Home NAS Recommendations

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Matt Middleton
<matt-oC+CK0giAiYdmIl+iVs3AywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> Is there an advantage to using FreeNAS over say a Debian server
>>  configuration (at least from an installation, set up and update  point of
>> view)?
>
> The main advantages are that the distro is available on a LiveCD, and config
> is fairly straightforward via a web interface.  That being said, I'm sure
> it's not necessarily the most powerful option.

"Available on LiveCD" doesn't seem like much of a big deal to me...

Once upon a time, it was rather valuable (especially if on dialup!) to
have a barrel of packages on CD so you didn't need to download them.

Reasonably quick bandwidth is sufficiently widespread these days that
this doesn't seem of all that much value.

What *would* seem of value to me, that isn't in something like Debian,
by default, is:

a) An assisted partitioning "wizard" to help build storage
configurations of some sophistication.
b) Some notification tooling to configure "calls for help" if the
device runs into issues.
   Who should I nag, and how, when:
    - SMART complains
    - Running out of space
    - Logs bloating
    - Anything else that might need a bit of nagging.  Such as,
"security issue!  Update this stuff!"
 c) Some expression of policy about periodic updating of software.

None of these are notably alien; if there's some pre-cooked
configuration and policy so that you don't have to construct it all
yourself, that's of some value.

I'll observe that the last time I built a "firewall box," which is a
different, but still, by intent, "appliance-like" purpose, I started
out by trying out a "run something off a floppy" thing, and migrated
over to Debian because it was easier to add an extra Debian box to my
environment than it was to add Another Different Appliance Thing
Needing Different Configuration.

And I suppose that this latter bit points at my particular bias :-).
I tend to think Debian's a better option as an "appliance manager"
than anything else, because it has pretty easy options for scaling
down such that the distribution can be pretty microscopic (e.g. - it's
mighty easy to leave off all "desktoppish" bits).  BSD folks might
have some legitimate objection that one could keep a
(Net|Open|Free)BSD down to reasonably compatible size with what you
could have with Debian.
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