Chase Brammer Thinking in Code

New Toy – Intel NAS (ss4200-e) with FreeNAS

Recently I got a gift from my wife's company Calculated Research and Technology, for helping them out with a few things.  I was lucky enough to get an awesome Network Attached Storage (NAS) device!  Toms Hardware says it's performance is the best in its class, and its price is about 1/3 of all the others on the market.  I got the Intel ss4200-e NAS device, which is sometimes branded as Fujitsu Seimens Scaleo Home server .  For those who don't know what a NAS is, it is a place for a a set of hard drives to act as one big fast hard drive (called a RAID), and have that data always be accessible to your home network.

Problem is, is that you need to have special hard drives from an approved list to get the machine to work.  I didn't want to do that, and I didn't want to run the crappy (from what I have read) OS that the device ships with.  So, I slapped four 2tb drives into this bad boy and now have an awesome NAS to store all of my media.

However, getting it all setup was a problem.  Here are the things I tried, that failed:

• Booting to the default OS on the device.  Failed because I don't have approved drives
• Booting to an Ubuntu live usb stick, I installed the image, but for some reason still unknown to me, I couldn't get the USB stick to persist the OS data between reboots

Finally, I installed FreeNAS on the system, and that has been working like a charm.  I am running the whole OS from the USB stick so that the drives can all be dedicated to storing data.

Here is how I got it all to setup right

1. Download the FreeNAS embeded install, for my it was the x86 architecture
2. Follow this guide to format a USB stick to be bootable, and copy over the img.  This is the OSX way of doing it.
3. Put the USB stick into the NAS, then boot the NAS to USB by starting with the system shutdown, then holding down reset button then holding down the power button together for about two seconds.  You will see the drive lights on the front light up, and the center light will go amber.  Don't worry about the Amber, that means that it is booting from USB.
4. point to your browswer to http://freenas.local or the default IP of 192.168.1.250  For me, the default IP didn't hold for some reason, but I was able to look on my Routers admin page to see what IP address had been assigned out and get to it that way.
5. Once into Freenas, you just need to follow the guides on the freenas.org website to setup and install

The one thing that I would like to do, but don't know how, is move FreeNAS from the USB stick to the embedded DOS (Disk on Storage) on the device.  If anyone knows how to do that (terminal?) let me know.