[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“In a recent article we saw how easy it is to take an existing
server and enable NFS, effectively turning it into a NAS box (See
Creating a NAS Box with an Existing System). The steps are fairly
simple and nearly all Linux distributions come with NFS (excluding
some of the embedded or specialized distributions). However,
implicit in this approach is that you have to maintain the server
distribution by keeping it up to date, making sure it is patched,
and implementing your own security on the system. This can include
many packages installed on the server that have nothing to do with
NFS or NAS.“An alternative approach is to use a dedicated NAS appliance
distribution that uses only the packages necessary for a NAS box.
This would reduce the number of packages that you need to keep up
to date or even monitor for security problems. This article
examines one popular NAS distribution, OpenFiler.”