Can I freely print while NASing?

March 9, 2009 3:36 PM

Is there a way to use a PC as a print server while running FreeNAS on it at the same time?

I have a roughly 5 year old PC that I'd like to run FreeNAS on for backups and file serving for the two laptops in our household. However, it would also be very convenient to have it pull double duty as a print server, rather than carrying a laptop to the printer every time we want to print. Is there a reasonably easy way to make this work? I don't have a problem running FreeNAS on a CF card or USB drive if necessary, and really had planned on doing that anyway.

posted by entropic to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Perhaps install ESXi (free vmware virtual server) on it, so you can setup the freenas storage server within the virtual environment, and then another virtual server (such as smoothwall express) for printing, dhcp, routing etc? If the print drivers are a pain to get working under linux, you could even have a third minimal XP guest just for shared printing.

Personally, I've used openfiler running virtualized this way, but freenas should work just as easily.
posted by ArkhanJG at 3:57 PM on March 9, 2009

I have not worked with FreeNAS itself, but after a quick read-through of their webpage it looks like it's a very limited, small, fast version of FreeBSD. That can mean two things:

• It could be (theoretically) possible to add printer queue support using standard FreeBSD packages
or
• The version is so limited that it would be less hassle to go for a "real" FreeBSD install (or a linux distro).

The main problem I see is that FreeNAS is derived from m0n0wall, and they really don't like adding *server functions to their firewall.
posted by PontifexPrimus at 4:02 PM on March 9, 2009

FreeNAS is m0n0wall under the hood (and m0n0wall is really just a stripped-down FreeBSD.)

You should be able to install CUPS on it (using pkg_add), and then configure CUPS to manage a connected printer. If you're relatively familiar with FreeBSD and CUPS, this shouldn't be all that difficult.
posted by toxic at 4:06 PM on March 9, 2009

ESXi will run quite happily off a USB drive too, so you can keep all the hard-drive storage setup for your virtual machines. You can also mod it to add further driver support for various drive controllers, in case yours isn't recognised. The only downside is it doesn't work with PATA local drives for virtual machine storage, only SATA - which you may not have, given the age of the machine.

Option B in that case would be a linux distro running say, vmware server; but then you could just run the linux distro to do everything in the first place, and I'm presuming if you could do that, you wouldn't need freenas...
posted by ArkhanJG at 4:07 PM on March 9, 2009

The version is so limited that it would be less hassle to go for a "real" FreeBSD install (or a linux distro)

This is probably true. Setting up a more generic Linux/BSD + Samba + CUPS is probably just as easy (if not easier) than setting up FreeNAS/m0n0wall + CUPS.
posted by toxic at 4:08 PM on March 9, 2009

I use Ubuntu Server rather than FreeNAS for this job, and it works just fine. 700MHz PIII, 256MB RAM, 1.5TB of disk drives.
posted by flabdablet's sock puppet at 4:08 PM on March 9, 2009