[RndTbl] Router / NAS

Adam Thompson athompso at athompso.net
Mon Apr 21 19:02:39 CDT 2014


On 14-04-21 06:48 PM, Kevin McGregor wrote:
> Well, I'd have to recommend FreeNAS at this point. FreeBSD based, full ZFS support and lots more.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Apr 21, 2014, at 1:05 PM, Paul Sierks <psierks at sierkstech.net> wrote:
>>
>> Weird subject, I know. But this is only for personal residential use. I've been running Arch on a system with a number of disks in raid for all my shared storage needs. This system also doubles as a router / firewall with Wifi, and other little things such as pxe booting. We'll recently I've been wanting to use ZFS with it more and more. So I figured I'd get opinions. Arch does have packages for ZFS, which would provide most features, just not encryption. So would I be better to use pfSense or the like off a USB and add what I need for ZFS, nfs, etc to it, or to just use FreeBSD? or is there some other suggestions.

I don't believe any "appliance"-like system exists that handles roles 
THAT far apart.

pfSense doesn't really do ZFS, and lacks most of FreeBSD's traditional 
init(8) system, so you'd be hard-pressed to add every little bit of 
functionality you expect to it.  It does, technically, support it, but I 
don't think you'll find much help on the lists, they're populated mostly 
by devs, heavy-duty firewall users, and newbies.  You'd have to install 
a number of packages to get the minimum functionality, and I don't think 
you'd be happy with the result.

FreeNAS is optimized as storage, not as a router, although I'm sure 
someone has written a plug-in by now that turns it into a home gateway 
:-).  It does appear that FreeNAS offers approximately zero support for 
running WiFi controllers in HostAP mode, however.

I can't think of any Linux-based systems that cleanly do what you want, 
either...

So, yeah, you should look at running FreeBSD.  Beware, it's very 
different from Linux.  Don't try to do things the same way you would on 
Linux.  RTFM.  Seriously, RTF Handbook before you even start. Even if 
you're familiar with an old version of FreeBSD, read the Handbook before 
you even boot the install image.
If you want something a little more friendly, look at PC-BSD.

-- 
-Adam Thompson
  athompso at athompso.net



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