Simple NAS

I have a home network with several Windows client and sharing the files through Windows simple file sharing. Tons of audio, photo, video and application files are stored in different client machines. So, if we need to access the files we have to open the other PC. I was thinking, why would I not create a NAS to centralized the files. NAS or Network Attached Storage is computer attached to a network whose main purpose is to provide data storage. That’s the simplest that I can describe it. My considerations are: It should be cheap, has less power consumption and reliable.

I have an old laptop which is still functional except the lcd screen is busted, its a perfect candidate for the project since it doesn’t have a monitor, it will be accessed remotely via ssh. Maybe I will use Putty for the task. Next is choosing which distro to use. I am a Windows user since I can remember and occasionally testing various Linux distro. Since my server will be an old and cranky laptop, Windows Home Server is out of consideration plus I will spend another bucks for it. I am not a Linux user myself but maybe its time to take a shot once more and try to learn it. There are several distros around that can be use like FreeNAS, Openfiler, Turnkey etc. In the end, I ended up using Debian(Squeeze) after playing with FreeNAS. FreeNAS is good, you can read all the positive reviews it got in the Linux community but I just can’t make it right to run in my laptop. I got several errors after errors so I ended using the Debian.

Here is the specs of the laptop that I use:

Processor
Intel Pentium M 1.2 GHz
400.0 MHz
Intel 855PM
RAM
384.0 MB DDR SDRAM
Storage
The laptop has 40GB HDD and I will be attaching external HDD to store the files.

Now the fun begins here.
Downloading the Installer
I downloaded the latest Debian netinst.iso in the Debian‘s webpage. I choose the netinst since I will only intall a very minimal apps and will run it in console mode only. I don’t plan to install X Server for one reason my, machine is old and it will eat up a lot of my precious resources and it will only be serving files anyway.

Installing Debian
Instead of using a cd for the installation, I created a bootable usb installer using UNetbootin you can download their windows version and follow the tutorial in their site. Believe me, it’s very straight forward and easy to use. There are many blogs and “How To’s” that you can follow for the installation just use Google to find it.

I will be installing the ff:

• Samba for Windows File Sharing
• rtorrent for downloading and seeding torrents
• mpg123 for playing mp3 (so I don’t have to open my pc just to listen to my collections)