Learn FreeNAS

ZFS is an excellent choice for a high end NAS solution. In this tutorial I walk you through building a ZFS based NAS using FreeNAS 8. You’ll learn how to create a ZFS volume and datasets within it. The article will also examine the advantages of using snapshots.

Read the full tutorial here: Building ZFS Based Network Attached Storage Using FreeNAS 8

Train Signal has published a new tutorial which guides you through an installation of FreeNAS 8 on a simple system using two hard drives for a fully functional network attached storage solution. The tutorial goes through the steps needed to boot and install FreeNAS 8 on a modest system with two hard drives. The first hard drive is a small 2GB drive to hold the FreeNAS operating system and the second a 2TB drive for serving data to the network.

The sections included are:

• Install
• Setting a Static IP Address
• Storage
• Add a User
• Sharing over the Network
• Connect from Windows

The latest update to the FreeBSD-based Network-Attached Storage (NAS) solution has been released. FreeNAS 8.0.3 is a mainatinace release which includes the following changes:

• Upgrade ataidle to 2.6.
• Upgrade nut / net-snmp to 2.6.2 and 5.7.1, respectively.
• Bump samba from 3.5.11 to 3.6.1.
• Bump netatalk to 2.2.1.
• NFSv4 ACL support.

A full list of changes and fixes can be found in the release notes. FreeNAS 8.0.3 is available to download for 32- and 64-bit systems. Note that previous builds were branded as i386/amd64 (32-bit and 64-bit respectively). 8.0.3-RC1+ rebranded the architectures as x86 and x64, respectively.