Do you need a free NAS box?

My new job is keeping me busy enough that it's hard to find time to add anything to my blog but I ran across this the other day and had to share it. We were looking to add some file share space on our network for us to use but didn't want to spend a lot of money. We have a lot of rack mounted server boxes around so I put one together and our IT Director handed me a cd to try. It was from freenas.org and it's a live cd that you boot to and have a floppy disk in the drive. When it boots up, you can use DHCP to get an IP address on the network or asssign it one but you can then go to it using a web browser and set up the box.

Basically after setting it up, you have a free nas box on the network. I was able to add close to 200 GB of storage for us to use. As you make changes, it writes the configuration information to the floppy disk. You can also download the file in case the floppy goes bad. Quick and easy and for sure the right price. :)

dj