This topic is related to the following thread: NAS for HD content streaming - minimum specs? What operating systems should I be looking at for my NAS box? I want it to be able to handle drive encryption, drive by drive spin up on demand, mailserver & FTP...and as I'm not great with code/scripting, a nice GUI
I never touched a NAS box, I think any OS will do the trick. Although, I have no clue for mailserver and drive by drive spin up on demand. Perhaps Windows Home Server or Windows Server 2008, or Linux as this is what Linux does best... servers. Heck if you just want file sharing than I think Windows Vista 64-bit will be fine.
Being a mailserver isn't a normal function for a NAS. www.freenas.org - will do most of the things you want except serve mail (there maybe an addon for that but I've never wanted it so havn't looked)
+1 on freeNAS. As soon as I can find some stable legacy hardware in my pile, I will be setting on up at home. Seeing how my other project is on hold waiting for tools.
Try Clark Connect but im not sure on the drive encryption side. Openfiler might might the storage side but you might have to hack it for email etc, it's linux based so if your ok with linux then you might be able to do what you want.
XP pro stripped down, hassle free in finding software to sort it, and considering all its doing is back up and stream and handle emails i cant see it going wrong at all. Its what i am going to be setting up on my shuttle, strip the OS down to its bare essentials and i can add-on apps as i need them. I did consider a linux distro like FreeNAS but after looking at it i came to two conclusions, one i dont understand linux well enough to drive it, and two i considered it to be limited in terms of adding features which looped me around to the first point. FreeNAS is well documented and i am sure a dummy could follow there guides in setting it up, but when you want extra features it gets messy.
Another vote for FreeNAS. works great even on low powered machines, and the browser-based user interface is very sleek.
Not to hijack this thread, but how well does freeNAS do printer sharing? I have set up an ubuntu server/nas and apart from the occasionally issue with folder passwords, printing is giving me a huge headache. So perhaps freeNAS could help me out.
I'm personally rather fond of using NetBSD for server tasks. You can really strip it down and customize it. If you don't like to tinker that much, FreeNAS or similar would probably do the job as well
I'm using Ubuntu myself (wanted the GUI so I can use it as a basic machine when I dont fancy booting up the main rig) on an Atom 1.6Ghz, 1GB ram. Runs SMB for file sharing, Bind9 for caching DNS (my ISP's dns are terrible!), DHCP, Left 4 Dead Dedicated server and a couple of other bits and bobs including a TeamSpeak Server. As such I would say any *nix environment would serve you well
Have you set up CUPS? It's dead easy and works like a charm. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1831119 http://www.owlfish.com/thoughts/winipp-cups-2003-07-20.html
Yeah I had it set up, and it would print test pages from the windows machines but not anything useful. I tried freenas knowing that I wouldn't be able to get a print server working without installing my own packages, but if I ever need a pure NAS again I will be using it as it was dead easy and worked like a charm. I am currently using Clark Connect for my file and printer server, again had some printer issues (I think my printer hates linux) but now it is working 100% and apart from the printer issue and adding a new hard drive afterwards, it was all done in the web based gui and took no time at all. So my recommendation is, if you want a NAS, use freeNAS, if you want multi purpose (print/web/file/email) server then go for clark connect, but grab yourself putty and winscp as remote command file and file browsing is a godsend when tweaking and fixing.