Documentation and support

When you don’t know if you’re coming or going.

Unlike desktop distributions where you can find your way around the system through simple trial and error, a NAS setup doesn’t take kindly to such cavalier poking about. Unless you know what you’re doing, you’re very likely to break your NAS setup and render it useless.

FreeNAS, one of the most beloved NAS projects, is a behemoth of information. It’s safe to say that when it comes to documentation, FreeNAS is to NAS distributions what Arch and Gentoo are to Linux. Apart from the community forums and IRC channel that you can use to find answers to specific problems, the projects hosts extensive documentation on its website.

In addition to a public forum board, the EasyNAS project provides some basic information and quick introduction to important concepts and technologies such as RAID and filesystems. However, many pages on the wiki, such as the one discussing installing EasyNAS to USB are blank, with no content.

You’ll find several pages on important topics such as installation, initial configuration, and even exotic topics such as Access Control on the NAS4Free website. Although basic, the information is still helpful.

Along with FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault and Rockstor too are very well documented. Whereas the OpenMediaVault documentation is to the point, Rockstor covers the topics in great detail and also features many howtos on a wide range of topics.

Unlike the others, FreeNAS also boasts of a dedicated book published by PacktPub. FreeNAS and Rockstor also offer commercial support solutions and you can also find several video tutorials for each of these distributions on YouTube.