I need help either setting up or finding software to help me set up a portion on a hard drive or folder for myself to access from my macbook air and my friends and my brothers windows laptop and i am hosting this from my windows 7 ultimate pc or i can host from a really old desktop with 320gb of space on a single hard drive, can anyone help me find software to help?
You could be better off using your other desktop PC and get another hard drive if you can for storage. And install FreeNAS on it.
The other desktop i has uses IDE connections and i only have 1 hard drive thats in it like that, and it only allows me to use one hard drive.
Oh, well in that case, you could install some sort of Linux distro on it and try to configure a password or something like that for security. Then share a folder which its subfolders should inherit the permissions from the parent folder. Now the subfolders could be anything you want, as long as you can read the name of it. To access it, just use the network path for the machine and remember to set a static IP address for that machine. Preferably, block any unused ports for added security.
Where can i find this linux distro that will work for what i want to do?
To just inform you i didnt know i could do a virtual machine of Freenas and i guess it works the same so i am now running it on my desktop but i have no idea how to work it!
IDE can do primary and slave on a single cable, buy a new cable and hook up a second 320GB IDE drive to that sucker. IDE drives are dirt cheap right now.
i cant even find the usb stick in the bios of the really old desktop and it doesnt come up when i hit f12 for the boot options and its not there i tried all my ports so i dont know how to run the freenas software off a usb stick but i got it to workmin virtualbox and it works just fine i just need to figure out how to set it up!
You're installing FreeNAS on the VM, right? But you do know that if your main PC has to fail, the VM will go down as well? So it's best to isolate the machine to its own host. Or else I would say that's ok for beginners.
As for the distro, you could give Ubuntu a try, although I'm kind of leaning towards Debian Wheezy because it doesn't have most of the crap Ubuntu have. Or you could stick to FreeNAS if you want to.