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

Too Smart Guys have uploaded a video and some instructions on how to setup BitTorrent on FreeNAS. Incluced is ‘enabling the BitTorrent client to use a blocklists and schedules’ and ‘how to update the block list’.

You can download the video here or watch it on their site at the link below.

Related links: FreeNAS – Setting up Bittorrent

The MyLinuxRamblings blog has posted another great FreeNAS related post, this time about using Clonezilla with FreeNAS.

Clonezilla is a free software disaster recovery and disk cloning application. Because it runs from a Live CD (ISO image obtainable from http://tinyurl.com/c2myn8) and will read most hard disk formats including NTFS, Clonezilla is OS agnostic. It can backup at partition level to another hard disk or to a USB hard disk. It can also clone to FreeNAS.

The tutorial covers booting the Clonezilla Live CD and using it to backup a hard disk to FreeNAS (via Windows Networking / Samba).

There are a couple of new FreeNAS posts on the MyLinuxRamblings blog. The two posts cover Installation and Configuration of FreeNAS.

Part 1 covers:

• Installing FreeNAS Server
  
• Configuring the Network Interface
  
• Logging in to you FreeNAS Server
  

Part 2 covers:

• Configuring FreeNAS Server
  
• Changing the Admin Password
  
• Set-up the File Sharing Service (CIFS/ SMB)
  
• Adding the Disk(s) to FreeNAS
  
• Sharing the Disk
  
• Accessing the Share over the Network
  

Talderon has posted a guide on how to install Subsonic (the free, web-based media streamer) on FreeNAS 0.7.1

The combination of FreeNAS and Subsonic is perfect. Together you get ubiquitous access to your music. You can stream to multiple players simultaneously, for instance to one player in your kitchen and another in your living room.

Subsonic is designed to handle very large music collections (hundreds of gigabytes) and in addition to being a streaming media server, Subsonic works very well as a local jukebox.

You can find the guide here: How to Install Subsonic 4.0.1 on FreeNAS 0.7.1

‘yoyojazz’ has kindly sent in a guide for creating an iSCSI target hosted on a ZFS RAIDz1 file system.

The guide covers:

• Adding Discs to FreeNAS
• Formatting Drives
• Creating a ZFS Virtual Device
• Adding a device to the ZFS Management page
• Creating an iSCSI target

The guide is in PDF format and you can download it here: FreeNAS_ZFS_iSCSI_v0.1.pdf

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.

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/

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