Learn FreeNAS

Bit-tech have posted an excellent tutorial on “How to build a NAS box” which includes both the hardware aspects and the software, which in this case is FreeNAS.

“A NAS - or Network Attached Storage box is the easy and increasingly popular answer because you can simply drag and drop files to/from any PC… NAS boxes are a very low power way to store masses of data, while also giving everyone on the network access to that data.”

As they go on to say there is a certain satisfaction from doing stuff yourself.

The tutorial covers:

• How to build a NAS box
  
• The Best NAS Hardware: Hard Drives and RAID Cards
  
• The Best NAS Hardware: CPU and Motherboard
  
• The Best NAS Hardware: Memory, Case and PSU
  
• BIOS Setup - Underclocking and Undervolting to Save Power
  
• FreeNAS setup
  
• Using FreeNAS for Bit Torrent
  

You can read more here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/07/23/how-to-build-a-nas-box/

       

admin Tips

Volker Theile has released a new Logo for the OpenMediaVault project.

THE OpenMediaVault is an evolution of FreeNAS and aims to be the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution but this time based on Debian Linux.

Related links:

OpenMediaVault » Blog Archive » New logo

       

admin OpenMediaVault

Via the FreeNAS forum, Phan Vinh Thinh has posted some details on how to secure your FreeNAS server.

1. Change the WebGUI admin/root password (the default is: freenas)
   Use a very strong password if you intend to access FreeNAS over the Internet.
   Please note - admin/root accounts use the same password.
   Please note - Users that are members of the wheel group can su to root if they know the root password.
2. Change WebGUI admin user name (the default is admin), to protect your system against dictionary attacks.
3. DO NOT give shell access to everybody.
4. DO NOT use FTP over the Internet, use SSH or SFTP instead.
5. DO NOT enable Password Authentication with SSH, set-up and use SSH key based authentication.
6. Always use https protocol to access WebGUI interface.
7. DO NOT open your WebGUI server to internet, rather open a tunnel via SSH from client to server.

See the rest of his blog entry for a brief tutorial on implementing these steps Phan’s blog: How to secure your FreeNAS server

       

admin Tips

Some more details are starting to emerge about what will appear in FreeNAS 0.8:

Planned major features:

• Development on FreeBSD RELENG_8. Release, depending on timeframe may be based on a RELENG_8 snapshot or 8.1-RELEASE
  
• Migrate off m0n0wall
  
• Migrate GUI to django
  
• Add support for ada and ahci SATA drivers
  
• Add optional SoftUpdates + Journaling support to UFS2 filesystems
  
• Migration path/tool for previous releases and configurations
  
• Preservation of all existing features of the current FreeNAS release
  
• Refactor FreeNAS build system to allow building FreeNAS without affecting the host environment
  
• Non-Blocking Features
  

Possible other features

• FreeNAS package support. Binary one click installs that modify the GUI dynamically.
  

I am sure this list will evolve and you can keep an eye on the current developments here: http://freenas.org/roadmap

       

admin News

There doesn’t seem to have been an actual official announcement about this, but it seems FreeNAS 0.7.1 has been released.

You can download it from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/

FreeNAS 0.7.1 (Shere):

Majors changes:

• Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.9.
• Upgrade istgt to version 20100125.
• Upgrade msmtp to 1.4.19.
• Upgrade transmission to 1.76.
• Upgrade PHP to 5.2.12 (Thanks to Xin LI).
• Upgrade fuppes to 0.660.
• Upgrade rsync to 3.0.7.
• Upgrade inadyn-mt to 02.18.08.
• Upgrade netatalk to 2.0.5.
• Upgrade bash to 4.0.35.
• Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.25.
• Upgrade proftpd to 1.3.2c.

Minors changes:

• Modify Samba default buffer size.
• Modify Tuning values.
• Add new MIB in System|Advanced|sysctl.conf.
• Add UTF-8 with English menu in File Manager (quixplorer).
• Restrict NFS sharing directory with alldirs.
• Add serial console support.

Bug fixes:

• Fix bug in istgt script.
• Fix Samba ‘Unknown socket option IPTOS_LOWDELAY’ messages. Thanks to Daisuke Aoyama. (BR 2894782|2858262).
• Fix mt-daapd/firefly error ‘Undefined symbol "avcodec_decode_audio"’ (BR 2895960).
• Fix bug in iSCSI initiator script (BR 2916334). Thanks to Daisuke Aoyama.
• Set home dir for Quixplorer users. Thanks to Daisuke Aoyama.
• Remove useless character in email (BR 2928068).
• Every reboot increases the number of ‘proc’ entries in fstab on ‘full’ installations (BR 2929029).
• Fix message in console menu ‘Reset WebGUI password’ (BR 2929338).
• Fix initial resolv issue.
• Fix full install upgrade error.
• Fix nsswitch error when ldap is enabled (BR 2936505).
• Fix transmission umask does not work (BR 2945242).
• Fix WebGUI allows usernames longer than 16 characters (BR 2934168).
• Fix cannot check WebGUI default port.
• Fix fail to apply if webserver authentication is enabled and documentroot is missing.

