Bananas - bananahome.com

As more of my friends start looking into the NAS market, one of them told me about a real gem. Almost any old PC is enough to create a good NAS solution, with the help of FreeNAS!

FreeNAS is made to be easily installed on a USB stick, and run on a simple PC. It has a fairly good Web interface, with some really advanced options. The USB stick option is to make sure that you can utilize the available disks in the PC for data, without having to use one for the software. The disk where the software is installed, can't be used for data. The USB stick needs to be 2 GB only.

If you and your friend has a FreeNAS each, you can also set up replication/synchronization between the two, to keep data safe on another site. There is support for AFP, Active Directory, CIFS (Windows network), Dynamic DNS, FTP, LDAP, NFS, SNMP, SSH, TFTP and iSCSI. The important ones here are, of course, CIFS and FTP.

The installation was easy, and hassle-free. The configuration was mostly easy, but I stumbled a bit when trying to create user ID's. My tip is to leave the Home directory as default while creating the user, and change it afterwards. It needs to be changed if the user is going to be able to use FTP.

Security note: If you want to access your NAS over internet, do it wia FTP. Never, ever, open up your firewall for CIFS (Windows network) from internet!

FreeNAS is Open Source, and thereby free!

FreeNAS would work great with Cobian Backup.

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