This article assumes you have successfully installed NAS4Free.
If not please click here to see how to install Nas4Free.
Click here for video tutorial of this post.
First Boot
On first boot login using the default username “admin” and password “nas4free“
Network and CPU Settings
System -> General
- You can change all the obvious things like usernames, domains etc… the ones I will point out are:
- HTTP – If you plan on accessing your nas remotely then change the http to https can leave the default port
- DNS Settings – put in here your DNS server which for most will likely to be your router’s internal IP address (in my case it is 192.168.1.254) obviously use your own IP here
- Time – add your location and system clock/time and enable the NTP server if you wish
- Once you are happy with your settings click “Save” and you should see that it says “The changes have been applied successfully”
- Click on “Password”
- Highly recommended to change the password especially if you are going to be accessing it remotely
Network -> Lan Management
- Here you can change the Ip address of the server if you wish
- Enter your Gateway again for most people this will be your Router’s internal IP address
- Everything else can be left default and then click “Save”
- It will say settings saved and ask you to reboot the server for the new settings to take effect – so click on the blue reboot and wait for it to start up again.
System -> Advanced
- Power Daemon -> “tick” Enable the system power control utility
- This allows the software to control how much processing power it needs and adjusts it to lower the CPU to save power when it’s not needed
Disk Configuration
Disk -> Management
This screen will be blank so we’ll need to import the disks into the system.
- Click Import – you should now see all the disks you have in the system including the boot disk
- Next click “S.M.A.R.T” -> tick “enable” and choose your “Power Mode” scroll down and click “Save and Restart”
Now that we’ve imported and activated the S.M.A.R.T we need to format them
Disks -> Format
- Click the pull down next to Disk. Here we can select the disk we want to format. We’ll need to do them all but one at a time. Go ahead and select one but make sure it’s not the boot drive.
- File System -> choose ZFS storage pool device
- Click “Format Disk” you’ll then see the output in the box below. Now go through and format every device you’ll use for storage
Pools
Disk -> ZFS -> Pools -> Virtual Device
- Click the “+” on the right to add a new virtual device
- Highlight all the drives that you want to use in this pool
- In type select what you would like to use mirror, raidz etc…
- Then give it a name then click “add” on the next screen you’ll be prompted “Apply changes” this is just a security feature when we are making important changes in Nas4Free you’ll have to apply everything 2 times.
Pools -> Management
- Click the “+” symbol to create a new pool to manage
- Highlight the “Virtual Device” you just created and then give it a short but descriptive “Name”
- Click “Add” the “Apply changes”
- Now you should see the total size of the “Pool” you have just created and the under “Health” it should say “ONLINE”
Datasets -> Dataset
- Click the “+” symbol to create a new dataset
- Give it a name. Again short but descriptive
- If you want to give it a max size then put it in the “Quota”
- The rest can be left default
- Repeat the steps to create as many datasets as you need or want
Network Settings
Services -> SMB -> Settings
- To start with change the authentication to “Anonymous” this will allow everyone on your network to access the NAS. This is a good first step to make sure everything works then once that works you can go back and change the settings to require passwords etc… if this is going to be for home to be a centralised media server then “anonymous” setting would be the easiest to deal with
- It’s believed that changing the Max Protocol to “NT1” has been shown to give better performance than “SMB2” but either will work fine
- NetBIOS name is the name that you will see under “Network” on your windows computer
- Change the Local Master Browser to “No”
- Change time server to no
- Tick “Enable Asynchronous I/O (AIO)
- Click Save and Restart
Services -> SMB -> Shares
Now that we’ve setup Samba we’ll need to create the shares
- Click on “Shares” then the “+” to create a new share
- Click on the “…” (settings) button to browse to the “Dataset” we created earlier
- Click on the Pool – in this case we only have 1 pool
- Select the “Dataset” you want to share over the local windows network – in this case LANData
- Repeat the steps to create as many shares as you want
- On your Windows computer select “network” and you should now see the NAS in your network
- Click on the Nas and you should see the share(s) you created
- Now test by copying some file across.