• Web UI for Administration (Ajenti)
• Subsonic
• Transmission
• Plex Media Server

Let’s dive into the details…

Web UI for Administration (Ajenti)

Because I’m coming from FreeNAS, I wanted something comparable to the slick (and useful) Web UI that they have on that project.  I’m a lazy admin and I don’t like to SSH into my server to every time I want to check the uptime.   I had searched around and found a few options for Web Admin panels.  Webmin is a powerful, yet clunky/ugly (sorry Webmin) option.  I’m sure it’s great, but I just couldn’t get past its looks.  OpenPanel is pretty, but didn’t appear to be as functional as the others.  It’s probably all about personal preference.  (I really do miss FreeNAS and it’s webUI – it holds a special place in my heart)

I finally settled on Ajenti which was very pretty, self contained, and useful to boot.  Here’s how you install it on the server (or you can go to http://ajenti.org and follow the latest instructions there).  First edit your sources:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the Ajenti APT repository:

deb <a href="http://repo.ajenti.org/debian">http://repo.ajenti.org/debian</a> main main

At the terminal type the following to get the keys:

wget <a href="http://repo.ajenti.org/debian/key">http://repo.ajenti.org/debian/key</a> -O- | sudo apt-key add -

And we are done with the hard part.  Now you can browse to your server using your favorite browser at the following address/port to start the configuration:

http://your.server.ip.here:8000

Subsonic

I’ve gushed about Subsonic many times on this blog in the past.  I love, love, love it.  I think anyone setting up a home NAS should make this a requirement.  Who wouldn’t want to have access to their music and movies on their PC’s and smart phones wherever they have an internet connection?  Let’s get started.  All the instructions for Debian/Ubuntu are here.

Download the deb package here: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/download.jsp

Now, from the terminal do the following:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

sudo dpkg -i subsonic-x.x.deb

Once installed, you can plug find your server at:

http://your.server.ip.here:4040

Your mileage may vary, but I ran into an issue with the automagical uPnP port-forwarding feature in Subsonic on Ubuntu.   I got some joy after turning off the built-in firewall, but for some reason it forwarded to the wrong IP.  And if you’d like to try the same, run this command.  Let me know if you are able to get this to work or know what’s wrong.

sudo ufw disable

Sourced from this site: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/ubuntu-server-disable-firewall

Transmission

I love bittorrent.  And having the ability to seed torrents directly on my NAS had great appeal to me.  Transmission (the bittorrent daemon) was a comfortable option for me and it has the ability to run headless with both Remote GUI options (for pretty much any OS including Android), and a Web UI built right it.  It takes a bit of work to get this thing up and running, but it’s well worth it.

Setup the Transmission CLI w/WebGUI, Blocklists and Remote Management.  From the command line start by installing these packages:

sudo apt-get install transmission-cli transmission-common transmission-daemon

Now we’ll need to edit the configuration file to get things set up.  Note!  You’ll need to STOP the daemon before editing the configuration file or your changes will not be made.  Here’s how you start and stop the daemon:

sudo /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon stop

sudo /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon start

Open the configuration file for editing (again, make sure you stop the daemon before making edits):

sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Some of the items that I really wanted to make sure were setup:

• Block List
• RPC (Remote Access)
• Seeding folder location on my shared drive

I ran into file permissions problems and ended up doing the following things.

Added transmission user to users group:

sudo ​usermod -G users debian-transmission

Opened the persmissions up on my seeding directory completely:

sudo chmod 777 /mnt/sharedrive/seeding

Don’t forget to start your server back up again.  Now that everything is up and running you should be able to access your web UI at the following address:

http://your.server.ip.here:9091

And if all that doesn’t help, try these other sites which helped me get things up and running properly:

• http://www.danielandrade.net/2011/08/29/diy-home-ubuntu-nas-server/
• http://www.webupd8.org/2009/12/setting-up-transmission-remote-gui-in.html

Configuration File Examples:

• https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/EditConfigFiles
• http://home.inestdia.com/localserver/transmission-daemononubuntulocalserver

Plex Media Server

Plex Media Server is slowly growing on me.  For those who may not know what this is, it allows me to stream videos across my network to Android, Roku, etc.  As a new owner of a Roku, this is probably the best way to stream local media from your ubuntu NAS server.  It’s been a bit sluggish and buggy… up until a few days ago when they released an update.  They’ve clearly worked on the responsiveness and overall look & feel.

