Before installing the FreeNas server, the DNS and DHCP service was running on my Linux desktop as this tends to be left running continuously. The service has a very light foot print in terms of storage required, memory and CPU usage. This made it an ideal candidate for moving to the FreeNas.
Since I’ve been writing about bits and pieces of my set up, I thought it might be useful to give it a bit of context.
I’ve been running email on my home system for years, starting with Sendmail and Pine then moving onto a more sophisticated system giving group-ware functionality.
A purchase of a digital camera 13 years ago (followed by several generations of replacement cameras and the ubiquitous mobile phone) has meant that a huge number of family photos were now only in digital format, and only stored on one disk.
A project to digitise my CD collection to reduce the clutter in the house also left various audio files sitting on a couple of machines and my phase 2 project to do the same for my DVDs put on hold.
The mail system was adequate, but I was feeling more uneasy about the storage situation, especially the photos.
The cost per MB has continued to fall, so my initial project was to build a NAS.