Do I Need a Monitor

[JonnyAlpha]

Hi;

I have been looking for a new storage / backup solution and decided I needed a NAS, having settled for a Synology 212j I did the maths and found out that with 2 x 2TB HDD's I was looking at approx £300!!

I then started investigating the DIY route and stumbled across Free NAS, which I think will be my saviour.

Being a bit of an enthusiastic (Amateur) IT buff i have loads of hardware knocking around in my garage so building a suitable platform will be no probs the only outlay will be on a Gbit Ethernet card and the Hard Drives (Although I have plenty of small ones to practice with (40 - 80GB).

What I don't have is a spare monitor and this being a NAS drive I am guessing apart from initial setting it up it wont need one however finally to my question:

Once it is setup can I access the NAS remotely from another PC on the Network or via the Internet to carry out Admin tasks such as shutting it down?? I' guessing I'll probably investigate my first ever Wake on LAN to boot it up?

This is probably covered in the extensive documentation and eleswhere in this forum but I am currently on holiday and only have limited access to WiFi hence the rushed question.

Many thanks.

 

[praecorloth]

Yup. You only need a monitor for the initial set up, and then only again if you have a kernel panic, or hardware (other than hard drives) breaks. FreeNAS uses a web GUI for administration. If you plan on doing very remote administration (like across the Internet) I highly recommend the first thing you do is set the web GUI to listen on HTTPS. Then you can NAT HTTPs over to your FreeNAS box and admin it from anywhere as long as you know your IP.

An alternate form of administration is ssh, though I highly recommend doing anything you can in the web GUI in the web GUI. Just because you can do something at the command line, doesn't mean you should. FreeNAS is an appliance and a lot of thought has gone in to the web GUI and what features you might want to play with. Always always always look there first.

If you get anywhere with wake on LAN, let me know. I have yet to see it work. :)

 

[NeilP]

true you do not need a screen once setup, and I do not doubt that lots of work has gone in to creating the webgui, but without some form of Command line interface such as SSH you will soon be totally stuck ..setting file and folder permissions for instance. from my very limited experience ( about 4 year amateur tinkering with FreeNAS 0.7 and now 8) without a CLI permissions just cant be set via the GUI, something soon goes wrong and you need to set permissions manually.

FreeeNAS once setup is very reliable... I had my last box sitting in the attic, headless for ...? 2 years at least now. never touched. scheduled turn on via BIOS at midnight, scheduled turn off at 0600 via FreeNAS, only had to upgrade because hardware failed

 

[ben]

When things are working as intended, SSH and the Web Shell provide sufficient console access. When things are broken (networking particularly) you'll need a monitor and local keyboard.

 

[jgreco]

you'll need a monitor and local keyboard.

Or serial console, or the cool equivalent of a monitor and keyboard: IPMI with remote console capabilities.


Do beware: you need to set your BIOS to not stop on errors. Most BIOS will consider the lack of a keyboard to "be an error" and then want you to "press F1" (haha, really?). Some consumer-grade boards have fabulous BIOS versions where you cannot set it to ignore the lack of a keyboard. Avoid those, or, find a cheap keyboard to leave with the unit. Further, some boards have problems if you plug in a keyboard after the system is booted and there wasn't a keyboard there to begin with. Test these things if you want to remain sane.

 

[JonnyAlpha]

Thanks for the responses guys, just finished building my test system last night but damm thing wouldnt boot, It recognised the USB Stick and allowed me to set it as the boot .device but it got stuck when trying to load the OS. After googling the error it would appear I need at least a 2GB USB Stick!!! Tried to blag it with my old Kingston 1GB. I have now loaded Free NAS on my 14GB Kingston and will try that.

 

[paleoN]

After googling the error it would appear I need at least a 2GB USB Stick!!!

Make that a 4GB USB stick. All 2GB sticks I've seen are actually just a little bit too small.

 

[JonnyAlpha]

Make that a 4GB USB stick. All 2GB sticks I've seen are actually just a little bit too small.

Yeh I read a couple of posts where people were having trouble with 2GB sticks usually solved by reformatting. I switched to my 14GB and it worked fine and I have seen TDK 4GB USB sticks in Tesco for
£4.00