Installing it on your ubuntu server is actually quite simple.

Open your sources list for editing (/etc/apt/sources.list):

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following to the file and exit:

deb http://www.plexapp.com/repo lucid main

Then install with the following command:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver

Now, fire up a web browser and point it to:

http://your.server.ip.here:32400/manage

To Be Continued…

That’s it for now.  Later I’ll talk about setting up other miscellaneous items like a web server, etc.

Step 1: First, goto ubuntu.com and download the latest ISO for ubuntu server.  Today I’m using Ubuntu Server 11.10 64-bit.  Burn the CD, create a bootable USB, whatever suits you best.   I chose to use a bootable CD, easy.

Step 2: Select a boot device for your NAS.  In my case, I’m selecting a 16GB Lexar USB flash drive.  It’s really low profile and will plug right into the back of the system without any clutter.  It’s so tiny that it doesn’t run the risk of being bumped or dislodged from the back of the system.  No need to buy an expensive HDD to add to the system.  With USB flash drives with huge capacity being so ubiquitous and inexpensive, it was an attractive option.

• 1.5TB HDD (/sda)
• 1.5TB HDD (/sdb)
• 16GB Lexar USB (/sdc)

I configured the 16GB Lexar USB drive first, since it is essentially my boot drive.  I made this drive primary, set the mount to /, set the file system to ext4 and made it bootable.  (later you’ll need to go into your BIOS setup to ensure that this device is in your boot device list such that it auto-boots to this device)  I used the entire 16GB of this drive for root.  Note:  It’s probably a really good idea to have your server restart after a power outage, so poke around in your BIOS settings to setup this behavior.  Usually it called “After G3 Enable”, or sometimes BIOS screens are a little less cryptic and actually state behavior after power-loss.

I configured the RAID as RAID 1 (mirroring), with two drives (members), as you can probably guess the 1.5TB HDD’s.  Ubuntu uses mdadm which I happen to be fairly comfortable using, but it’s awful nice that they will help you setup these devices upon install of the OS.   After installation you’ll find your array at /dev/md0 happily synching (hopefully) and you can check this via this command:

mdadm -D /dev/md0

Time to install some software packages.  Again, also super nice, makes things easy to get started.  Here’s what the screen looks like (apparently there is bug in Ubuntu 11.10 which causes an extra option to show up called Ubuntu  usb or something of that sort – ignore that). 

I chose OpenSSH, LAMP, and Samba for my server.  You may have other needs.  Follow the prompts and finish the installation.   This may take ages… I’m pretty impatient, but wow.  It’s probably due to the fact that I was installing from a CD to a flash drive.  Slow reads and writes.

Step 4: Once you’ve rebooted, it’s time to do some house cleaning and getting things setup.  Here’s what I did:

Configure a Static IP Address

(excerpt found here:  https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/serverguide/C/network-configuration.html)

To configure your system to use a static IP address assignment, add the static method to the inet address family statement for the appropriate interface in the file /etc/network/interfaces.

 sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

The example below assumes you are configuring your first Ethernet interface identified as eth0. Change the address, netmask, and gateway values to meet the requirements of your network.

auto eth0

iface eth0 inet static

address 10.0.0.100

netmask 255.255.255.0

gateway 10.0.0.1

dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4

By adding an interface configuration as shown above, you can manually enable the interface through the ifup command.

sudo ifup eth0

Update all software packages:

Open the sources.list file and uncomment any sources that you may want to use.  I found that with 11.10, it had defaulted to pretty much everything I wanted (including multi-verse, etc. )

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

To update the apt package database with the latest software lists type the following command:

apt-get update

Then to install all the latest updated packages (if there are any) type this command:

apt-get upgrade

Mount the RAID Array and Make it Persistent (show up after reboot)

MDADM is a great, solid solution for RAID under Linux.  Now, since we have already configured a RAID array during the server install (and hopefully it is done syncing – see the display status command above), we can simply format and mount the array.  More details can be found in one of my previous posts or in this article form the How-to Geek.

