After finishing testing with the “FreeNAS” project, i’ve changed around the hardware and switched operating systems to the Openfiler OS....I'm pleased to say i see a lot of potential in this project.

FreeNas is a good home user Network Attached Storage solution that is great for throwing some old junk hardware together and build something very useful out of it. However, for my needs it lacks a lot of security features that i would like to use.

So back to the project...I re-arranged some of the hardware to allow me to put some of the better components towards a new domain controller........all in all I'm using a nice silverstone microATX case, an older asus AMD board with a Semperon 1600....which ironically shows up in the Bios as a Athlon XP 1600...weird, but i know what the chip actually says....its also running 512mb ram, and 4 x 80GB hard drives

First thing i noticed was a pretty nice feature while installing openfler, and that was the option to install the OS across multiple hard drives in a software raid 5 configuration....which is fantastic because the original plan was to install the OS on its own hard drive, and build a raid 5 out of the other 3 drives....which means my data would be safe, but if the OS dies, i’d have to rebuild it before i could gain access again.

Unfortunately...my mobo will not boot from a USB cd-rom...which means i could have all 4 hard drives plugged in and install the OS to them all....so i reverted back to installing onto one hard drive...shutting the system down...removing the cd-rom and hooking up the rest of the drives.

This solution works fine for now...its mainly for testing..and when i buy a new board i’ll get something with more connections.

At this point I'm still at the setting up point and will add more later.