First of all this blog is long overdue. I had the chance to play around with an open source project called FreeNAS. I’m sure most of you have heard of. It is based on FreeBSD and Monowall. First let me say this has been the most impressive open source project I have seen in the past year. You can check it out at FreeNAS.org. There are a number of reasons why I love this software. First being it’s light weight, which is awesome. You can run it off of a live CD, a Compact Flash/USB drive, or on a hard drive. Why is the CD / SSD so cool? Because you can cut down on loss of data. All you need to save your configuration to your desktop and upgrade to the newest build or change which format you would like to run it on. I have personally chosen the CF route. I have a CF to IDE converter and I’m running it on a compact flash. Yes I know they have limited write capacity, but that is the beauty of this I just save the config and pop in a new one and I’m back up and running. The OS size is only 128MB for the embedded. It takes about 10 seconds to install, which is super nice.
The other thing that I think is pretty Badass IMHO is the Web GUI. Everything is done though a Web GUI and it’s meant to run as a headless server. It also has a ton of services that it has built-in and run nicely out of the box. To name some: SMB/CIFS, FTP, TFTP, SSH, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, Unision, iSCSI, UPnP, itunes/DAAP, Dynamic DNS, SNMP, UPS, Webserver, BitTorrent. It also has software raid support so for those people who don’t have a hardware raid controller and just have a bunch of disks this is a great option.
I could go on and on about this project but I think it’s best you check it out for yourself. I promise you will not be disappointed. I have recently converted from an Ubuntu install running SMB to FreeNAS without looking back. The switch to FreeNAS has also improved my streaming to my ATV with XBMC over SMB.
On a side note I am getting ready for DEFCON in a month and a half with MSTAFF so hopefully I will be doing some more security projects and blogging them here.