Learn FreeNAS

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.
  

admin FreeNAS Releases, News

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

admin News

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…

admin News

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.

admin News

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

admin News

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.

admin News

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

admin News

Linux.com have published an excerpt from my book Learning FreeNAS… The excerpt is entitled “Configuring storage in FreeNAS”.

You can read more here.

admin News

Varun has posted an entry on his blog about his FreeNAS server. After 193 days he has had to reboot it due to a problem with his router (and not the FreeNAS).

He is a bit saddened as he was conducting an experiment to see
how long various operating systems can keep running before they need to be shut down or restarted for any reason. FreeNAS was at the top of his list!

admin News

Harryd has a excellent blog entry about solving/measuring ZFS write performance using the dd command.

You can read it here.

admin News