Writing books about software almost certainly means that the book will be out-of-date sooner rather than later. This is even more the case when writing open source software under active development. However, this has not stopped Packt Publishing from releasing yet another open source-related book: Learning FreeNAS, written by Gary Sims.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) was often found in companies and large enterprises, until recent times when prices of technology and especially hard drives prices were falling lower than ever. With FreeNAS (a free network attached storage server based on the UNIX-like operating system FreeBSD) setting up a NAS servers is in everybody’s reach, and “Learning FreeNAS” makes understanding and setting up a NAS system an easy task.
FreeNAS has a full range of advanced features, including RAID support and support for Microsoft Active Directory and iSCSI. These and many other features are easily accessible through a web-browser.
Setting up a stand-alone FreeNAS server brings some useful advantages: operating system and data are separated. This means that whatever happens to your desktop operating system, all your data, pictures, music and videos are safe on the data server.
Learning FreeNAS has some 200 pages explaining the background of NAS in general and FreeNAS in particular, and an additional 20 pages with an introduction to FreeBSD. Learning FreeNAS is not a handbook, but it is full with good information.
The book has two parts, one for those who are familiar with open source operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD) and want to start to “get their hands dirty”, and another part for readers new to these systems and who’d like to go through the theory and processes step-by-step.
So, what is this book all about? The first chapter explains the idea behind NAS and the philosophy of the FreeNAS server.
The second goes into capacity planning and hardware requirements, backups and redundancy needs. Calculating future disk space is important, but often overlooked. As most PC users know, you can never have enough hard disk space.
Chapter 3 explains how to install FreeNAS and chapter 4 goes into the different services and protocols (CIFS/SMB for Windows clients, NFS for UNIX clients, AFP for OS X clients, etc). If you’re new to these protocols, this chapter helps you decide what to activate in order to make your data storage server available to all connected PC’s on the network.
Chapter 5 deals with system administration and user administration. The next 2 chapters deal with RAID Levels (0, 1, 5, 6, 10 – redundancy and fault tolerance) and backing up your data server to other disks or remote servers.
Chapter 8 and 10 are mainly for advanced users as they deal more with FreeBSD, the operating system underlying FreeNAS.
Hardly any installation will be without problems, hence chapter 9: problem solving.
As you can see from the above chapters, the book is set out very methodological. It goes from introduction to planning, installing and trouble shooting.
The book does not go into all details and settings of FreeNAS, but reading it you will find your way round very quickly. Overall the book is well written and easy to follow. Garry has done great job making NAS and FreeNAS easy to understand. If you have a spare PC (and some spare hard drives), give FreeNAS a whirl and that PC a new lease of life.
Many companies sell dedicated NAS systems (Netgear, QNAP etc) at high prices, but if you like to understand the NAS concept and like to set up yourself, have a look at FreeNAS.
One minor point I’d like to add is that since FreeNAS has evolved further since Learning FreeNAS came out, a number screens have changed, so some of the screenshots in the book do not match the screens in newer FreeNAS versions.
As FreeNAS is a project in continuous development, Gary has also set up a blog to keep you up-to-date about new versions, howto’s and other useful content: www.learnfreenas.com. News, howto’s and other interesting material relating to FreeBSD, can be found on www.freebsdnews.net.
If you are looking to set up a FreeNAS server, I definitely recommend buying this book as it is a clear and concise guide to setting up and implementing FreeNAS.
Buy on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
