NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and it has become a major point of hardware sale.
http://bfy.tw/8tGM
So here you will find fancy boxes that are set up to do the magic for you.
But if you have a few USB disks and a broken computer why not hook all your USB-disk up to it and install NAS software and manage your own network storage?
That's what I did.
I learned from my testing of Freenas that it makes no sense in installing it on the HD because you need it for storage.
I liked Freenas but it was UNIX and I am kind of a Linux guy so I checked out Rockstor and found it worth the test so here we go:
I picked up two USB dongles one 2GB and another 32GB and hooked them up to my computer.
Then I downloaded Rockstor
..so far so good.
Time to burn that to my 2GB USB dongle then:
I checked out where it was with lsblk (or maybe use gparted) and dd'ed it to my dongle making sure it was not mounted.
Standing in the directory with the rockstor iso:
Code: Select all
dd if=Rockstor-1.2-3.iso of=/dev/sdb(This is only an example your usb may be something else than /dev/sdb so check it!)
That went fine so I rebooted and set my Bios to boot from the 2GB USB containing Rockstor.
It booted and I was asked to install Rockstor and picked my other connected 32GB dongle as destination /Rockstor only needs 8GB for the install).
Now the process started and it took a looong time so be patient.
Some basic settings had to be filled in but that is easy really:
The reason why it tooke so long was that it was formatting the harddisk of the computer as storage space - which is fine.
It should be possible to add more space later by connecting those USB 2TB disks...
So the install went through and it was time to go to another PC and point the browser to the ip of the box with the Rockstor install and....
As you can see I connected the 2TB Disk - a simple re-scan and it was all there.
So far this thing looks more impressive than Freenas and I feel way more comfortable with the Centos CLI since Rockstor is powered by Centos.
It is supposed to excel with speed since it uses Btrfs that has a way of speeding up storage.
