Part 3: Software Setup

This part explains how I installed the FreeNAS operating system on my HP ProLiant MicroServer and configured it. In case you are questioning yourself how to install the OS before having the device assembled you really should continue to read…. …. maybe a hint, we are going to put the OS on the usb stick

Index

Instead of simply writing one big blog entry I decided to split up my report into multiple parts:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Components
• Part 3: Software Installation
• Part 4: Assembly & Configuration

Getting FreeNAS

You can get FreeNAS very easy from the Website of the FreeNAS project. Simply go there and look for “Download”. I decided to use the AM64-Version of FreeNAS because the AMD Neo II N36L does offer AMD64 support and therefore I did not see any argument why not to use it. To install FreeNAS on an USB-Stick the best is to download the “xxxx.Full_Install.xz”.

Installing FreeNAS on an USB-Stick

After getting to know how it is very easy to install FreeNAS on an USB-Stick to boot it from there.
To be able to write this image on a USB-Stick you maybe needs some additional software in case you do not work under Linux. How to write the operating system on the USB-Stick is described at the online documentation of FreeNAS including how to do this by using Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Therefore please check out this link to find out more: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Installing_from_the_Image
I do use Linux (openSuSE) on my workstation therefore I went with “dd” to write the image on my 8 GB trancend USB-Stick as you can see in the screenshot.

After it is done writing the image to the USB-Stick more or less the whole installation is done and we can put it to the parts we do need to put into our MicroServer.

Continue to read at: Part 4: Assembly & Configuration