Format the newly created RAID array:

sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/md0

Create mount pount:

sudo mkdir /mnt/sharename

sudo chmod 777 /mnt/sharename

Add it to /etc/fstab:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add the following line to the end of the file:

/dev/md0  /mnt/sharename auto defaults 0 0

Configure Windows File Sharing (a.k.a. Samba, SMBD or CIFS) 

The heart and soul of your new NAS will likely be Windows file sharing, which allows your other PC’s in the house (Mac, Linux, Android, Windows, etc.) to access your files over the network (that is unless you want to setup NFS, which is probably better, but likely only for the Linux users out there).  I found this article very helpful on the Ubuntu website.

Open the samba daemon configuration file for editing:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Create a new section at the bottom of the file, or uncomment one of the examples, for the directory to be shared:

[sharename]

comment = Ubuntu File Server Share
path = /mnt/sharename
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no
create mask = 0755

Now that Samba is configured, the directory needs to be given ownership and the permissions changed. From a terminal enter:

sudo chown -R nobody:nogroup /mnt/sharename

sudo chmod -R 755 /mnt/sharename

Finally, restart the samba services to enable the new configuration:

sudo restart smbd

sudo restart nmbd

Startup / Shutdown Beep (Needs Update)

Normally your server will likely be running headless (with no monitor attached).  And in this case it’s nice to have some kind of audible beep to indicate when a system is either shutting down or has started up (and is ready).  This is the part where I tell you that it should be simple.  Unfortunately I have yet to get this to actually work on my server.  I know my PC Speaker is working (the BIOS beeps on startup), but I cannot get these instructions to work for me.  Your mileage may vary.  (leave me a comment if you have any clever ideas)

sudo apt-get install beep

Other Useful Terminal Commands

Check the status of your RAID Array:

sudo mdadm -D /dev/md0

Reboot your server:

shutdown -r now

Check your memory usage.  Remember, since we omitted a SWAP partition, we need to make sure that we’re not dangerously close to overflowing system memory.

free

Don’t freak out if your system memory is fully utilized.  Linux is pretty heavily optimized to utilize the actual free memory as a file cache.  So if you subtracted the “cache” size from the used memory size you’ll get your actual used memory.

Additional Considerations If converting from FreeNAS…

I had backed up all of my data onto an external USB HDD on Freenas v0.7.2 (Sabanda) to transfer to the RAID array after it was setup.  FreeNAS 0.7.2 uses UFS and doesn’t really support EXT4 which is what really wanted to use, but luckily my ubuntu server also supports UFS.   For mounting A UFS partition from a FreeNAS 0.7.2.5543 (Sabanda)box based on FreeBSD 7.2, enter the following in your terminal:

 sudo mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sdx1  /media/usbDrive/

Stayed tuned for our next next installment, which will cover additional software installation like Web UI, Subsonic, Transmission (bittorrent), etc. 

Resources & Citations

The internet helped me greatly in completing this project.  The following sites were referenced above but are compiled here for quick access.

• http://www.ubuntugeek.com/step-by-step-ubuntu-11-04-natty-lamp-server-setup.html
• https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/serverguide/C/network-configuration.html
• http://www.parmeter.net/ben/2007/07/28/raiding-the-archives/
• http://www.howtogeek.com/51873/how-to-setup-software-raid-for-a-simple-file-server-on-ubuntu/
• https://help.ubuntu.com/10.10/serverguide/C/samba-fileserver.html
• http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu-home-fileserver-p3

This is basically part two of my previous post about troubles in NAS-land.  That experience got me thinking about switching up my NAS solution.  Here’s why:

