Alexander Kojevnikov has set up a FreeNAS server using RAID 1 (AKA mirroring) and encryption. But is asking himself the question what if, in the future, I want to upgrade the drives with larger ones?
A common scenario with RAID 1 is to replace one of the disks with the bigger one, rebuild the mirror then replace the other one and rebuild it again. In theory it sounds like an easy process that will keep all your data intact. In practice however it’s not,
Alex has found a post by Mike Oliver called FreeNAS 0.7.3953, RAID 1, growfs… oh my! explaining how to do this under FreeNAS.
However if you add encryption it is a little more complicated… Thankfully Alex’s post as the procedure needed!
Related links: Growing mirrored and encrypted partitions in FreeNAS
The Windows7holic blog has posted a tutorial about setting up FreeNAS.
The tutorial is quite advanced and not only covers booting, installation and initial configuration but also covers RAID.
Related links:
Windows 7: Assembling File Server with the Red Devils
harryd has written a short post with some pointers to tutorials about Samba tuning with FreeNAS 0.7:
“Here is a nice blogpost from learnedbyerror about tuning samba (and other…). Especially the samba/cifs tweaks should give you a performance boost.”
Harryd doesn’t recommend you use the old zfs tuning settings as the latest FreeNAS versions are based on FreeBSD 7.2 (see http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide).
Related links:
harryd: FreeNAS 0.7 – Samba tuning
Here is a short blog entry about how to connect a Dvico Tvix to FreeNAS with NFS.
Related links:
My Howto`s: Dvico Tvix to Freenas with NFS
Marton Pipe of Home Cinema Choice has written a guide about using FreeNAS for media storage.
“If you have an old PC sitting around it’s surprisingly easy to create a NAS (Network Attached Storage) repository for your media.”
“For the purposes of this project, I spent a mere £20 on a six year-old Evesham 2.8GHz Pentium 4 (i.e. single-core) with 512MB of RAM (pictured above).”
“FreeNAS provides many useful features. As with commercial NAS boxes, a built-in webserver allows you to remotely administer it from a PC on your network – just enter the IP address that it can automatically derive via DHCP.”
Related links:
How you can build a media NAS for next to nothing…or even less | Home Cinema Choice
Simon Day has published a guide on how to connect a Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 (SLES) to a FreeNAS Server using iSCSI.
The guide assumes that you have built and configured a FreeNAS Server with working iSCSI Targets.
The guide covers:
- Install the iSCSI Initiator Package in SLES
- Configure the iSCSI Initiator to connect to your Free NAS server
- Set the iSCSI Initiator Service to start when booting
- Add the iSCSI target
- Establish Target Connection
- Change Startup
- Adding the iSCSI Target to the Linux File system
- Creating the Linux Partition and assigning a mount point
- Check the new Mount-point
Related links:
How to Connect SLES 10 to a Free NAS iSCSI Server
Hype-o-thetic.com has published a script which performs a scrub on each pool. ZFS automatically checks for errors when it reads/writes files, but you can force a check with the scrub command.
After uploading the script to your FreeNAS machine, hype-o-thetic.com suggest you make it run automatically, by going to System –> Advanced –> Cron and add it as Monthly cron job.
You can find the script here:
FreeNAS Bash script to start a ZFS scrub on each pool (scrub.sh) – hype-o-thetic?com
Jonathan Brown has been playing with FreeNAS and has written a six part guide to his adventures. By the end of this adventure he configured FreeNAS and has a nice 2.6TB storage device connected to his network.
You can read all about it here:
Sharing files using Windows is quick and simple at first, but it also has downsides. However, using network attached storage (NAS) drives has many advantages, such as centralized access, a network recycling bin, and multi-OS support. Eric Geier shows you how to set up a NAS or network drive for free by using the open source FreeNAS program.
Eric covers:
- Benefits of Using NAS Devices
- Recycle bin support
- PCs don’t have to be on to access shares
- Better and easier control over shares
- Supports native file sharing protocols of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X
- FreeNAS Protocols and Features
- Building Your FreeNAS Machine
- Getting FreeNAS on the Network
Eric plans a part 2 in which he will show how to access the web GUI and perform some initial configuration. Then he look at how to set up the disks, so that you can start sharing with the popular protocols.
Stay tuned as I will update the blog when part 2 is published.
Related links:
InformIT: Setting Up FreeNAS for a Central File Server: Part 1 > Benefits of Using NAS Devices
‘frrl’ has written a tutorial about FreeNAS and iSCSI. In case you don’t know iSCSI (Internet SCSI) is an evolution of the SCSI protocol, which allows SCSI commands to be sent over a network. It allows two hosts to negotiate and then exchange SCSI commands using IP networks. The result is that a remote device with iSCSI capabilities can be seen to be a local disk drive but the commands and data for that device are being sent over the network rather than down a cable in the machine.
In iSCSI clients (called initiators) are able to send SCSI commands to SCSI storage devices (targets) on remote servers. FreeNAS can act as an iSCSI initiator or and iSCSI target.
The tutorial covers:
What can iSCSI do for you?
Why SAN?
FreeNAS and iSCSI
Related links:
Fun with FreeNAS – iSCSI – When a local disk is not local « http://frrl.wordpress.com
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