Just 6 months ago I decided to put together a small and fairly inexpensive file server to serve as a software library, media deposit and much more.

As part of the project, I made the decision to try out an application that is used solely to the purpose of hosting data and making it available on the network. Some of the applications that I came across were FreeNAS, Openfiler and a few others less significant linux applications. Although my choice of software would be something in the field of non open source, the constraint of limited funds forced me to go with FreeNAS.

With great surprise, most of the functionalities of FreeNAS actually came in fairly handy and even the installation of the software was somewhat simple. After using FreeNAS for a while, I decided to actually go on a bigger escapade and try out ubuntu. Ubuntu is free-of-charge open source operating system much like FreeBSD and Fedora, etc. The project is still in the making and so far I am able to declare the following hardware as part of the project.

Intel Pentium 4, 2.8GHz HT

512MB DDR Memory

ATI Radeon Video Card

Hard Drives 1x (40GB OS) + 2x (320GB File Server)

… all this mounted in a 1U server case.