1. FreeNAS v0.7.x is based on FreeBSD which is a fairly foreign OS to me.  Everything, I mean everything, that I do in that OS is a complete and total learning experience.  While it’s easy to setup initially, debugging is a chore.  I’m much more comfortable in either a Windows or Linux environment.
2. FreeNAS v0.7.x has basically been EOL’d and is now in “legacy” support.  That leaves me wondering about security and stability issues when upgrading to new hardware (see my previous post).
3. FreeNAS v0.7.x transfer speeds have been shown to be a bit slower than (reference needed) other solutions for SAMBA or NFS.
4. FreeNAS v0.7.x uses UFS (Unix File System).  Yeah… I don’t know either.  Mounting EXT4 or NTFS is not an option, but would be extremely handy when swapping data around.
5. FreeNAS v0.7.x has questionable USB drivers which seemed to hang on my system when doing large RSYNC or file copy sessions.  Bad.  Also… slooow.
6. FreeNAS v0.7.x has PHP4 and Lighttp instead of PHP5 and Apache2.  There were a bunch of cool web applications that I wanted to install on FreeNAS but didn’t because I didn’t want to hassle with installing PHP5 and Apache and screwing up the Web UI.  It looks messy and difficult.

Given that I’m comfortable with Linux (Ubuntu specifically), I was eager to see if I could make the switch to something more Linux’y, and still have the nice features and flexibility of FreeNAS.  Here was what I wanted:

1. I want to run the OS from a USB flash drive.  Well ideally it would be nice to run it from an SSD, but I’m not made of money.
2. I want a comparable Web UI to FreeNAS (huge selling point).  Needs to have the ability to manage shares, services, show me uptime, transfer rate, etc.
3. RAID 1 mirror capability is a must.  I have data that I want protected from a drive failure.  Redundancy is key to my strategy.
4. Services like SMB/CIFS, SSH, NFS, FTP, etc. are important to access the data.
5. File system flexibility.  I’d like the capability to attach new storage in different formats.  Linux gives me that flexibility.  EXT4 gives me the performance and the protection from issues like power-outages that killed my previous NAS solution dead.
6. Remote Bittorrent.  Gotta have it.
7. Subsonic (hell yes)
8. Exandability.  I want to install my own web apps, servers like Plex Server, Tonido, OwnCloud, and a host others that would have just been a pain in FreeNAS.
9. Good hardware support and regular security updates.
10. Good support community.

Here was my final verdict:

1. Yes, you can run Ubuntu Server from a USB flash drive.  Some folks have pointed out that USB flash drives may run the risk of wear-out and warn to not install an OS on a USB flash drive.  You can minimize the amount of writes that are targeted at the flash device by removing the swap partition (make sure you have enough system memory for this).  Others say that you should probably never run into a problem with a good quality USB device.
2. I started to look for alternative Web UI’s for server administration and I stumbled across a few.  I was most impressed by Ajenti (http://ajenti.org), however it’s still in an very early stage of development.  I’ll probably go with this, but Webmin appears to be pretty widely used UI and I may fall back on this to get more functionality.
3. Yup, I’ve done a lot with RAID Mirroring on Ubuntu in the past.  I’ll just dig up this old post (raiding the archives) and implement a mirror as I did before with MDADM.  Easy.
4. Check.  SMB/CIFS, SSH, NFS, FTP are all a snap to install on ubuntu.  Just pull from the repositories, configure and off we go.  Ajenti has some capability to manage these services from the Web UI as well.
5. Yes again.  Flexibility abounds.  I will choose EXT4 thank you very much.
6. Same as FreeNAS, I’ll pull in the latest Transmission Deamon.
7. Yup – and easier to install, upgrade and manage on Ubuntu.  It’s a deb package so I won’t have to much other than configure it once it’s installed.
8. Resounding yes.  I will have full flexibility to install the latest PHP, Apache, MySQL, etc… this means I can go crazy installing other fun projects on the NAS in the future.
9. Yes and yes.
10. Yes – while FreeNAS has a great community, Ubuntu has a bigger user base and a bigger support community.

So that’s it.  I’ve made up my mind.   Ubuntu Server here we come.   It’s going to be quite a project to get this initially setup, but I think it will be an enriching and useful project.  It’ll open my home server up to new capabilities and hopefully enhanced performance.   FreeNAS is great, but it’s sort of like riding a bike with the training wheels on.  It’s time to ride on two wheels now.

