Code|Beta

I went to monitor the process of the file copy from the second hard drive to the USB attached hard drive to see how much longer it would take and I simply had it with waiting for the copy to complete so I just went and copied what was ultimately necessary and didn’t backup everything else…mostly because they had previously been backed up.

After doing that I recabled the hard drives and booted up FreeNAS so that I could add those extra hard drives to the mix and have my file server back up and running. In order to restore the data I decided to do it over the network as it would be way faster than connecting to the USB 1.0, yes it’s a 1.0 and I confirmed it with the dmesg output that FreeNAS attaches to the e-mail, and copying all the files back. I hooked up the hard drive to my Windows box at which point I realized that I had formated the hard drive using ext2 file system and not NTFS or FAT32, no that FAT32 would have worked anyways,  so I just went ahead and installed the drivers on Windows so that it could read this drive’s partition correctly. Proceeded to copy some of the files over back to the server and it took around 50 minutes to complete…damn I should have done the backup this way

This file server doesn’t just store my files it also stores my dad’s files and soon it will also store my mom’s files so I had to set it up in a way that only my user would have access to my files and not everyone else so I looked around for the setting and it appears that FreeNAS doesn’t have an option that will do this for you so I went to the next best thing and set the permissions on the directory but first I created a group for myself. After creating a group for myself I then proceeded to run a chown on my directory so that it belonged to my group and not the general family group. Next I wanted to protect the user home directories and set the permissions to only allow the user and group to have read and write access to the directories and others wouldn’t even be able to see the contents. I left the group as being able to read and write because sometimes my parents will ask me to move some files to their directories so I needed to have access to their directories.

To change the permissions on the directories you need to go into the console tool in the advanced menu and run the commands from there since connecting via SSH will only allow you to access your user account and doesn’t have the option to become root and I guess this is something that you’d want for security reasons.

I’m very satisfied with FreeNAS at this point and would recommend it to anyone that wants to set up a File Server.

-LM