Learn FreeNAS

Following the success of this blog I have started a new, wider and more general blog about Network Attached Storage. As well as covering FreeNAS this new blog will cover other NAS products (both free and commerical) including OpenFiler, NexentaStor and NASlite.

The blog will also cover news and tips about the various NAS technologies including iSCSI.

You can find the new blog at Network Attached Storage News.

Techbuster has posted the first part of a test between FreeNAS and Windows Home Server and FreeNAS has impressed them.

As well as setting up standard network storage, the reviewer was able to stream DivX files to a XBox 360 with no issues whatsoever.

The piece ends with “All in all, I’m highly impressed…ESPECIALLY for a 100% free piece of software.”

Read more here: techbustr: FreeNAS vs. Windows Home Server (Part 1)

Packt have opened the voting for the Packt Author of the Year Award 2009. The Packt Author Award 2009 is open to authors of all Packt books published during 2008 which includes my Learning FreeNAS book.

By voting and answering the survey, you enter yourself into a prize draw to win one of three iPod Shuffles.

Go to Packt Author Award and click the VOTE NOW! link and select "Learning FreeNAS" in the "Choose the book that you want to vote for:" drop down box and then fill out the rest of the form.

Voting closes the 28th May.

Please pass this on to all your friends!!!!

Thanks,

Gary

FreeNAS 0.69.1 code named Omnius (referring to a collection of artificially intelligent entities from Frank Herbert’s Dune) has been released. It can be downloaded here.

Majors changes:

• Upgrade Samba to 3.0.34.
  
• Upgrade ProFTPD to 1.3.2.
  
• Upgrade mDNSResponder to 1.08.6.
  
• Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.22.
  
• Upgrade cdialog to 1.1.20080819.
  
• Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.4.
  
• Upgrade nut to 2.4.1. Thanks to Joerg Pulz for the core dump patch. This
  version uses TCP wrappers instead of the internal ACL mechanism. Because of
  that all client can listen the UPS. If you want to prevent this you have to
  use the FreeNAS client firewall to block specific IP ranges. See

  http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/nut-upsuser/2009-February/004862.html

  for a detailed explanation.
  

• Upgrade transmission to 1.51.
  
• Upgrade fusefs-ntfs/ntfs-3g to 2009.2.1.
  
• Upgrade 3Ware serial ATA RAID controller driver to 9.5.1.
  
• Upgrade bash to 4.0.10.
  

Minors changes:

• Add ‘SSL/TLS only’ on ‘Services|FTP’ page to allow TLS/SSL connections
  only.
  
• Add ‘Reverse DNS lookup’ on ‘Services|FTP’ page. This and the ‘Ident
  protocol’
  option are disabled per default because they may slow down or break the
  user
  login to the FTP server in some situations.
  
• Add ‘Authentication’ checkbox on ‘Services|BitTorrent’ page to
  enable/disable
  authentication for TransmissionBT WebGUI.
  
• Add checkbox to enable WOL on ‘Network|Interfaces|LAN’ and
  ‘Interfaces|Optionalx’
  pages. Please note that WOL only works for nfe, nve, sis, vr, xl. Thanks to
  Tobias Reber for the patch.
  
• Add traceroute6 command (FR 2531610).
  
• Add *.iso support to Fuppes UPnP (FR 2521047).
  
• Move ‘m2ts’ video file extension to ‘default’ section (BR 2643180).
  
• Add ‘Remote monitoring’ to ‘Services|UPS’ to allow adding remote
  monitors that
  monitor the local installed UPS in slave mode.
  
• Use WebGUI administrator password for the NUT user ‘root’.
  
• Add ability to mount UDF ISO images.
  
• Disable download feature in Quixplorer because there are misc. (PHP and
  system) limitations that makes this feature senseless.
  
• Prevent generation of core dump files (BR 2662404). Can be enabled via
  ‘System|Advanced|sysctl.conf’.
  
• Add ability to enable/disable sysctl variables in
  ‘System|Advanced|sysctl.conf’.
  
• Add XMLRPC services that are available via

  http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xmlrpc.php,

  e.g. system.getInfo.
  

• Add ability to configure ProFTPD module mod_ban via WebGUI (FR 2546338).
  
• Add device I/O statistics to ‘Status|Disks’ page (FR 2704919).
  
• Replace msntp with FreeBSD’s ntpdate.
  
• Allow setting TransmissionBT WebGUI user name (FR 2745563).
  
• Allow to set the following TransmissionBT settings via WebGUI: peer port,
  port forwarding, pex, encryption mode and max. upload/download bandwidth
  (FR 2765940).
  

Bug fixes:

• Set correct friendly name in fuppes.cfg for Xbox 360. The correct
  friendly name will be generated automatically (e.g. ‘xxxx : 1′).
  
• Set correct shutdown property in upsmon.conf (BR 2521141).
  
