Here’s a pretty cool open source software that you can install on an old machine to use as a network-attached storage (NAS). It runs on FreeBSD and you can even install it on flash drives (installation including the FreeBSD OS is less than 64MB).

It supports popular services such as CIFS/SMB, FTP, SSH, NFS, iTunes/DAAP, and UPnP. It even has a BitTorrent client! All of these can be managed from a web interface.

I haven’t tried all the services but those that I have seem to work pretty well (CIFS, FTP, SSH, UPnP, and BitTorrent). There is also an option for Active Directory authentication but after I enabled it, it seems to give access to the shares to everyone when using CIFS/SMB, including computers not in the domain I specified (I’m using version 0.69b4). So I ended up just using Local User Authentication instead. I created an account with the same username and password as my domain account so I don’t get prompted for credentials when I try to access it.

The UPnP service also worked great with my PS3 and very simple to set up. Just enable it, add the content you wish to share, select one of the preconfigured profiles or choose custom, enable transcoding and select the temporary directory for transcoded files and that’s pretty much it.

I also really like the BitTorrent client. Very nice and simple web interface.

I’m running it as a virtual machine on my home network using VMware ESXi. Installation is pretty straightforward: create a new virtual machine, create a virtual disk for the OS and the FreeNAS software (I allocated 100MB which is more than enough), create an additional virtual disk to store your files, map the FreeNAS ISO image to your virtual CD-ROM drive (connect at power on) and power on the the virtual machine. Once the ISO image is loaded, choose the option to install FreeNAS to disk. After that, choose the option to set the LAN IP address and once that’s set just open your browser, point it to that IP address and you can manage everything from here.

Default login is admin/freenas.

ebsite: http://www.freenas.org