An Old Computer Turns Into A FreeNAS Device Part 2

[pr3ban]

Nice. I've got an old HP Kayak XU that I'd like to repurpose as a FreeNAS for vm storage. The only thing that bothers me is that the slots for the SATARAID are all PCI, not PCI-e. Have you tried running any vm's in your config?

[uxwbill]

@pr3ban While I do have virtual machines (longtime VMware Workstation user here, though several versions behind current), they are stored on a second local hard drive in the computer where I use VMware. The NAS holds backups and other "idle" data, so its speed is not a big issue.

[geo58impala]

Wow thats a lot of optical drives! you could play a ton of cd-rom computer games at one time with that thing!. LOL

[drewyah100]

why so many cd drives?

[ralfytm]

About the flash card, have you think using a 4 gb memory stick and a cable from IDE to USB. I think it will work, i also have hobby with pc.

PS: keep up the videos, i like them :)

[PompousPreacher]

Your old computer has to at LEAST have an i7 core processor and 192 GBs of RAM. As we all know, at least humans who actually matter, those computers have long been obsolete and if you're a filthy peasant liberal who's still using one of those computers and your old PC doesn't have AT LEAST those specifications, you can't use it as a FreeNAS.

[HoneycombAgent]

What's with all those CD-ROM drives?

[boomndrum]

Awsome setup!!

[OakBluff55]

Very cool! Have you looked at any power saving options? For example, can you spin down the hard disk when not in use for a long period of time?

[uxwbill]

@OakBluff55 Yes. The disks spin down after some period of inactivity. I do not recall where the timeout is set, only that there is one.

[bernatk]

Srsly very cool project. I have never seen SATA cards on this part of the world.

I have an old P166 and windows me on it. Only 6.5G hdd. I've been thinking about a long time how I can reuse it lol. This NAS project looks very promising.

[uxwbill]

@bernatk Odd...I'd have thought that the SATA expansion cards were common just about everywhere computers are sold. You have more than enough disk in that system to start and run FreeNAS. However, you may need more RAM. The latest builds are said to require a minimum of 256MB installed RAM.

[xXBioKillerTrollXx]

where u get the mac os x disk?

[BroknSircut]

I wanna slide my finger down the optical drives eject buttons and watch the trays cum out.

[joshruehlig]

If using FreeNAS I wouldn't recommend atom processors, they can only handle 4GB of ram, athlon's can go up to 8 or 16GB I believe which would be better if trying to use ZFS. This actually saved me money in that many athlon boards are cheaper then atom D525 board, and have better performance as well (also they take Desktop ram, also saving money)

[BilisNegra]

Knowledge turns shit into gold. I've got a couple of old machines I've never used for the las 5 years, and I just see some junk whenever I look at the corner where they are collecting dust...

[simontay1984]

I have an old IBM thinkpad 380D. i've been thinking to install FreeNAS on it and have it connected to my WRT54GL router running DD-WRT. i want to be able to access my files over the 'net when i'm away from home via FTP.

The ethernet card is a 16bit PCMCIA Netgear 410TX.

The CPU is a Pentium MMX 150Mhz and it has 16MB of RAM. Would this work.

[uxwbill]

@simontay1984 You don't have anywhere near enough RAM, and it's a laptop. That is not the best combination--you must get at least 256MB RAM for recent builds and laptop hardware tends to be "funny", especially that which is old.

[simontay1984]

Why so many optical drives? How did you connect them. Most motherboards only have 2 IDE ports for a max of 4 devices.

[hrbear]

@simontay1984 There are many cd rom drives because these machines used to be file servers in the past. So the admin could easily change the cds, and offer different files to the users as they needed. They also served as backup devices. These cd rom drives are not IDE, they propable are SCSI ones. Then, only 1 SCSI controller needed for up to 15 devices, cd drives or hard disks, all of them on 1 or 2 SCSI cables.

[7941series]

FreeNAS is nice. I've been using it for a year or so now. But the Bit Torrent service caused some problems. Now it looks like it was removed from V8. It was a nice feature, but not very stable.

