Openfiler vs FreeNAS ?

[RanceJustice]

Hey guys, I'm in the process of getting a little NAS box up and running (once I get some drives). Its primary use is going to be general storage, so I can access my media (primarily) and sundry files (setups, ISOs etcs) from any of my current PCs and those that I might build in the future (or utilise some sort of media extender). I want any Windows, OSX, and Linux PCs I have. to be able to have read/write access to these files.


I was set on using FreeNAS as it seems to be a good solution, but then I learned of Openfiler, which seems to be more comprehensive. Does anyone have experience with both of them? Is it possible to run Openfiler without a Kerberos or similarly keyed infrastructure all ready in place? Can both of them support a file system which is easily readable and writable by all three major OSes? Anything else I should know? Thanks!

 

[jasonlitka]

I'm running Openfiler on two systems: one at home and one at work. Of course, I'm a bit biased, I'm a mod on the OF forums...

As to your question about having to have authentication infrastructure in place, the answer is no. You can run everything with guest permissions if you'd like or you can use the built-in LDAP server.

 

[unhappy_mage]

FreeNAS is a little less flexible with software raid setups. What I want to see, though, is this. I had a talk with the developer of that project (the guy who runs that blog) and it sounds like really cool stuff.

 

[RanceJustice]

I'm running Openfiler on two systems: one at home and one at work. Of course, I'm a bit biased, I'm a mod on the OF forums...

As to your question about having to have authentication infrastructure in place, the answer is no. You can run everything with guest permissions if you'd like or you can use the built-in LDAP server.

In order to have easily accessible read/write access to Windows (primary), OSX/Linux secondary, what file systems does openfiler support? FreeNAS seems to say that UFS will work with everything easily - is that the case with Openfiler as well? I've never had any interaction with UFS and my previous experience with the Linux filesystem, ext3, and the like have many incompatibilities with Windows having read/write

 

[unhappy_mage]

The filesystem is only accessed directly by the NAS box itself. Everything else just makes standardized network requests, and the NAS box takes those requests and writes them to the filesystem. Any SMB/CIFS/NFS box does this, so in this regard Openfiler and FreeNAS are equivalent.

 

[trmentry]

I tried both OF and FN and didn't like them. I went with just a Linux install running Samba. I like this setup a lot as I can add/remove services as I need on the server and I'm not limited to a 'standalone' nas solution like OF and FN. Although I will admit I don't know if you can install other programs on those 2 distros.