So the other month I bought a ton of new equipment for a new NAS box. The question was, which NAS software to go for? As ever it needed to be free, preferably open-source, and have all the functionality I was looking for.
Webserver
FTP server
SAMBA/CIFS
RSYNC
I wrote about my excitment for
OpenMediaVault (OMV) more than a few months back (
http://bleedingedgegeek.blogspot.com/2009/12/current-nas-situation.html). However during this wait my current NAS
(FreeNAS) began to fail, due to harddrive issues, and the fact that it was a crappy old box.
OMV has yet to be released, so I was in a bit of a pickle, I have new hardware, I need a new NAS, so I began to try my alternatives. I installed and checked out the following NAS solutions:
eBox
Openfiler
Amahi
P.S. There are more, but some of them were ruled out due to hardware limitations, or pricing for several drive solutions (
unRAID).
eBox was nice in the fact that it had a built in LDAP server, but I soon realized that it is not something I really need. Openfiler was cool, but I had some issues with my
WD EAR drives (a
dvanced 4KB sectors), and I wasn't really a fan of the Volume Management. And Amahi... it sounds good, but the plug and play aspect is a little cluncky/cloogy in my mind.
So in the end, I stuck with FreeNAS! I have implemented encryption on my drives, FreeNAS handles the WD EARS no problem, setup the UPS feature for safe power downs. All in all I am happy with my decision, there is no guarantee that OMV will be in a good shape when it is release, so why take the risk - stick with something I know and love!