P.S. I should also mention that during my research, I ran across OpenMediaVault (http://openmediavault.org/).   The original FreeNAS project forked into two projects.  The first fork was FreeNAS 8.0 based on FreeBSD8, which is aimed at higher-end server equipment.   I avoided this version because it is still in it’s infancy, requires a kind of ridiculous amount of power and it’s still based on FreeBSD.  I recently discovered that the second fork is actually a Debian Linux based fork aimed more at the home NAS market.   Now they have me second guessing things.  Since it’s based on debian, perhaps this would be the easier route… naw.   

I should probably follow the old saying that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  In this case, I totally disregarded that wise advice and “fixed” with wild abandon.  With my current NAS operating relatively glitch free for over a year on FreeNAS, of course it was time for some upgrading and tinkering.

It started out as an idea for offsite backup, which involved installing duplicity (which turned out to not be that hard), which presented some challenges.  More on that later.  I was also doing some large file transfer across my home network, which is gigabit but was struggling to achieve a decent transfer rate.  I decided after some research that my hardware was holding me back, it was probably my 2-3 year old chipset bottlenecking transfer speeds.  Fortunately, I had just decommissioned another system in my home with considerably greater horsepower.  That’d be great to replace this aging slow NAS system.  So backed up my data on the NAS to some old HD’s laying around the house (slowly… across the network), and switched to the new hardware.  Upgraded FreeNAS in the process to the latest stable v0.7.2.  Restored my config.  Good so far.

Then, my FreeNAS box started rebooting randomly.  Worse, it rebooted and hung while we were away in Hawaii for two weeks.  Nothing I hate worse than having no access to my tunes, let alone other data, and having a broken system that I can’t do anything about, a thousand miles away.  At first I thought I was getting power-outages.  But I discovered later that it was nothing to do with our power at the house.   After a look through syslogs, and some internet searching I found my problem.  Corruption.

I was able to run fsck (file system check) on the RAID array and get the darn think back serviceable again… but the reboots continued.   What… the… hell.  I started to go through my mental checklist of what could be going wrong with the system.  Why the crazy random reboots?  And absolutely no warnings in the log files, no errors, no kernel panic, nothing.  Had to be something with the motherboard, cpu, memory or power-supply or something.  After a while I decided to replace the motherboard first… which forced me to replace the memory.  Two more variables removed.  Still, reboots.  Finally I replaced the power-supply.  Bingo – problem solved.   Why did I even bother to do an upgrade in the first place?!

Well, at least we are stable for now.  Stay tuned for part two… switching to Ubuntu Server from FreeNAS.

And regarding security, I would definitely use a different port than the standard SSH port, at least externally. Otherwise you’ll get clobbered with traffic from hackers attempting to connect to your server for not so nice reasons.  You may want to consider using a keyfile as well – which makes it less convenient, but much more secure.

Only one thing has changed since then. I’m still on that fad diet and I still haven’t found my motivation to exercise.   However, my weight has dropped pretty drastically despite my sedentary nature.  I dropped over 40 pounds during the year to be more accurate.  That’s more than three (3) average sized bowling balls worth of extra weight that I was carrying with me everywhere, putting stress on my bones, my heart and my mind.

This is great and all, but there is another good 10 or so pounds that I need to drop to be back in the normal weight category (right now, I’m still overweight for a 6’1″ dude).  So, this year I resolve to actually start that exercise at least a couple of times a week to move that body-fat percentage down even more, and hopefully lose those last 10 lbs in the process.  I’ve been thinking that getting back into running again might do the trick.  However, Suzy and turned me on to this whole rebounding thing which involves a trampoline (how fun is that?).  While I feel pretty silly effectively bouncing on a tiny trampoline (and probably look pretty silly too), it leaves my muscles sore and jelly-like after only 20 minutes of jumping.  Seriously… even my abdominal muscles are sore.  NASA can’t be wrong about this… 

For additional motivation, I’m posting my 2011 data here (call it a public humiliation diet tactic).  I apparently love fads… slow-carb, rebounding, public humiliation.  I’m such a chump.

