ejes consulting

I love my home network; it’s well designed and more importantly secure.

As part of a modern network, Network Attached Storage is a must.  Especially since I like to have all my information centrally accessable for my XBMC and my multitude of computers and remote access sites, not to mention a source repository for my projects and consulting.

I evaluated a whole lot of solutions for Network Attached Storage,  including out of the box NAS appliances and even building the functionality I needed with OpenBSD or Ubuntu Server.  Finally I was turned on to FreeNAS by a colligue.

FreeNAS, out of the box, came with all the functionality I needed.  Web server, Bitttorrent, CIFS stack and NFS.  As well as a bunch I don’t use (yet).

Configuration was a breeze, just boot from CD, and ta-da it worked beautifually.

I started doing a bit of development on the web-server portion of FreeNAS.  It runs a full blown lighthttp server, with a tiny SQLite backend.  This means that MediaWiki can actually work on this tiny embedded platform.

How?  Simple.

In FreeNAS enable the web server, create a directory to serve from and put the latest version of MediaWiki there, configure it up, including a sqlite database (that I put in a non-browseable place for security purposes) and what do you know… home private wiki.

I’m going to start working on scripts and extensions so that my home media wiki will give information on my house, and media contained therein.

If there is enough interest, I’ll post a tutorial for setting up FreeNAS, and the MediaWiki.