I used to manage a computer lab at a high school with 20 iMacs running
OSX 10.4. The reason for me choosing a NAS box was the old Windows
Server 2000 machine at the time acting as the lab's fileserver had some
serious problems.
Firstly, some files stored on the W2K box got corrupted. The files
themselves were fine if they were accessed on a Mac client, but when I
attached a firewire drive to the W2K machine for backup, a lot of files
got messed up. Lesson learned: don't store files created on a Mac on NTFS.
Second, thanks to Microsoft's greed, only 10 clients can access the
server at a time. Given that there are 20 clients in this lab (more if
someone brings in their laptops), some people had to wait in line until
someone else logged off before they can access the server.
Third. Mac data files have the resource folk and the data folk
integrated. The users in the lab work on collaborative projects where
they would color code the files for easy identification. Files saved on
the W2K machine (if not corrupted) had this color info removed.
Interestingly, under FreeNAS, if the users access these color coded file
under SMB, the colors are gone, but under AFP, the colors show up!
Fourth. Perhaps this is why files were corrupted. The Mac OS seems to be
more liberal with naming scheme. Mac users in general love to use unsual
characters as the file names. Once a file with these "unconventional"
file names were saved onto the W2k server, it got corrupted and would
not be accessible by the very same Mac that had created it.
Fifth. The W2K server was slow serving out files. Maybe it was trying to
work its way through the protocol stack to the Appletalk one. Also,
sometimes the Mac client could not connect to the server at all.
So these were the reasons I was looking for a better storage solution.
I stumpled upon FreeNAS and gave it a shot. I installed it on a P4 with
128 MB of RAM and a 20GB IDE drive. This FreeNAS file server has been in
service for nearly a year now and no problems so far. It even survived 3
unplanned shutdowns: 2 from power outages and the other because some
student yank out the powercord. It took me several tries to set it up
because FreeNAS kept telling me that there was error in mounting the
drive in the GUI, but I ignore it and it works. Basically, it's a false
positive. I could not make FreeNAS boot from a 512MB CF card attached
via IDE so I settled with a two partions scheme on this 20GB drive.
Other than a few hiccups, this FreeNAS server has been running
flawlessly. The best part is that there is no 10 users limitation. Take
that Bill Gates! Speedwise, it was definitely faster than the old
Windows server. I upgraded the NIC to gigabit as the switch in the lab
was already a Neatgear Gb switch and all the iMacs were Gb as well.
One major gripe I have about FreeNAS though is user permissions.
Although I could create groups and members to put into these groups,
they all had the same access permission (read and write) to the files!
Therefore, if one user in the lab carelessly or intentionally deleted
all files, they would be all gone! I attached a firewire hardrive to one
of the iMacs and backup all the data (18GB) everyday just in case.
In short, other than a security "problem", FreeNAS rocks. By the way,
the people who used the lab were reminded frequently that the data saved
on the fileserver or locally on the Mac client were not secured so if
they wanted security, they had to store their files on their own USB
sticks.
