Turning old hardware into network storage

Do you have an old computer gathering dust? Thanks to Linux's flexibility and the innovative spirit of programmers, even computers that are more than 10 years old can still be used as network storage in current IT infrastructures.

Systems frequently used by power users in the past often offer plenty of space for mass storage. In addition, these systems usually have sufficient power supplies to run multiple hard disks as network-attached storage (NAS). EasyNAS, an openSUSE derivative, takes the pain out of configuring network storage with multiple storage media and integrating it into an existing LAN [1].

Requirements

EasyNAS comes as a hybrid ISO image with a size of about 380MB. As the minimum system requirements, the developers recommend a processor with at least 500MHz clock speed – as you may recall, this was state of the art more than 15 years ago.

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