Re: Anyone used FreeNAS?

[Philip Herlihy <thiswillbounceback@xxxxxxx>]

Ric wrote:
> Hi All,
> I want to play with mirroring  fair chunk of data across town between
> mine and a mate's house.
> We're both on ADSL so our upstream speed's not brilliant, but
> nevermind.
> I was planning on setting up a FreeNAS box at one end, possibly
> eventually at both, and filling it from the pile of hard disks I have
> lying around.
>
> Anyone got any hands-on experience of doing this?
> In terms of doing the sync, can you Rsync over FTP or am I going to
> have to setup a VPN?
> I'm presuming in terms of remote admin SSH is the way to go?
>
> Presuming I do an initial local sync and then just manage the deltas
> sync over the internet I'd hope performance would be slow but
> acceptable...
>
> Ric

For different purposes (uploading large websites) I've used robocopy 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy) with WebDrive 
(www.webdrive.com). WebDrive mounts any FTP server as a local drive, so 
network-enabling any and every file-aware utility.

Robocopy has a wealth of facilities including mirroring, and automatic 
background running on a schedule.  Tip: to learn robocopy, run a simple 
command copying from one folder to another using the /L (no actual 
copying) flag, and also the /save:myjob and /Quit flags.  That'll give 
you a saved "jobfile" which you can edit to add new options.  Robocopy 
hugely rewards the effort of learning it.  Note the /MIR command can 
delete files at the destination - caution!

Recent versions of Webdrive have a basic mirroring facility built-in, 
and these days that's all I need to use for websites.

As I write this, it's just dawned on me that you're talking Unix: sorry 
for my Windows accent...

I see from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenas that FreeNAS has an 
Rsync interface built-in.

Phil, London