An old computer these days is no longer a completely useless system. In fact, even though I might upgrade my main computer every couple of years, I usually take ten to fifteen years before I completely remove it from my home network and send it to that great LAN in the sky!
Here are ten twelve uses that I have discovered for that more “experienced” computer system!
And once you have read through the article and decided which exciting project you want to do, make sure you let us know by voting in the poll!
Since I had such a great response to the new DCoT Tours feature, I have added a new tour to the list.
The FreeNAS Tour takes you through some of the most important posts that Daily Cup of Tech has produced. It introduces you to FreeNAS, a free (duh!) network attached storage operating system that allows you to take your old computer hardware, throw in some good sized hard drives, and suddenly you have a network file server on the cheap.
The tour shows you how to create your own FreeNAS server including installation, configuration, setting up Windows and FTP services, and backup using RSync. The tour pages makes it easy so that pretty much anyone with a bit of computer background can have a FreeNAS server up and running in a weekend.
Being a Technology Director can sometimes be a tricky job. The budget is nonexistent and trying to keep a wasteland of old machines alive is sometimes impossible. Well, I turned to a few open source solutions to help.
One that most people have heard of is OpenOffice. We have three computer labs with 20 computers each, 25 teacher computers, five administrative staff computers, and three small mobile labs with 10 laptops each. Purchasing that many copies of Office 2007 doesn’t really fit into my budget. Starting with the 2006-2007 school year, we transitioned to OpenOffice in all but one computer lab. The benefits that we have received are numerous. The teachers were all given copies to give to their students. Some students may not be able to afford purchasing MS Office, so giving them a free alternative that they use at school and home is a great way for the students to use the same software in both places.
Another great open source tool is FreeNAS. FreeNAS is a free Network Attached Storage. I found out about it, on this very blog. After reading the multitude of articles featuring this great piece of software, I excitedly visited my computer graveyard. I had 10 to 15 old machines laying around and picked the best two. Then I purchased two 250 gig drives and installed one into each machine. I now use these NAS devices for storage of student profiles, documents, and backups. The software installed onto both systems is a snap to install and includes web-based administration. Both machines sit headless in different parts of the school.
The last open source program that I use is actually a bunch of open source programs combined into one package. K12TSP is the K12 Linux Terminal Server. Basically, install it one beefy server, and it will then serve several diskless thin clients. This project has been installed in many schools across the country. It includes programs such as OpenOffice, Gimp, K-Office, Abiword, Firefox, Acrobat Reader, Gnome, and KDE. My K12TSP lab include 15 laptops that were basically useless, but could boot from the NIC. I gave it a shot, and voila, I had 15 working computers complete with sound.
Overall, my exposure to Open Source software has been great. Above is just a few of the programs that I like. I am positive there are projects that I have not found that would benefit my network. There is a bunch of people out there that can do amazing things with programs. I am not a programmer, but I appreciate those that are.
DCoT’s favorite free…uh…NAS, FreeNAS, has released a new beta version - 0.684b. Here is what the website has to say about it:
Notes:
Here is the 0.684b.Lot’s of changes: Disk encryptions, iSCSI-target, swap, etc.. (check the change log for all details).
Important notice: The ‘lnc’ network card driver is replaced by ‘le’ driver. If you are using ‘lnc’ as interface LAN, plug a keyboard/monitor on your screen before upgrading FreeNAS.
LDAP doesn’t works: If you known how to configure LDAP client for authenticate all services, your help is welcome
Changes:
Majors changes:
- Add disk encryption with geli
- Add iSCSI-Target: Permit to create specials files that simulate iSCSI target disk.
- Add swap feature: Permit to create a file on a mount point for memory swap purpose
- Add powerd/cpufreq system power control utility
- NTFS: Replace ntfs FreeBSD module with ntfs-3g: read/write support for NTFS
- Added growfs tools (usable from the CLI only)
- Add EXT2 filesystem creation support
- Add option for upgrading FreeNAS from CDROM (this can be used as recovery mode too).
- Multilanguage: Update languages files and add Japanese (Thanks to Hiroyuki Seino) and Russian (Thanks Ahmetov Shamil)
- Force only one UFS type: EFI GPT Partition with Softupdates, and permit to select percent of free disk space to kept (between 8 and 1)
Minors changes:
- RSYNC: Permit to configure multiple RSYNC local/client
- RSYNC: Add description attribute to RSYNC tasks
- SSH: Permit to enable SSH TCP forwarding (SSH tunneling)
- NFS: Permit to add more than one networks for NFS
- iSCSI: Upgrade iSCSI initiator to 2.0.1
- FTP: Add ‘Resume’ mode. Fix bug in enabling ‘FXP’ and ‘NAT mode’.