Permanent restrictions:

• It is not possible to format a SoftRAID disk with MSDOS FAT16/32.
• It is not possible to encrypt a disk partition, only complete disks are supported.
• It is not possible to get seperate CPU stats per processor on SMP machines because FreeBSD does not support that feature.
• Enable ‘polling’ on interfaces used by a LAGG interface will make it inoperable.
• It is not possible to mount EXT2 disks with an inode size of 256 bytes. You have to format it with 128 bytes on Linux to use them on FreeBSD.

Known bugs:

• If DHCP for IPv4 is used, the IPv6 statically configured DNS server will be overriden by the IPv4 DNS server.
• Downgrading to 0.69 via WebGUI fails because of broken pipe error.
• FreeBSD’s ext2fs module, as of release 7.1, cannot mount ext2 file systems with 256-byte large inodes, only 128 byte sized. Unfortunately, 256 byte is the default size with many recent Linux distributions.

       

admin FreeNAS Releases

Recently I wrote about the plans to move FreeNAS from FreeBSD to Linux. The reception was mixed, some saying it didn’t matter, some mentioned that the lack of ZFS support was a real problem.

Today Olivier Cochard-Labbé has made a great announcement, FreeNAS will live on and production ready ZFS support will be added with the upgrade to FreeBSD 8.0. At the same time a new Linux version of FreeNAS will be created called OpenMediaVault!

Olivier explained it like this: FreeNAS needs some big modification to remove its present limitations (with one of the biggest being the lack of support for add-ons/plugins). We think that a full-rewrite of the FreeNAS base is needed. Therefore, we will take 2 different paths:

1. Volker will create a new project called “‘OpenMediaVault” based on a
   GNU/Linux and use all his experience acquired with all those nights and week-ends spent improving FreeNAS during the last 2 years. He will still
   continue to work on FreeNAS (and try to share his time with these two
   projects).
   
2. And, a great surprise: iXsystems (http://www.ixsystems.com/), a company specialising in professional FreeBSD systems has offered to take FreeNAS under its wing as an open source community driven project. This means that they will use their professionals FreeBSD developers to better FreeNAS! Their manpower will permit a full-rewriting of FreeNAS.
   

Olivier also added that he will personally come back to actively working on FreeNAS and begin to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8.0 (which is “production ready” for ZFS).

This is brilliant news all round and I think Volker and Olivier should make sure that the two projects share as much code as possible. Also I think iXsystems should be congratulated for their support of FreeNAS.

       

admin News

Harryd has blogged about the future of FreeNAS and it looks like the future is Linux not FreeBSD.

Harrdy has gleaned this information from this forum thread

In short… FreeNAS 0.8 will be based on Debian GNU/Linux! Volker (the core developer) started an intermediate project called CoreNAS. FreeNAS 0.8 will be based on that.

Here is a short list of pros by Volker:

• Text and graphical installer that can be customized. This means no hand written install scripts anymore which causes some problems in FreeNAS
  
• WOL works in Linux
  
• lmsensor - A WORKING sensor framework which is a really needed feature in FreeNAS to check the CPU/MB temps and fan speeds
  
• Better Samba performance
  
• Ability to implement HA features
  
• System can be updated via ‘apt-get’ or any other deb package manager
  
• Better driver support
  
• Maybe ‘ZFS’ over FUSE (there is already one commercial product available that uses this feature)
  
• NFS4
  

ZFS
The really big problem is ZFS… If it is Linux under the hood or FreeBSD it really doesn’t make that much different to the end user, but and it is a big but, Linux doesn’t have (and can’t have due to licensing issues) ZFS and really running ZFS under FUSE is not a real option.

Is it time for someone else to take up the development of FreeNAS where 0.7 and Volker left off?

       

admin News

Todd Dixon, an assistant engineer for Crawford Broadcasting in Birmingham, Ala, was introduced to open source software several years ago.

Since then he has been a die hard open source fan and has used Linux, LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project) and FreeBSD. Todd has recently discovered FreeNAS and has written all about it (see the link below).

Here are a few choice snippets:

“FreeNAS works fine with an old Pentium III (933 MHz), showing only 1 percent CPU usage and 20 percent of the 1 GB total of RAM. I’m not exaggerating, the thing screams.”

“It is elegant in function and a perfect option for us to continue to give even more data services to everybody here in Birmingham even while our budgets have been tightened.”

Related links:

FreeNAS: A Simple Data Storage Solution

       

admin General

Volker Theile and the FreeNAS team are proud to announce the release of FreeNAS 0.7. Codenamed Khasadar (which is a form of police from Frank Herbert’s famous novel Dune) you can download the ISO and image files here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/stable/0.7.

Majors changes:

• Add ability to configure the login shell for a user.
  
• Local users must join the group ‘ftp’ to be able to login via FTP if ‘Local users only’ in ‘Services|FTP’ is enabled.
  
