{"id":372,"date":"2009-01-31T16:26:17","date_gmt":"2009-01-31T21:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=372"},"modified":"2019-12-10T14:46:46","modified_gmt":"2019-12-10T19:46:46","slug":"convert-an-old-pc-into-network-attached-storage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=372","title":{"rendered":"Convert An Old PC Into Network Attached Storage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I converted an old PC into a Network Attached Storage device. I have an old PC that I was thinking of selling on eBay but its processor is just 550 MHz so it would probably be a waste of time trying to sell it. However it does have three hard drives installed so I might as well store some files on them.<\/p>\n<p>You can get a free operating system for your Network Attached Storage device at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freenas.org\/\">http:\/\/www.freenas.org\/<\/a> &#8211; download FreeNAS 0.69, file <strong><em>FreeNAS-i386-LiveCD-0.69.4276.iso <\/em><\/strong>and burn it onto a CDROM. Set up the BIOS on your old PC to boot from the CDROM. Then you want to make sure that your old PC can ping the other computers on your network. Once this is working you will be able to access an administration web site in your browser. I ran into some trouble with the network card drivers for my old PC so I had to edit a configuration file. I edited the <strong>loader.conf<\/strong> file to disable ACPI which was preventing my network card from working after a reboot. As you can see, files can be edited in your browser.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/FreeNAS-Boot-Loader-Edit.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>After that you&#8217;ll want to configure your hard drives. I have three hard drives in this old PC; <strong>ST33210A\/1.70<\/strong> 3099MB = 3 GB, <strong>Maxtor 51536U3\/DA6207V0<\/strong> 14656MB = 14 GB, <strong>ST38410A\/3.03<\/strong> 8224MB = 8 GB. I used the recommended file system UFS because the files are just going to be stored there so I really don&#8217;t care about the native file system.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/FreeNAS-Disks.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Then you have to set mount points for these hard drives because this is a Linux system:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/FreeNAS-Mount-Points.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>You also have to set up your swap drive:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/FreeNAS-Swap.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>You can also create user accounts in your browser. This will be necessary if you plan to transfer files using FTP which requires a log in account:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/FreeNAS-Users.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>After that you can enable the CIFS\/SMB service which will allow this Linux system to appear in your Network Places under the Workgroup network. You will then be able to access the files in Windows Explorer:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/FreeNAS-SMB-Shares.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/My-Network-Places-Workgroup.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Just to be on the safe side, you should enable the SSH service so you can telnet into the file server and run commands. When you are finished configuring the NAS you can run it without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse (known as a headless server) so you&#8217;ll want some ability to connect to the server and issue commands.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/FreeNAS-SSH.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>If you need a SSH client for Windows then go to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chiark.greenend.org.uk\/~sgtatham\/putty\/download.html\">http:\/\/www.chiark.greenend.org.uk\/~sgtatham\/putty\/download.html<\/a> and download the file <strong>putty-0.60-installer.exe.<\/strong> You can use that program to telnet into your new file server:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/PuTTY-Configuration.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This will require an user account for the log in. Type the command <strong>df<\/strong> if you want to see how much disk space is left.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/PuTTY-Login.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>You can even shut down the server from your browser:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/images\/blog\/FreeNAS-Shutdown.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Of course, you can buy external hard drives that run an embedded operating system and function as Network Attached Storage devices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I converted an old PC into a Network Attached Storage device. I have an old PC that I was thinking of selling on eBay but its processor is just 550 MHz so it would probably be a waste of &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=372\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[230,227,228,229],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3282,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions\/3282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}