Learn FreeNAS

‘yoyojazz’ has posted a review of the Learning FreeNAS book on Amazon.com.

In it he says:

I picked up Learning FreeNAS book about 6 days ago and I could not put it down! The book wastes no time and gets to the point fast!
Gary has an amazing ability to explain things clearly. I had no trouble being able to do some of the most complex configurations after the first read! (By day 3 I had a confidence in FreeNAS and a strong understanding of the technology that would oftaken me weeks to acquire!)

What is evidently clear from the book is that Gary has a passion for FreeNAS technology and he explains it so well. The book is well divided so information was placed in the perfect sections and with his website all the latest developments within FreeNAS are reported.

admin News

FreeNAS + Mercurial is a little tutorial about installing Mercurial (the distributed version control system on FreeNAS 0.69 (for those using the 0.7 series you will need to look for the appropriate packages in the FreeBSD ports).

It was actually a lot easier than I though it would be.

admin Tips

Thanks to some great technology provided by WPtap.com you can now read LearnFreeNAS.com easily from your mobile phone. Just point the browser on your mobile device (including iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Windows Mobile and Android devices) to LearnFreeNAS.com and an easy to read mobile version of web site will appear!

admin General

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