FreeNAS or FreeNAS functionality for PowerPC platform

[aurora72]

Hello everybody,

I'm planning to use my PowerPC Macs as Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. For this purpose, the most suitable NAS software seems to be FreeNAS but it's precompiled only for the i386 and amd64 platforms.

So, I wonder how I can make use of FreeNAS functionality on my PPC Mac if I install FreeBSD on it, are there instructions particularly for this purpose? Or better still, can I myself compile FreeNAS for the PPC platform, is it worth trying?

Thanks

[SirDice]

FreeNAS is nothing more than FreeBSD with a few custom scripts. Everything else is just plain FreeBSD plus a few ports. Management would have to be done by hand but isn't really that difficult.

[aurora72]

Thank you for the comment.

In the light of this, I assume I can install FreeBSD (for PPC) and configure it in such a way that it will act like a FreeNAS system, right?

I will opt for this direction and install FreeBSD with the aim of using it as plain NAS server.

[polinux]

Hi. What macs do you have? I have MacMini G4 and just wanted to install FreeBSD on it to work as router, firewall and www server. Was wondering how easy that is.

Thanks

[SirDice]

I have MacMini G4 and just wanted to install FreeBSD on it to work as router, firewall and www server. Was wondering how easy that is.
http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html

[polinux]

http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html

Thanks. I've read it and even gave it a go but it didn't work for some strange reason with ad0. Now I'm running Debian for PPC but probably going to change it to Free/OpenBSD.

Thanks anyway!

[aurora72]

...it didn't work for some strange reason with ad0...


This post (http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=140373&postcount=23) might be helpful about that.

In my case, I had to reassign Apple Partition Map (APM) scheme to the harddisk using gpart command. Only after have I done that, have I managed to install FreeBSD-ppc.

Other 2 tips (which are not mentioned explicitly in the tutorials I've followed) are:

--> You can use gpart only from Fixit-> 2- CD/DVD Use live filesystem CD/DVD option, normal installation CD does not contain gpart. Livefs CD should be downloaded from that address: http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-powerpc-20110308.iso.bz2 The other freebsd-ppc livefs downloads are buggy, that's reported by Nathan, who is closely related to freebsd-ppc development.

--> You create at least 6 partitions using gpart and then assign /, swap, /tmp, /var, /usr, /home to each of these partitions in Disk Label, manually. A - auto defaults is not useful at this point.