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

Related links: FreeNAS – Setting up Bittorrent

FreeNAS has been listed in the top ten at Best Open Source Software Awards (BOSSIE) 2010 in the networking tools category. Other winners are the Hyperic HQ and OpenNMS monitoring solutions, the Vyatta router Linux and Cacti, another monitoring application.

See FreeNAS listed here: http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/bossie-awards-2010-the-best-open-source-networking-software-153&current=5&last=10#slideshowTop

Related links: Best Open Source Software Awards 2010

Obviously there is more work to be done, but iXsystems and the team there are working hard to get FreeNAS 0.8 finished.

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).

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
  

A basic web GUI is up and running and things are starting to take shape. I am working with Warner to try and get some screen shots for you.

If the current rate of progress continues there should be a more general preview build available in the next couple of weeks with the ability to configure the network, disks, filesystems, NFS and SAMBA from the web GUI.

Warner is hoping to do weekly snapshots and I will try and blog about the updates as then come.

This snapshot is for developers only. It is not functionally complete yet, and there are likely many rough edges.

If you are interested in playing with it you will need to download the code and build it yourself. You can find the code in SVN and here is the accompanying README.

The new FreeNAS is based on nanoBSD and builds for 32 and  64 bit machines, but building a 32 bit image on a 64 bit installation is currently broken.

Related links:

FreeNAS: iXsystems’ FreeNAS snapshot

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

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

Steve says FreeNAS is worth investigating because it supports both of the two recent innovations that can raise storage usefully above the level of its misbehaving basic building blocks; a FreeNAS server can serve up and participate in a Zettabyte Filing System (ZFS) configuration, and it can act as either an iSCSI target (that is, presenting logical drives to a host or aggregation server) or as an iSCSI initiator (that is, collecting together a group of targets on some reachable subnet into a single large logical storage volume).