My FreeNAS Box

I wasn’t planning on building a computer last week, but I made the mistake of browsing NewEgg while also thinking it would be neat to have some sort of home server for easily sharing files. So here I am, less than 1 week from clicking the first “Add to Cart” button, with my FreeNAS box.

I hope most of you are smarter than I am and won’t need any of this info, but here it is anyway.

What I bought:

• 1 x MB INTEL|BOXDG41AN G41 LGA775 RTL ($71.99)
• 1 x MEM 2G|CRUC CT25664BA1067 R($23.99)
• 1 x CASE INWIN| BP655 200W RT ($49.99)
• 1 x FLASH 8G|PATRIOT PSF8GMUSB RT ($14.99)
• 2 x HD 1T|SEAGATE 7K ST31000528AS OEM – OEM ($129.98)
• 1 x CPU INTEL|C430 1.8G 775 512K R ($43.99)

Resources:

• Freenas (http://freenas.org/)
• TooSmartGuys YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZqGHKKIK48
• Alternate FreeNAS (http://shell.peach.ne.jp/aoyama/archives/1244)

I made the same mistake and bought a case that’s not made for holding two standard size internal drives – so I currently have one resting in the bay for the optical drive… (This mistake can be avoided by carefully reading the product description).

I got everything put together – somewhat miraculous in itself since I’m not a hardware person.

At first I had trouble getting the bootable image on the 8GB flash drive (land of blinking cursor every time I tried to boot from the USB drive), so I got a hold of an old 512MB USB drive and got that working – which is when I learned that good ol’ standard FreeNAS doesn’t apparently support my mobo’s LAN interface.

So, I found this version – http://shell.peach.ne.jp/aoyama/archives/1244 – use may wish to turn on Google Translate. I downloaded FreeNAS i386 LiveCD v0.7.2.5547, burned that to a disk and dug out my external optical drive. Plugged that in and prepared to boot from the optical drive.

Hurray, I can now successfully boot into FreeNAS and get and IP address! Then I used the option to make a bootable USB drive. First I used the 512MB drive, but that didn’t work, so I went back to the 8GB drive. And hurray again!

Once I got to this point, I just followed the directions from the Too Smart Guys YouTube video.

Next step: find a better case, and a suitable corner to stash this thing in.