I am in a work environment where out corporate office is off site, and we have no tech guys at work. We have a lot of common files that are being stored on every one's computers separately, then we email it to our manager and he updates the master file.
My question here is, is it possible to use my current PC that I work on to act as a NAS Server and at the same time run Windows so that I can work on it?
I've read that software like FreeNAS is actually an OS. Can I run the NAS software and my OS side by side? And what happens if I shut my PC down? Right now I am sharing one of my partitions as a NAS, but no-one can access it when my computer is logged off or shut down.
21 Answer
Assuming you are using Windows - which I'm guessing is the case by default, you don't actually need complexity. Simply create a directory (folder) then "share" it by right clicking on it and clicking "Share" or similar. Make sure the other computers on the network are in the same workgroup.
From a practical perspective (ie with the level of knowledge hinted at by your question), you would need a dedicated computer to run FreeNAS - its non-trivial to get 2 OS's running side-by-side - more so when you are talking about filesharing. FreeNAS is designed to turn a computer into a NAS appliance - not run alongside other machines - and it presents the same way as a shared Windows folder.
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