NASLite Network Attached Storage

ok, so there is a nes nas distro out.... see http://www.freenas.org and the program looks pretty good too (hint soft raid,default gateway, still boots off compactflash, cd,hdd without having to buy) and im sure i wont have to wait longfor upgrades like some nas program i bought recently hmm.

it just makes me wonder, i like this certain nas program but updates are pretty slow and there is still no raid support or default gateway etc.

just a thought.

I looked at it, went as far to install it. Whats the old saying, you get what you pay for? Well, it's free, so thats what your getting, an unpolished work.

Took nearly 5 minutes to boot off of a USB key on 1.5ghz althon!!, has a default gateway with no user management, can some one say security ISSUE. It didn't support my ga311 card at gigbit speed, and was really confusing to install.

I have no faith in the developer, he's just taken m0n0wall and tried to roll a nas solution into it, really would you trust your valuable data to a solution thats hacked on top of something else? I'm talking about the m0n0wall code, not the OS. If you peruse thier forum there's a post from the developer that he just recently learned PHP and FreeBSD and decided to do this project, I can't trust my valuable data to that inexperience.

Here's a recent post about naslite from him.


I think in the history of naslite there's been like 2 bugs, freenas has 5 to 10 at any give time. This is probably from breaking m0n0walls code.

Can't quite see how you can say the updates are slow, this certain nas program had to change the licencing because they had more updates than they expected in a 6 month period. I bought it in April at vers 1.1 and now wer're at vers 1.5 thats an update every 2 months It's not perfect but there have been vast improvments over the last 6 months and with Vers 2.0 on the horizon and a lot of the features your stating freenas has will be incorporated, obviously there will always be other options some may be superior and have more features, some useful additions etc, if someone has a hobby at writing software and wants to offer it for free thats fine, until they decide to do something else and all your support dries up Now that could happen with a certain other nas but these guys are relying on it for a living so it's in their interests to improve and make it stable. I've had a quick look at freenas and it seems ok, I don't think it will be as stable as another certain NAS software, having an online bug tracker is a good sign of BETA I'm not saying this hasn't had the odd bug but most complaints about running are down to hardware, all my problems have been hardware related not software.
It'll be an interesting one to keep an eye on for the future but I'll stick with a certain other nas software, great support, supremely stable product and with the vers 2.0 improvements it's going to be some product

I am always interested in seeing new linux projects however....

someone tell me if i am going mad...

"Features planned to be supported by FreeNAS

FreeNAS will support :

* Protocol: uPNP"

what on earth can that do to help a NAS box?

I can only think of bad things

I had to chime in on this one. I am new to this product and am currently testing both NASLite+ and FreeNAS side by side.

I agree with everything said, regarding FreeNAS, but I find it has several features that I would really like added to NASLite+ some day.

I am running both products on 2.4GHz P4 machines, each with 1GB memory and GA311 Gigabit NIC's. Both seem 100% stable for the week I have had them running.

What I like about FreeNAS is the ability to completly configure it through the WEB interface after installing and setting the IP address. Other items include adjustable disk "spin-down" to reduce heat and what I really like is that pushing the on/off switch, gracefully shuts down the O/S, just like the full version of Linux.

Jerry