phillhutt

So, as mentioned two posts ago, I tried to install ruby (the programming language) on my NAS server. This was so I could use the ruby rsync to sync the freeNAS up with my Amazon S3 account. It is basically a watered down version of freeBSD, which is UNIX (not LINUX apparently) so of course it’s going to be an absolute mission. Firstly, a lot of the commands were different to those used in Ubuntu or Debian like I’m used to. For example they have “fetch” instead of “wget” and they have “pkg_add” instead of the useful apt-get package manager. It doesn’t seem to have man pages, I assume they must have taken that out of freeNAS in order to lower the installation footprint. All these things seem to make it very hard to me to work with it. Eventually I mangaged to find a (apparently) compatible ruby package (or port in BSD) and I think I even managed to install it at one stage, but I had no way of really using it. For example, if I installed it with Debian, I would immediately be able to type “ruby hello.rb” and it would run the hello.rb file. But this didn’t work with freeNAS, I didn’t know if it didn’t install properly or if you have to manually assign the link or binary or whatever. Also, when I was trying to follow somebodies install how-to they used shell scripts (.sh files) and either BSD doesn’t use them or freeNAS can’t run them as is, so I ended up giving up. For now.

I was quite interested to read about openfiler because it is based on a LINUX distro, something I’m used to and I don’t think it is quite as stripped down as freeNAS because it has a 1GB install rather than a 32MB one. So, something for another rainy day, either get ruby to work on my current freeNAS setup, find something else to install on it, or set up openfiler, or set up some other type of open source or freeware NAS OS.