For some time now, I have been aware of the rather handy feature that Windows Home Server boasts with a web based file manager (I believe they call it Remote Web Access or some such generic name).  Being a stalwart FreeNAS guy, I was impressed, but didn’t let my jealousy shine through.  How cool is it that you can log into your NAS from outside the network and upload/download any file that is there via a spiffy web interface?  Very cool.  Want.

Sure, you can setup an FTP server, but I really don’t like exposing an FTP to the outside world.  Too many security issues with FTP.  Yes,  I know you can setup an SSH tunnel and do FTP, but that’s kinda boring and not everyone has the patience to setup their own SSH client, etc. Plus I wanted an easy way to allow my friends and/or family to log into the server to grab things like photos or videos or even upload their own files.  I’m certainly not going to get 99% of these folks to setup a secure FTP session via SSH.

Recently, I came across this LifeHacker article about setting up FreeNAS to run SickBeard and SABnzbd to do a sort of Internet PVR.  After reading this, and seeing the techniques they used to get this up and running I was suddenly inspired to work on the above project.  I knew there had to be a way to shoehorn something in.  So I began to look at my options.  I finally stumbled upon a slick PHP/Ajax based Web File Manager front end with decent security that would work for me and decided to give it a shot.  (Ajaxplorer)

If you want to be the master of your domain, and show your Windows Home Server friends up, then this setup is for you.  Enough background, let’s get started.

Get the Necessary Pieces:

• Step 1: Go to the Ajaxplorer website and download the latest zip (http://ajaxplorer.info).  As of the publication of this post, I downloaded Ajaxplorer v3.2.4 and I should also mention that I am using FreeNAS 0.7 in my configuration.  (sorry FreeNAS 8 folks, but I’m guessing these steps will work equally well on your server?)
• Step 2: No step two?  Alright, on with it!

Configure FreeNAS:

• Step 1: Open the admin web interface and navigate to the “Services” tab.
• Step 2: Open “Webserver”
• Step 3: Check the box to “Enable” your LightHTTPd webserver in the upper right hand corner (this doesn’t actually instantly enable anything, just allows you to start configuring)
• Step 4: Choose HTTP from the protocol drop down (at least initially – we’ll talk about securing this before we poke a hole in your router and expose the NAS to the internet)
• Step 5:  Select a port number (i.e. 1234).  (don’t select port 80, try not to conflict with other ports on the server and of course something between 0-64999)
• Step 6: Choose webserver base directory (or document root).  I put mine on my mounted drives, rather than installing directly on the flash drive (OS drive).  For example:  \mnt\sharename\www\ (of course you will need to go and create this directory on your drive first)
• Step 7: Leave Authentication and Directory Listing un-checked.
• Step 8: Click the “Save and Restart” button.  You should get message stating: “The changes have been applied successfully” after a few tense seconds.

Install Ajaxplorer

• Step 1: Unpack the ajaxplorer-3.x.x.zip into a directory off of your webserver base.  For example “. \www\ajxp”.  Confirm that all of the directories and files were created properly and that permissions were set properly (see this page for more details: http://www.ajaxplorer.info/wordpress/documentation-3/chapter-basics/ ).
• Step 2: Point your browser to your FreeNAS IP and new webserver port (i.e. http://192.168.1.101:1234/ajxp) to get started.   A diagnostic tool will be ran once to check that your configuration is ok.  On FreeNAS you’ll get some warnings letting you know that you won’t have image previews due to the lack of PHP5, etc.  Despite these warnings you should have a mostly functional web file manager installed.
• Step 3: Click continue and you should see a warning telling you that the user « admin » has been created with the password « admin » : log in with this id/password, and go the the « Settings » panel to change the admin password.
• Step 4: Configure your users and repositories.  (http://www.ajaxplorer.info/wordpress/documentation-3/chapter-features/gui-overview/ )

Additional Security Concerns

I’m not much of a security expert, however it was absolutely essential to me that this be a decently secure solution.   I really don’t want people hacking around in my NAS from the outside.