- FTP: Add ‘connected users list’ information page
- Samba: Try to improve samba performance by adding ‘large readwrite = no’ in smb.conf
(see http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_Troubleshooting)
- Samba: Add dos charset CP866 (Russian)
- Little index page improvement : % used of TOTAL size display. Paul Wheels patch
- Permit to configure the system time: Paul Wheels patch
- Add hardware sensors information page
- Add syslog message for RSYNC local/remote synchronization
- Geom mirror: Change default algorithm to round robin
(http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html)
- Now it is possible to store the configuration on floppy disk and USB stick when booting FreeNAS from CD.
- Permit to select if a user is in the administrator group (wheel) or not
- Add WebGUI page (System/Advanced/Startup) to add/edit/delete commands executed pre or post system initialization (booting).
Bug fixs:
- Fix UPnP WebGUI bug
- Fix bug in user & groups WebGUI.
- FTP: Fixed: Deletion of files uploaded and owned by user was not able.
- FTP: Fixed PAM error (using MS AD account for example)
- FTP: Disable root login by default. Can be enabled via WebGUI.
- Fix DHCP problem
- Try to prevent “acd0: FAILURE READ_BIG ERROR” during install from CDROM (thanks to fortinde@isers.sourceforge.net)
- Modify FreeNAS make.sh build script for supporting AMD64 FreeBSD now…
Underlying changes:
- Use the FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE (production) for FreeNAS base
- Upgrade twa kernel driver (e.g. 3ware 9650SE Series Raid S-ATA II PCIe)
- Try to improve performance on VM machine: http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/vmware.html
Replace ethernet ‘lnc’ drivers with ‘le’ driver (WARNING: NEED CONFIGURATION CHANGE AFTER UPGRADE)
Reduce Kernel’s timer frequency to 100HZ
- Samba: Upgrade Samba to 3.0.24
- Remove the tools ‘beep’
- Upgrade PHP to 5.2.1
- Upgrade ushare to 0.9.10 (should now support xbox)
Known bug in the 0.684b:
- Using iSCSI-target can cause problem for stopping/restarting FreeNAS
- French character not correclty displayed
- When pressing Ctrl+halt+del key, the rc.shutdown script generate an error
Ryan sent an e-mail a few days ago with a problem between DeltaCopy and FreeNAS. It seems that everything copies just fine but then locks him out.
Hello,
I recently came across your website and I love it!!! I have a question about one of your articles that I was hoping you might be able to help me with (I understand that you not in the business of tech support..but hey). I went through your FreeNAS how to article and was, amazingly, able to get my system up and running relatively easily. But when I configure Rsync with Deltacopy, I run into a problem where I do not have “permission” to access the files that are automatically backed up to the FreeNas server. In other words, Rsync and Delta copy do their thing and seem to do it correctly, but when I try to access the files that have been backed up. I get network permission errors and file permission errors. Is this something that you came across when you tested this? I’m running Windows XP SP2, the latest Freenas, and a linksys router. Any information you can provide is greatly appreciated.
Again, very nice website.
Ryan.
First of all, Ryan, thanks for the kind works. I’m always glad to hear that people enjoy reading DCoT. Now, if only I could make money at it!
Now, for your technical request. The problem that you are having is with the file permissions that are set on the FreeNAS drive. By default, only the root account has access to these files.
Reset Permissions
There are two ways that you can solve this problem. The first is to change the permissions on all the files. This is a relatively easy process. Simply go to the Command section of the Diagnostics menu. Enter the following command:
where <sharename> is the name of the share that you wish to reset permissions on. For example, if your share name was Backup, you would execute the command:
This would reset the permissions on all of the files in the Backup share.
Click on the Execute button once you have entered the command correctly.
Now, if you browse to your share with Windows Explorer, the files should now be available.
Change File Systems
Another way that you can avoid this problem is to change the file system on your FreeNAS server. If you choose a file system that does not support file permission (e.g. FAT32), then there is no real way that permission can be set on the files and no way that you can be denied access to the files from a file permission level.
Note: It is still possible to lock people out from accessing the files from a share level.
Recommendations
Both of these solutions will work and provide you with what you need i.e. access to your files. But, I lean toward the first solution because it allows you to both backup and secure your files on an ongoing basis. This way, if you need to recover some lost data, only you can get access to it.
But, if you are in an environment where you trust those who have access to your FreeNAS box (e.g. your home system), then I would say the second solution would work just fine for you.
An old computer these days is no longer a completely useless system. In fact, even though I might upgrade my main computer every couple of years, I usually take ten to fifteen years before I completely remove it from my home network and send it to that great LAN in the sky!
Since I had such a great response to the new 
Being a Technology Director can sometimes be a tricky job. The budget is nonexistent and trying to keep a wasteland of old machines alive is sometimes impossible. Well, I turned to a few open source solutions to help.
DCoT’s favorite free…uh…NAS, 