[stydel311]

Is it possible to take a linksys wpc54g wireless pci card and put it in my computer and connect it wireless-ly? I have a pretty fast router and don't use the server enough that it would have to be blazing fast. Is there a way to load drivers?

[uxwbill]

@stydel311 Possibly, yes. What kind of computer is it and what operating system are you running?

[stydel311]

@uxwbill The machine itself is (i believe) a C&M Computer, originaly running windows XP Home. Im pretty sure by the dates inside its from early 2003. It has a 1.7GHz intel Celeron, and 512MB of ram. Its already been formated and actually has freenas installed. I have some backups on it, but its in the basement, which is the problem. My routers upstairs, and my dad doesnt think any of our 30 year old plugins and wiring can handle it. i would just need to put a wireless car in it, any ideas?

[uxwbill]

@stydel311 The problem with wireless and open source software is one of nearly no cooperation from wireless chipset manufacturers. Ralink is the one chip maker that has cooperated to some extent with the open source community. Their software is needed to do housekeeping functions on the chip, which usually has a minimal CPU inside.

30 year old wiring that's been properly done should handle a computer--if it can't, there is a much bigger problem that MUST be fixed for your own safety!

[uxwbill]

@uxwbill A quick bit of web searching and a check of the FreeNAS 0.7 hardware compatibility list showed no evidence that wireless devices are in use. You'll probably be something of a trailblazer here if you try it. What I'd do is get an Ethernet to wireless converter or use a router that can run something like DD-WRT or Tomato in "client bridge" mode.

[sucutruleee1]

Great video! Have you ever considered structured cabling?

[uxwbill]

@sucutruleee1 No, because this stuff won't be here forever. This is my parents home and someday I will move out into my own home.

[Telstar85]

You bastard, have a PS/2 model 50 or so laying under your cd-server :)

[uxwbill]

@Telstar85 That's a 16-to-4 megabit Token Ring bridge.

[jdogtotherescue]

i tried that cf card adpater thing too but it didnt work with my old compaq deskpro. i then bought a sd to ide adpater and it worked! you might wanna try that. i just like the idea of having the os on a flash media. i was only able to install the embedded though.

[b0rk3d]

@jdogtotherescue You might want to try an USB stick, and get a small converter so you can stick it right into the header on the mobo. It doesn't an external power source (PATA) and runs with DMA unlike CF.

[Dant2142]

@b0rk3d I thought newer CF cards could use DMA.

[iToasterman]

its freenas. you dont say the whole name or say free nas u say it as one word...

[simplex237]

is that a hp netserver lh2

[RippedJolt]

Hey uxwbill, ive been watching your videos for a while and i just wanted to ask, what do you do? like you have a sizable network set up there and was just wondering the purpose of it?

[Grafikbug]

Nice hardware devices

[ASUSproz]

I am using windows home server. I would like to give freeNAS a try but main reason stopping me is because it doesnt have the back up method that WHS offers. automatic full image back up of whole computer + restore. Also no 2 identical files get back up. WHS simply make changes to original back up image. IS freeNAS able to do this feature?

[uxwbill]

@ASUSproz FreeNAS can use rsync. There are a few builds of rsync for Windows floating around. It probably takes somewhat more effort to set it up. The advantage is that Win32 builds of rsync will run on almost any 32-bit version of Windows.

You can always just try FreeNAS on almost any PC compatible computer as long as it has enough RAM.

[ASUSproz]

@uxwbill

will one gig of ddr2 work well? thats what my current windows home server use.

[surikan1]

@uxwbill how did you get mac os on it

[uxwbill]

@surikan1 This does not run the Macintosh operating system. It runs a specially configured version of FreeBSD known as FreeNAS.

[oxide112]

@ASUSproz freenas has Rsync more or less the same

[0Fluxor0]

The slug(NSLU2) was a great unit. I didn't pick one up while it was available. Bill, Do you have a network diagram of your network ? I mean you do seem to have a sizable network footprint with your Ethernet/Token Ring network. And with this installation. It's all very impressive really. For the pin grounding, You could always solder a momentary switch to the board and mounted that to the front of the case, it's alot of work for a half baked solution though, very cool video.

[TheIndoctriNATION]

Hey! Has there been a fire here yet? 

