Network Attached Storage has become increasingly popular the last couple of months. Interest has only grown more since apple’s release of Time Capsule which is a NAS device that also has the capabilities to create incremental backups of computers on the network. NAS can be very useful for any home network with a lot of media. It also places less load on other computers on your home network. Being a technician I hear countless times how all the client wants is pictures from the machine and some home videos, etc. All of this media can be moved to a NAS device so that if a system goes down all can still be accessible from another machine quickly. Backups are also essential in that equation, but it can easily be achieved with an external Seagate drive or countless others. What I would like to discuss today is the use of this free NAS software (with TONS of features for sharing media) to get media shared in less than 10 minutes. This may be extremely useful at LAN parties for those trying to share content to one another (perhaps the latest 600mb patch of Battlefield 2!) Also, this method allows the computer to run the NAS software without disturbing the original OS. Just like any other linux live CD, FreeNAS (freeBSD based) has features that lets you boot from a CD or USB drive. If you need more information on NAS devices to see all the possible uses check out the wikipedia entry.
There are many different configuration options for getting it all up and running, but I will go into detail about that which I found to be the fastest. A few things to note before going through these steps:

-you do NOT need to remove all partitions on the machine you intend to setup as a NAS device. You may if you want to, but it doesn’t really matter unless you are performing a full installation or would like more storage space. You can leave everything intact, and there will be NO changes to the OS if you follow steps as I direct. If you stray from the path you could easily end up formatting the drive, but there are warnings before this would happen as well so don’t worry too much.

-you will need to know how to burn ISO’s onto a CD, just like any other linux distro.

-you do NOT need a lot of technical experience to get it up and running if you just follow this guide. Though the more knowledge you have about your computer hardware the better.
-you do NOT need know how to use linux, or BSD, or even know what they are. If you have hardware problems any time throughout this tutorial you could always hop over to the support forum and someone should be able to help you get on the right track.

-for default setup to work without changes you will need to already have an address such as 192.168.*1*.25. The *1* being the key factor there. Some routers by default are setup on different ones such as 192.168.0.1. It depends on the network.
Alright lets jump right into things. I will explain it step by step as all my other tutorials.

1. Download the ISO here and burn it to a CD.

2. Place the CD you just burned into the drive and boot up. You may want to have your keyboard and monitor hooked up to the machine to make sure your CD ROM drive has 1st boot priority. If it does not, simply go into your BIOS and change the boot order (there should be a button to hit such as F1, DEL, or F10).

3. Your CD should start booting the software automatically. Within about

2 minutes (if there are no errors) it should boot up for you and show the splash screen. You can press Enter and configure options (such as machine IP or connection to use such as wired or wireless) but it is up and running at that point. Note: the only thing your computer actually needs plugged in in the back is power and the data connection (which you would need none obviously if it is wireless).

4. On another machine on the same network open up your browser of choice and type “http://192.168.1.250″ into the address bar. This is the default HTTP control panel for FreeNAS.

5. Hit enter and you will be prompted for a username and password. Default username = admin. Default password = freenas.

6. Hit enter and you will now be at the main page. This is a status page and can give you some basic information about the system. Lets navigate to the left hand side and go to Disks > Management.

7. On the lower right side there is a + in a circle for you to add drives for it to recognize. Click to continue to the next screen.

8. You will need to choose your Disk (make sure and do NOT select your CD ROM drive) to setup. Find your hard drive on the list. Also make sure you select the format type of your drive (if the drive has windows installed on it you will choose NTFS. Click “Add” once completed. Repeat this process for any other hard drives installed in the machine if any.

9. Hit apply changes on the Disk Management screen. It should say “the changes have been applied successfully. If it does not you most likely made a mistake when configuring the disk.

10. Go to the Disks > Mount Point menu on the left side of the window.

11. We are now going to create a mount point for the drive. Click the button on the lower right to continue.

12. Choose your configured disk under the “disk” drop down menu and make sure you select Partition type 1. I’m going by the assumption that most users are going through these tasks with an NTFS formatted drive. Go to the drop down and select NTFS. Name and describe the drive as you wish (note that it is limited on the types of characters, it may be that it only allows spaces, numbers, and letters.)

13. Press the “Save” button and click “Apply Changes” on the following screen once you have configured all of your drives. If it says that all changes have been applied successfully the hard part is over and it is configured. Now we are going to verify, and setup a means by which your files are accessible over the network.

14. Go to Status > System on the left hand side. Look at the “Disk space usage” box at the bottom. It should show your configured drive there along with how much space has been filled on the drive. If all is there then the drive is configured properly and is reading correctly under FreeNAS.

15. For the sake of saving time I am going to assume you do not want any security on this box for the time being and will allow anonymous connections for sharing. You may configure them if you wish in the Access > Users and Groups menu. Lets go to the Services > CIFS/SMB menu on the left side.

16. Once in the menu you need to first enable the sharing service to run by clicking the checkbox in the upper right hand with the text “enable”.

17. Click the “Save and Restart” button at the bottom (note: this will just restart the service, not the computer).

18. After changes have been applied, go to the top and click on the “shares” tab.

19. Click the + button

20. Create a share name and comment. You may leave path blank. All other options should be okay by default. Hit the “Save” button and the “Apply Changes” button on the next screen.

21. Now close out of your browser and just open “My Computer”. Replace the text in the address bar to “\\192.168.1.250″ and hit enter. You should see your share listed below as a folder. Open and view, edit, save, delete your files just as if it was a locally connected drive.

Now a few closing notes. There are a lot of options we left blank, a lot of thing we could have changed with this system. Spend some time messing around with it, just be carefull of the “Format” menu. Because this is a live boot all changes you make will NOT be saved once the computer is powered down. You will need to reconfigure all of these settings as we have in this tutorial. After doing it a few times this should only take 5 minutes or less to reconfigure in the future. FreeNAS can also be installed as a full or embedded install. I will not cover this today but may in a future entry. If you are having any difficulties throughout the setup process head over to the support forum for help. Hope this gets you going on creating a NAS device for free.