So, it has been my latest project to build a NAS box for my home network. I have had an old Pentium III box set aside for a while now, and decided it was time to get things up and running. I had initially wanted to go with FreeNAS, as it seems to be everyone's de facto standard for this kind of thing, but it just doesn't seem to like my machine. All it will do is boot to a "mountroot>" prompt and vainly ask me to tell it which device it should boot from. So, after some BIOS tooling and 3 coasters burnt for trying different beta builds, I abandoned FreeNAS and went looking for something else. Openfiler was the next highest on the NAS-Distro list (of course, from what I can tell this list consists of 3 entries, so this isn't saying much) and I was hopeful for better success with it. After getting it set up I quickly learned that it was not at all what I needed, and the configuration options for it are cryptic and poorly documented, as well as it doing some things that flat out puzzled me (a la no local users, but running a local LDAP server). So, after significant frustration with it I decided to kick all to the curb and do what I should have done in the first place. I now have Ubuntu Server installing as I type. Once I get SSH, FTP, and Samba servers running on it, I should have roughly what I need. Plus, with Webmin, I'll get the nice GUI web interface I was looking for in the other two. Oh Ubuntu, how I love you so.
Shirley Out.