Have you considered NAS4Free rather than FreeNAS? I tried FreeNAS and found it a bit unintuitive. Switched to NAS4Free due to some other issues I had...
Fair point on the first item, although on a completely personal note if our server room burnt down, the rest of the school would be burnt out with it...
I like the idea to get a temperature warning system, but looking at the costs, I might just create one out of an arduino/netduino... That should keep...