In this configuration there are at least 3 caveats with regards to security:

1. When using this interface over the internet, the traffic is unencrypted (as is your login and password).  You’ll want to setup a secure connection to your FreeNAS box and the easiest way to do this is to configure HTTPS on your box.  (http://www.freenaskb.info/kb/?View=entry&EntryID=284 ).  You’ll be self-signing your certificate, which means that your credentials will not be recognized by any reputable certificate authority – and that your browser will likely throw up all kinds of alarm bells when accessing your site.  But since you know you’re trustworthy, you can just ignore those warnings.  Do this step first such that you can generate the credentials, and the configuration file for your webserver – in the next step we’re going to use the newly created configuration as a base for a new webserver.  Just read on…
2. FreeNAS’s LightHTPPd does not support .htaccess files (which are for Apache), which means that you’ll need to go and lock down any sensitive directories (i.e. .\server\conf, etc. ) manually.  Although it seems it may not be necessary after poking around a bit more, better safe than sorry.  More information can be found here: http://redmine.lighttpd.net/wiki/1/Docs:ModAccess.  I found that there are two configuration files under FreeNAS.  One for the WebUI and one for the web server that you just enabled.  You’ll want to edit the configuration file found here: \var\etc\websrv.conf.  Add something like this to the end of the file:
   

   $HTTP["url"] =~ “^/ajxp/server/conf” {
   url.access-deny = (“”)
   }

   Now, to my surprise, if you disable and re-enable the webserver via the web UI or reboot the system you’ll completely blow away any changes you made to the config file (http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=86&t=1941). This is apparently how FreeNAS is designed. So, here’s how I got around things. I made a copy of the websrv.conf file named mywebsrv.conf and instead of launching the default web server, launched my own via a config script. Do this by adding the following to System > Advanced > Command Scripts:

   /usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -D -f /var/etc/mywebsrv.conf -m /usr/local/lib/lighttpd

   Make this a post-init script meaning it runs after the system boots and initializes.  Ensure to add all of the directories that you would like to deny access to into the configuration file.  After you’re done with this step, make sure you disable the other default webserver via the web gui before you reboot the system. This should do the trick and forbid access to your sensitive directories.

3. Ajaxplorer comes with a standard Admin account creatively named ‘admin’ so you’ll probably want to change that to avoid dictionary attacks.  I created a new account with admin privileges and a strong password and then deleted the admin account.

If you’re reading this and can think of more, please do let me know so that I can plug those holes too.

Poke a Hole in your Router

Because everyone has a different type of router at home, I won’t even attempt to begin to tell you how to do this.  However, you’ll want to make sure that you port-forward whatever port you defined in your LightHTTPd configuration above.  You can use a different outside port if you desire, but I like to keep it simple and use the same port number.

Now you can access your stuff anywhere you have an Internet connection.  If you have a Dynamic DNS service to help you remember your IP, even better!

Final Thoughts

While I’m pretty happy with the results, I’m sure there are improvements that can be made to the installation etc.  Others have used Ajaxplorer in place of the Quixplorer that is currently running on FreeNAS (which can be used on the internal network).  Ajaxplorer can be a bit sluggish, and it doesn’t integrate perfectly with FreeNAS, but it gets the job done.  If you have any suggestions, tweaks or improvements let me know and I’ll include them here!  I hope this helps anyone that has been thinking of doing this.  It’s certainly been a learning experience for me.

Mark your calendars (if you’re keeping track at home).  On August 12th, 2011 my will was finally broken and I have become a mini-van owner.  This post-dad point of view is 100% on-board with a mini-van and the lifestyle that it promises.  Mini-van’s are all about convenience and comfort.  They’re all about capacity and doors that open themselves with the push of a button.  They’re all about cup holders and arm rests and tinted windows.  They are about incrementally improving the family travel experience.

Just like last time, this is a new era.  An era that I fully admit that I resisted before but have come to completely embrace.  Next time I’m thinking about taking a stand on the topic, I’ll just remember this humbling moment when I waffled.