• Starting FTP service fails when using DHCP on LAN interface (BR 2519951).
  
• FPSyncDir patch correction (BR 2546107).
  
• UPS service improvements. Display NUT messages in syslog and send
  emails when
  using shutdown mode ‘UPS reaches low battery’ (BR 2549047).
  
• Change user agent string for PS3 to ‘PLAYSTATION 3′ in fuppes.cfg (BR
  2600554).
  
• Formating disks with ‘Software RAID’ doesn’t clear GEOM metadata (BR
  2609681).
  
• GUI menu separator line too thick in Safari (BR 2652160). Thanks to
  skabde.
  
• Add patch for PHP bug #45996 (libxml2 2.7 causes breakage with
  character data
  in xml_parse()).
  
• Display dialog to set WebGUI port when configuring network settings via
  console menu (BR 2661938).
  
• Fix problem with DAAP & Mac iTunes 8.1 (BR 2701606). Thanks to Alexey
  Sannikov.
  
• Fix false positive bug while detecting disk mount state (BR 2706994).
  Thanks
  to desummoner for the patch.
  

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.
  

In a recent article Maximum PC comments that FreeNAS is a wonderful open-source alternative to pre-installed software setups on network-attached storage devices.

But the main thrust of the article (by open-source software developer Patrick McKenzie) is how to separate open-source winners and losers. The competition between open-source projects and retail applications is a never-ending struggle. Open-source is an alternative, but when is it the better alternative?

Unfortunately the article points out some weaknesses of FreeNAS. He writes, “But if you check out the project’s Web site, you will have no indication as to why you would ever want to install the app. What’s the benefit? There’s a ton of information about the program’s features, requirements, and updates… but comparisons of FreeNAS versus common open-source and retail equivalents are sorely lacking. What problem does FreeNAS solve? What makes it better than the standard? Why should I turn to open-source?”

Such things are addressed in my book Learning FreeNAS but maybe I need to write a post addressing his points… Anyone else up to the challenge?

Read more here: Four Ways to Separate Open-Source Winners and Losers | Maximum PC

The guys over at the Streaming Bits blog had a scare recently when one of the drives failed in their FreeNAS server.

But after replacing the failed disk in their 2U server (with 3 x 400 GB IDE drives in a RAID-5 setup), FreeNAS syncronised the new drive and everything is working again just fine.

At the bottom of the post the author says, “It worked well for me and my faith continues strong in FreeNAS.”

Read more here: FreeNAS RAID-5 shines! @ Streaming bits…

iXsystems, the corporate sponsor of the PC-BSD Project, have announced the FreeNAS Titan a FreeNAS-based Network-Attached Storage server.

The features of the FreeNAS Titan Storage Appliance Solution are as follows:

FreeNAS Management Software
2U 12-Bay SATA Hot-Swap Chassis
Intel Quad-Core CPU
Dual Gigabit Ethernet Interfaces (supports up to 10)
2GB DDR2-667 Memory (expandable to 8 GB)
High Performance Raid Controller with Battery Back-Up Unit
Supports up to 12TB Capacity
Single or Redundant 800 Watt High-Efficiency Power Supplies
Compact Flash based FreeNAS Image

You can find more details here.

Mercian Labels, a label printing company in the UK bought a Buffalo Terastation Live 1TB at the end of September and after the initial configuration everything seemed to work well.

In their blog they reported that “It configures easily using the web interface, and just works… I'd recommend it on the basis of what we have seen so far as a good value NAS for SMEs.”

However after only 2 weeks one of the hard drives failed and they had to get a replacement… Now they have abandoned the Terastation all together.

Again from their blog, “I found the Terastation to be slow, with unreliable hardware, reasonably difficult to configure network shares and ftp access on, and the lack of ssh control ability meant we couldn't do much with it if it went wrong. For this reason, I can not recommend it for business use.”

The blog concludes with “The FREENAS box however seems to have gone in a lot better.”

Mercian Labels decided in 2007 to migrate all of their software to open source solutions. They have already succesfully migrated their email (using Zimbra), Web server (migrated to Ubuntu dedicated server) and CRM. They are aiming to use Ubuntu on the desktop.

You can read more in their blog entries:

Open source migration update

Replacing our TERASTATION NAS with a FREENAS box

Nexxo has a great design for a FreeNAS box.

Called Ada (after Ada Lovelace), it is a NAS consisting of FreeNAS running on an Epia C7 mini-ITX platform, driving two 1Tb drives in a RAID 1 configuration. Simple, quiet, cheap, low in power consumption.

There is a nice 3D concept picture which is worth looking at here.

Much of the testing I do with FreeNAS and many of the setups I used for writing my FreeNAS book were done using virtualization software like VMware and VirtualBox.

As a result I have started a new blog called Virtualization News.

Enojy!

Gary