FreeNAS

This is the email received from the S.M.A.R.T. Long Self-test option in FreeNAS installation and is the report on a disk with errors.

Subject: SMART error (EmailTest) detected on host: p2nas.local

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: p2nas.local
DNS domain: [Unknown]
NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

TEST EMAIL from smartd for device: /dev/ad8

This is the email received from the S.M.A.R.T. Short Self-test option in FreeNAS installation.

Subject: SMART error (EmailTest) detected on host: p2nas.local

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: p2nas.local
DNS domain: [Unknown]
NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

TEST EMAIL from smartd for device: /dev/ad6

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages). smartctl version 5.38 [i386-portbld-freebsd7.2] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen

This is the email received when testing FreeNAS status email reports using the S.M.A.R.T. option in FreeNAS installation.

Subject: Status report from p2nas.local on Thu Feb 11 06:50:10 EST 2010

Last 50 SMARTD log entries:
---------------------------
Feb 11 06:36:10 p2nas smartd[34469]: file /var/run/smartd.pid written containing PID 34469
Feb 11 06:36:10 p2nas smartd[34469]: smartd has fork()ed into background mode. New PID=34469.
Feb 11 06:36:05 p2nas smartd[34400]: Test of /etc/mail/smartdreport.sh to me@example.com: successful

FreeNAS or Openfiler? Which one should you use for your free open source network attached storage? Openfiler has a lot more features and is based on Linux so should work on a lot of computers. FreeNAS is simpler but is based on FreeBSD, a Unix that is slow to get support for new hardware. how do they match up in a live test?

FreeNAS is an interesting way of storing data at lower cost than dedicated NAS hardware. Here is my experience of installing FreeNAS. I originally used version 0.686b2 from 2007. Currently I am experimenting with version 0.7.1 and will update this article for the shiny new easier to use version.

FreeNAS is worth a look for recycling your old computers as Network Attached Storage.