[geeks] Thoughts? (Cheap NAS with nice feature set)

[Alois Hammer]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 15:37:34 -0400, "Joshua Boyd" <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
> 
> I think that a built in bittorrent client has potential to be really
> useful in a family setting.

Unless you're a Comcast customer, in which case, your first question
should be, "Does this thing support encryption, and is it going to be
upgradeable to the next round of arms-race protocol changes?"  Besides,
my firewall/router is also an NTP proxy/DNS proxy/web proxy/Tor
proxy/Freenet node/BitTorrent handler/other stuff as needed.  Hence the
Intel E6550 and the four gig of RAM.  Eight gig of RAM later, when I get
the time to upgrade to 64-bit Linux.

> I'd go for Solaris.  Actually, I did go with Solaris, although I
> certainly don't have 2TB yet.

I've been toying with the idea of OpenSolaris or Nexenta or something,
but a) Linux and BSD are both considerably more performant, especially
for filesystems (clearly an important consideration for a NAS device)
and b) using anything other than Sun Solaris 10 x86 isn't going to get
me that tasty Solaris experience to go on my resume.  And, honestly?  I
can't stand Sun Solaris.  The userland tools are terrible, and getting
good GNU tools on seems to be an exercise in hair-pulling, cursing, and
wondering why stuff doesn't get updated for months or longer.  (Or has
someone produced an alternative to SunFreeware?)