FreeNAS Quick Start Guide, Installation HowTo

FreeNAS Quick Start Guide

This quick start tutorial is meant to accompany the Graphical Tutorial freenas1.htm. A link to this can be found here:

http://www.freenas.org/contrib/sloan/freenas1.htm

This guide will help to build a FreeNAS implementation from the live CD into a PC using one or more hard drives in the PC. FreeNAS will run in RAM and each time you reboot the PC FreeNAS will reload into RAM. The live CD can be found here.

http://www.freenas.org/index.php?option=com_versions&Itemid=51

This guide covers version 0.686b3 but it will also assist in future versions. Do not download the .tgz file, we want the .iso. You will need to burn this to a cd disk. A good free tool for this is Deep Burner for Windows. Here is the link http://www.deepburner.com/?r=download

Then create the ISO. I use 'cdrecord' via the Linux comand line.
sudo cdrecord -v speed=20 dev=/dev/sr0 FreeNAS-I386-liveCD-0.686b3.iso
I use Ubuntu your device 'dev' may vary .

Now that you have set your bios to boot from cdrom and you have created your ISO we can boot into FreeNAS on your PC.

Booting from a live CD like this is a great way to test your hardware. You could also check the FreeBSD Hardware Compatibility List. http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/hardware-i386.html

Now we will cover 4 Steps for installing FreeNAS.

Step One: Add the hard drive.
Step Two: Format the disk
Step Three: Enable Services CIFS.SMB, FTP, SSHD, UpNP
Step Four: Test our setup

The default IP address for FreeNAS is 192.168.1.250. This will be automatically set on boot-up. If your network is on the same subnet you can log-in via a browser and configure away. If not you can change this by attaching a monitor to the PC and resetting the IP address. If you want to use a shell or install to a hard drive or add additional interfaces you may do this via the console. If you have a monitor attached to the PC you will see a boot screen. To get to the console you can hit the escape key or just hit enter.

Don't forget to change the default password from freenas to something secure. The default username is admin

Once you have a configuration that is working you may want to back up. System > Backup/Restore is the location to do this.

Comments about the two tutorials can be made to ComputerProSupport@gmail.com