer (from now on I will be calling the old computer the ‘server’)

Once you got your CD, put it in the server and boot the machine up. Make sure that BIOS is set to boot from CD first.

You will get to this menu. Type 9 and Enter

Select Option 3

This warns you that anything on the server will be deleted (STOP HERE if you have important work on the machine)
Press Enter.

Press Enter again.

If you have more than one hard drive in your machine then you will have a choice of which one to install FreeNAS on. But in our case just Press Enter.

This sets the size of the OS partition where FreeNAS system is stored. 128MB is fine. (The rest of the hard drive is used as the storage space)

If you have more than 512MB RAM in your machine then press No

FreeNAS is now installed. Remove the CD and Reboot the machine.

This is the screen you will see when your machine boots up. Before FreeNAS is working we need to do one more thing and get it setup correctly on the network.
I am expecting that you are using DHCP on your network, if you don’t know what this is then you probably are.

Press 2 Set LAN IP Address and Enter.

Press Enter for Yes

Then Enterfor No

You will then see a IP address (a set of number in xxx.xxx.x.xxx format) In my case it is 192.168.0.196

Go to your main PC and open up a web browser. Type in the IP address in the URL and you should get a login box.

Default username is admin and password freenas.

Once logged you should see this screen. If so, congratulations you have installed FreeNAS.

In Part 2 of this guide I will be looking at how to setup your disks, shares and users.