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Here's a draft I received from sblair, who sadly at the moment could not post it himself.

sblair http://superuser.com/users/flair/494.png

Here's a draft I received from sblair, who sadly at the moment could not post it himself.

Username http://superuser.com/users/flair/494.png

• Set up SMB/CIFS, FTP, NFS, and AFP shares
• Transmission BitTorrent client, with its own web interface (24-hour downloading/seeding!)
• rsync
• SSH
• iSCSI
• Dynamic DNS
• DAAP
• UPnP
• S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and email alerts
• Manage users

• It's important to note that RAID-Z1 (single-drive redundancy) is not really recommended. If a single drive fails, the strain of resilvering (which may take a long time) might knock out a second drive - and all data would be lost. RAID-Z2 provides dual-disk redundancy for this reason. (All of my work and important personal documents are backed-up with Dropbox, and the data on my NAS are somewhat expendable.)
• Although Solaris offers the most up-to-date ZFS support, with features such as de-duplication and snapshots, I didn't plan on needing these and so I was happy to settle for the older version of ZFS in FreeNAS 0.7.
• The SATA ports in the case are close together, and I was lucky to only have two L-shaped SATA cable connectors; otherwise they would not fit.
• The case also has a 2.5" hard drive bracket, which is intended to be used for the OS/boot drive.
• Booting from USB automatically with the ASUS AT3IONT-I motherboard is not obvious. You need to pretend the USB drive is a floppy disk drive.
• Initially, I toyed with the idea of an integrated NAS and HTPC, but decided that there would be too many compromises; dedicated devices would be far better. For example, FreeNAS is great for ZFS support and other NAS tools, but how would I get a driver for ION-accelerated HD video out of the HDMI port? The hard drives are also too noisy for a HTPC. As an aside, the Boxee Box works really nicely as a dedicated HTPC.
• btrfs should be great one day when it's ready, but ZFS does the stuff that's important for a NAS now.

sblair http://superuser.com/users/flair/494.png

• Set up SMB/CIFS, FTP, NFS, and AFP shares
• Transmission BitTorrent client, with its own web interface (24-hour downloading/seeding!)
• rsync
• SSH
• iSCSI
• Dynamic DNS
• DAAP
• UPnP
• S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and email alerts
• Manage users
• Network interface link aggregation

• It's important to note that RAID-Z1 (single-drive redundancy) is not really recommended. If a single drive fails, the strain of resilvering, which may take a long time, might knock out a second drive. All data would be lost. RAID-Z2 provides dual-disk redundancy for this reason. (All of my work and important personal documents are backed-up with Dropbox; the data on my NAS are somewhat expendable.)
• Although Solaris offers the most up-to-date ZFS support, with features such as de-duplication and snapshots, I didn't plan on needing these and so I was happy to settle for the older version of ZFS in FreeNAS 0.7.
• The SATA ports in the case are close together, and I was lucky to only have two L-shaped SATA cable connectors; otherwise they would not fit.
• The case also has a 2.5" hard drive bracket, which is intended to be used for the OS/boot drive.
• Booting from USB automatically with the ASUS AT3IONT-I motherboard is not obvious. You need to pretend the USB drive is a floppy disk drive.
• Initially, I toyed with the idea of an integrated NAS and HTPC, but decided that there would be too many compromises; dedicated devices would be far better. For example, FreeNAS is great for ZFS support and other NAS tools, but how would I get a driver for ION-accelerated HD video out of the HDMI port? The hard drives are also too noisy for a HTPC. As an aside, the Boxee Box works really nicely as a dedicated HTPC.
• btrfs should be great one day when it's ready, but ZFS does the stuff that's important for a NAS now.

Here's a draft I received from sblair, who sadly at the moment could not post it himself.

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Here's a draft I received from sblair, who sadly at the moment could not post it himself.

Username http://superuser.com/users/flair/494.png