[uxwbill]

@TheIndoctriNATION No, should there have been? Are you planning to set one?

[TheIndoctriNATION]

@uxwbill

Of course not! I wouldn't even wish that on barry soetoro.

Just a heck of a lot of wires and gear everywhere, seen trouble before...

Take care

[MrKillswitch88]

This is a great idea and saved to favorites.

[klote2314]

ur eating up power aint ya

[jdcrispe95]

Whats the specs of that server?

[thevideoguy555]

Why so many optical drives?

[McgregorKLB]

I love it, going to make a FreeNAS for my apple time capsule to. I have 4 IDE 320GB disks. I want to make a RAID 5 with 3 disk. and have 1 spare if 1 of 3 disks fails. I have no experience with IDE-RAID. (i do with SATA) is there much difference? Going to check sum more video's! cheers!

[uxwbill]

That is half of what mine does, although I am not using RAID. If you do use RAID, it is probably best to use the software RAID built into FreeNAS. Many "RAID" adapters that you can readily buy are in fact "fake RAID" cards that use firmware and special driver tricks to make it appear that they have actual RAID logic and hardware support. This does not work very well in FreeNAS and many other places (outside of Windows).

[uxwbill]

Three disks is the minimum required for RAID-5...two striped data disks and one for parity information storage. If you want a hot spare, you will need four disks.

From a software point of view, PATA and SATA can be identical. (However, SATA controllers can operate in AHCI mode, which lets the underlying software see that they're not just PATA controllers.) FreeNAS typically works best if you run your controller in the IDE mode.

[uxwbill]

SATA also supports hot plugging/unplugging of disk devices, which PATA hardware typically does not.

As cheap as large hard drives are today, unless you are reusing old disks, you would do a lot better with new, large SATA drives.

[poopskinTheLiar]

@colbertnation1776

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what shall we think of a empty desk?" -Albert Einstein

Obviously, Bill has a lot on his mind :P

[HybridPineapple]

Why so many cd drives?!?!?!

[JayDetroiter]

Nice vid but when are you going to do the TM vid I would love to see it.

[poopskinTheLiar]

my NAS needs are met by a lil' HP MediaSmart LX195. Nice setup you've got, though!

[SpeedSwordCarbon]

does that work

on Windows too

[uxwbill]

FreeNAS can be configured to provide a file share that Windows machines can use.

Windows (XP and earlier) don't have a mechanism to perform automated hourly backups. (They do, however, have a basic backup program that can be scheduled. You probably wouldn't want it to run every hour.)

You can run a tool called rsync on Windows to do scheduled backups.

Windows 7 is supposed to have some kind of fancy backup tool. I have not tried it.

[cakelover33]

@uxwbill i dont have any important files or anything. so i wont use that for aa while

[Bandicoot803]

"No Time At All"! Awesome job!

[padix900]

that's nice! you should try to make a computer that cleans up the mess in your kitchen

[uxwbill]

I did, and it crashed. :-)

[padix900]

LMAO!

[OmegaM41]

I see you're calling it "The Dump of Time." Very nice!

[uxwbill]

Hey, somebody finally noticed!

It seemed like a fitting name to me.

It's actually a reflection on time and moments in computer data being left there, like garbage at a town dump. (Only later do people go there looking for everyday objects that have now became treasures. Just as would be the case with this data...)

[vwestlife]

I tried one of those Compact Flash adapters in my laptop, because its hard drive crashed and I wanted to try a solid state drive that would be immune to physical damage... it works, but is very slow, and Windows refuses to allocate a swap file on the flash drive, so when the computer gets low on RAM, it gets even slower. So, I'm going back to a regular hard drive, and I guess I'll take my chances with it crashing again!

[uxwbill]

Maybe it was the way the adapter worked?

I have an IBM NetVista 8364 that boots and runs Windows 98SE from a CF card. However, it plugs right into the motherboard and shows up as an IDE hard disk. (I really think the system temporarily grounds that ninth pin to put the CF card into IDE mode.)

The thing about flash memory is that it has a write-cycle life limit. People claim you'll beat one of them to death in hours to days if you put a swap file on it. The 8364 has run for two *years)*.

