Site reviewed: http://www.freenas.org/
For Chapter 12, I visited FreeNAS.org, a site dedicated to creation and support of an open-source network-attached-storage solution. The main page is pretty bare-bones, with no ornamentation and few links. It has the fairly-standard dropdown menu across the top of the main page, with an About tab (news, information about project members, and partners & sponsors), a Features tab where you can compare the newest release of FreeNAS with earlier versions, a Support tab with chat, community-forum, commercial support, mailing list subscription links, and bug reporting, a Documentation tab, and a Search bar, along with small icons linking to social-networking sites. Down the page, there is a section for the latest FreeNAS news, with much of the rest of the site appearing to act as copies of the links accessible through the top toolbar. It wasn’t until I got most of the way to the bottom that I found a “What is FreeNAS” link, which takes the reader to a page which offers brief, friendly descriptions of what network attached storage is and why it might be useful, and what FreeBSD (the OS which runs FreeNAS, a Unix-like OS) is. Overall, there’s not a whole lot to this website – most of the action appears to be on the user community, in the forums, where one can find do-it-yourself guides to building and/or setting up one’s own NAS device, and tweaking it to give the best possible performance. If you’re looking for generic information on network-attached storage, this might not be the best choice for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for information on how to build your own, or hack existing hardware to run FreeNAS, you’d be well served by spending some time browsing the forums.
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