its all pritty straight forward:
its a so called
LiveCD so no need to install to try, just boot the CD on an old machine and run it off that cd.
take a look at the browser pictures you work with on the FreeNAS site
http://www.freenas.org/index.php?opt...d=15&Itemid=28
i assume you currently have several PCs on a your LAN all connected to
a switch or (wireless)router that can do 100Mbit or far better 1Gigabit.
"===" =straightthrough RJ45 cable
"=x=" =Xover/crossover RJ45 cable
"---" = wireless connection to and from somewere
something like:
VM-CM-===multiport(wireless)10/100/1000 router
and all LAN machines plug into this router with === and/or ---
you can also do an =x= connection directly from your FreeNAS to your main machine if you plan on playing with 1GigaBit iSCSI there,just add an extra 1Gigabit NC at both ends and Xover a seperate IP segment assignment (for instance you can use 10.0.0.* for that bit on both ends)
and you need a min of 256Meg Ram in the freeNAS to play nice iSCSI, not a problem with most of todays old machines.
Now, getting faster than 1gigabit Bonding virtual network on windows is a big problem so if you readers sus that part out after reading the links then let me know
but its fine with upto 1gigabit for now.
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/19...l#post34385995
and
http://www.freenaskb.info/kb/?View=entry&EntryID=204),
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take your old PC (now refered to as the FreeNAS machine) with a CDrom and 1 or more blank/old Harddrives in it
put a 1gigabit card in there, a cheap £6/12 RTL one will work fine (or 10/100 of thats all you have) or perhaps its already got an onboard 10/100/1000 so just use that.
find a nice place to put it out of the way later but remember to buy an RJ45 cable long enough to reach all the way to the router (thats anything upto 300foot away so no problem there in most houses).
now heres basicly the outline:
grab the latest FreeNAS
liveCD ISO
http://www.freenas.org/index.php?opt...ions&Itemid=51
grab the latest Nightly Build if you want to play with more iSCSI options
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fre..._mirror=heanet
or just the last 685b
burn that ISO to a CD and place it in the freenas CD drive and boot it.
if you happen to attach a screen and kb to it then you will see the options , it should already have set up the default static LAN address of 192.168.1.250
you can just play it blind if you like and assume the defaults so try without the screen and kb
just wait for the cd to stop and it should be fine.
yes,fine ,go to any LAN connected PC and start your browser.
if not, take note of the Ip address as your network might have issued another No, use that IP No instead in the next bit.
thats usually your router giving out IPs so check that router screen to see if it it gave the FreeNAS another No and use that instead.
open the said browser as
http://192.168.1.250 and you should see
the FreeNAS HTML pages as per my original screen grab above first link to configure it as you please.
Ohh , the default user/passwords are
admin and
freenas you can change them once inside.
set up your drives and play with it, once your happy you can then reboot the CD and take the plung to install it for real on the HD so as to be able to boot the HD, and not to have to keep booting the liveCD and slowing it down on accessing the NAS pages/binarys etc.
just follow the userguide PDF
http://www.freenas.org/downloads/doc...reeNAS-SUG.pdf and be up and running in 2 minutes, it will take longer to fit your drives and find a nice place for the BOX