[uxwbill]

There are also some kinds of flash that are faster than others. There's NAND flash, NOR flash, and in today's world, also Single Level Cell and Multi-Level Cell flash.)

Some CF cards are really, really slowly because they top out a low speed programmed I/O mode. It can pay to buy a faster one for that reason if you plan to run your computer from it.

(Oh, and I do use a swap file with 256MB of installed RAM on the 8364.)

[meierbeat]

Nice one with the FreeNAS. Looks quite good. How much power does it need? I suppose a good old P2 with a BX2000 chipset would save you a bit. And that chipset should have more PCI lanes - have you already tested how much mbps you get over LAN? (Shouldn't be too bad if you don't copy from LAN to USB ;-))

[uxwbill]

I haven't put the power meter on it yet to know. I'd guess it's pulling about 90 watts from the AC outlet. Maybe less, now that I've got less stuff hooked up to it and that EcoGreen drive.

The chipset is an Intel 440FX/PIIX3, where the BX2000 you mentioned appears to be a motherboard built on the 440BX. But maybe I misunderstood. If I did, let me know.

[uxwbill]

Here are the power usage numbers:

FreeNAS, boot drive, Samsung EcoGreen storage drive and a few PCI cards adds up to 56 watts total.

The NSLU2 (running two SATA disks in USB enclosures) pulls 46 watts total.

Apple says the Time Capsule pulls 34 watts when fully powered up. I haven't checked that number yet.

[meierbeat]

No, that's right - the BX2000 was a motherboard, produced by Gigabyte with the revolutionary dual BIOS ;-). The 440BX-Chipset was what I meant... Too long ago - I think 10 years, when I bought myself a P2 350 Mhz ;-)

Power consumption is pretty low - and looks even better if you compare it to the NSLU...

[uxwbill]

I haven't had too many Gigabyte boards (normally I use the ASUS ones) but the few that I have used were definitely good quality.

An Intel D201GLY2A board (Celeron 220 with SiS chipset) being used as a desktop computer clocked in at 48 watts with a USB memory key, CD-ROM and one SATA hard disk.

So it looks like power consumption is pretty even as long as whatever you are using fills the need.

Intel should have really made an Atom-based board with the SiS chipset instead of the power hungry 945

[uxwbill]

Instead of doing that, though, they dumped the D201GLY2/2A boards, probably in a fit of "that chipset wasn't invented here!" in June 2009.

Some people don't like SiS chipsets. I've never had any complaints from the few I have here.

I know that nVidia now has their Ion chipset for Atom processors out, but I'd really rather have the SiS one. Nothing against the company, but some of the nVidia chipsets I've used have behaved in...interesting...ways.

[randomrazr]

optical drives...thats so 90s :p

[uxwbill]

That thing with all the CD drives in it is a server. Yes, really. You put CDs in and it serves them out over the network for Windows and Macintosh file sharing. Or you can view the contents of the CDs from a web page.

It was given to me at a hamfest. At first I thought it was a SCSI CD tower, and I was going to strip it for the drives. And then I saw the Ethernet looking port on the back. It's very handy (for computers without CD drives) so I have kept it.

[Noxtek]

I back up my data on old paper punch cards. :-)

Great video Bill, 5 stars!

[annatom2]

lol you will need alot of space for that

[uxwbill]

Heh! Paper punch cards...that's great! You win "best comment for the day".

I hope you have a portable reader for those! :-)

[matkovicha]

HA, ME TOO!!

[Appl3Byte]

Very Nice! I was thinking of buying an apple time capsule, But now i could give it a shot and try to set up my old Dell 4200 system. I do have some knowledge of Unix commands and such so should make things super easy then paying mega bucks for one. Thanks!

[uxwbill]

I'd definitely recommend trying this. The Dell (Dimension) 4200 should run it well. I'd suggest 256MB installed RAM if you can get it.

Make a user with rights sufficient to use the disk you set up in FreeNAS. Turn on the AFP service and set up a share that advertises itself as a Time Machine destination. I believe that you also have to turn on AFPv3 "Unix" permissions when setting up the share.

Zeroconf/Bonjour should already be running, and you should be ready after that.