FreeNAS Rules

After spending maybe another half hour with it, and after reading the immensely helpful articles over on Tim Fehlman's site.  Tim stopped by the other day and left a comment in the other FreeNAS thread, and I checked his site out.  Great overviews of all the basic configuration options and some awesome "how to" articles as well. Really, all I wanted was a box I could plug into my router so that other folks on my home workgroup could have a place to back up files.  FreeNAS came through in spades.  I ran out and scooped up a 140GB hard drive at Best Buy (Western Digital stuff was on sale) and threw it into the Compaq as a slave drive.  I backed my laptop up to it yesterday, and it's as fast as the Terastation we have in the office.

The only problem I'm having is with FTP.  I wanted to set up the FreeNAS FTP server so I could snag files from home while I'm at the office.  I followed the directions - no dice.  And yes, I did set up port forwarding on my NetGear router to send FTP requests to the FreeNAS box.

I'm guessing that Optimum Online is probably blocking the requests before they hit my IP.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time to troubleshoot the problem thoroughly - that will likely be a project for next weekend.

If you've got an older machine sitting around and need something for home backups, I'd recommend using FreeNAS.