NASLite
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 NASLite |
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| Website: | serverelements.com |
| Company/ developer: |
Server Elements |
| OS family: | Linux |
| Default user interface: | Console/Terminal |
| License: | v1: Freely Distributable, v2: Proprietary |
| Working state: | Current |
NASLite is a Linux distribution for 486 and above x86 based computers which fits onto a 1.44MB floppy disk, providing a way of using the computer as network-attached storage. It supports serving files to clients running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. Other proprietary versions are available which support different networking protocols, or booting the operating system from a USB Mass Storage device. NASLite floppy disk images can be downloaded for free from either the Server Elements web page or the NASLite sourceforge project.
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[edit] Networking Capabilities
NasLite turns its target machine into a simple file server. Since file serving takes up very little processing speed as opposed to network speed or hard drive speed, it is able to run on comparatively old computers with little processing power. Other than the minimum specifications mentioned above, it requires only PCI and IDE to be supported by the computer, as well as a supported PCI Ethernet card, and as it runs from a floppy disk, hypothetically all IDE channels can be used for harddrives.
Naslite has three variants supporting different file serving protocols. These are Samba to support serving to Microsoft Windows client machines, NFS to serve to Unix based operating systems, or FTP. It also supports remote administration via telnet, and includes a web server to display usage and error logs.
[edit] Compatibility
NasLite supports new larger hard drives that often are not supported by older machines, by bypassing the BIOS and directly accessing the harddrive(s), greatly increasing the usefulness of an older computer for serving large amounts of data.