• Add a user portal. This allows a local user to login and change it’s
  password. The user must have access permissions to login to the user
  portal.
  This can be configured in the user configuration WebGUI. Please note that
  the administrator needs to apply changes done by the local users because
  there have to be restarted several services (which is not allowed to be
  done by a user).
  
• Announce AFP shares using Bonjour/ZeroConf (FR 2839592). Thanks to Morton
  Jonuschat.
  
• Add AFP FP_SYNCFORK command support (FR 2836955). Thanks to Morton
  Jonuschat
  for the patch.
  
• Add Adaptec AACRAID 32/64-bit driver to v5.2.0 Build 17517.
  

Major software upgrades:

• Upgrade Samba to 3.0.37.
  
• Upgrade transmission to 1.72.
  
• Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.23.
  
• Upgrade ProFTPD to 1.3.2a.
  
• Upgrade iSCSI initiator to 2.2.3.
  
• Upgrade fusefs-ntfs/ntfs-3g to 2009.4.4.
  
• Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.8.
  
• Upgrade inadyn-mt to 02.14.10.
  
• Upgrade fuppes to SVN-0.640.
  

Minors changes:

• Set transmission umask to 0002 per default. This can be customize via the
  ‘Services|BitTorrent’ WebGUI or the rc.conf variable ‘transmission_umask’
  (FR 2813791).
  
• Add ixgbe driver to i386 kernel.
  
• Add ixgb driver to AMD64 kernel (BR 2813759).
  Add support for Blowfish 448 bits encryption (FR 2816028).
  Add configuration option in ‘Services|BitTorrent’ to enable/disable usage
  of distributed hash table (DHT).
  
• Add /usr/bin/getopt command (FR 2824548).
  
• Add extra options for S.M.A.R.T. in ‘Disks|Management|Disk|Edit’ (FR
  2824730).
  
• Add RAID1 balance algorithm ‘prefer’ (FR 2833989).
  
• Add latvian language support. Thanks to the translators.
  
• Update Quixplorer russian translation (BR 2841900). Thanks to Alexey
  Sannikov.
  
• Add ‘Max. login attempts’ to ‘Services|FTP’ (FR 2844193).
  
• Get AFP dbd cnid scheme working (BR 2844900).
  
• Set ‘dir-listing.encoding = “utf-8″‘ for the webserver directory listing
  (FR 2872624).
  
• Display volume serial number in ‘Disks|Management’ (FR 2881880).
  
• Now it is possible to configure iSCSI-Targets for export: removable media
  (static & dynamic size), pass-through devices. Thanks to Vasily Chalykh.
  

Bug fixes:

• Prohibit user ‘transmission’ to login via FTP.
  
• ZPool disk space usage isn’t displayed correctly (BR 2810584).
  
• Improved Unison WebGUI to be able to configure ZFS shares as working
  directory (BR 2795084).
  
• Synchronizing ZFS configuration fails (BR 2814324).
  
• Restrict bittorrent administrative WebGUI port to [1024,65535] (BR
  2835342).
  
• The ‘Unmount disk/partition’ checkbox on ‘Disks|Mount Point|Fsck’ was ignored (BR 2860297).
  

Permanent restrictions:

• It is not possible to format a SoftRAID disk with MSDOS FAT16/32.
  
• It is not possible to encrypt a disk partition, only complete disks
  are supported.
  
• It is not possible to get seperate CPU stats per processor on SMP
  machines because
  FreeBSD does not support that feature.
  
• Enable ‘polling’ on interfaces used by a LAGG interface will make it
  inoperable.
  
• It is not possible to mount EXT2 disks with an inode size of 256
  bytes. You
  have to format it with 128 bytes on Linux to use them on FreeBSD.
  

Known bugs:

• If DHCP for IPv4 is used, the IPv6 statically configured DNS server
  will be
  overriden by the IPv4 DNS server.
  
• Downgrading to 0.69 via WebGUI fails because of broken pipe error.
  
• FreeBSD’s ext2fs module, as of release 7.1, cannot mount ext2 file systems
  with 256-byte large inodes, only 128 byte sized. Unfortunately, 256
  byte is
  the default size with many recent Linux distributions.
  

       

admin FreeNAS Releases

Alexander Kojevnikov has set up a FreeNAS server using RAID 1 (AKA mirroring) and encryption. But is asking himself the question what if, in the future, I want to upgrade the drives with larger ones?

A common scenario with RAID 1 is to replace one of the disks with the bigger one, rebuild the mirror then replace the other one and rebuild it again. In theory it sounds like an easy process that will keep all your data intact. In practice however it’s not,

Alex has found a post by Mike Oliver called FreeNAS 0.7.3953, RAID 1, growfs… oh my! explaining how to do this under FreeNAS.

However if you add encryption it is a little more complicated… Thankfully Alex’s post as the procedure needed!

Related links: Growing mirrored and encrypted partitions in FreeNAS

       

admin Tips