Learn FreeNAS

Here are some screenshots for the recently released FreeNAS 8.0 RC 2:

Since iXsystems released the first FreeNAS 8 beta in November there has been lots of activity including several betas and a release candiate. They have now released RC2 (release candiate 2) which means that the final version should be coming out soon.

The astute  among you will also notice that the version number has changed. This is no longer FreeNAS 0.8 (which followed the tradition set by previous versions of FreeNAS - remember 0.69? 0.72?).

The intention is to have the version number reflect the base version of FreeBSD used. RC2 is based on FreeBSD 8.2, but this version of FreeNAS is called 8.0 as there are future plans to add functionality. Once FreeNAS 8.2 is out, a suffix will be added, such as 8.2.1, 8.2.2, etc.

Release Candidate 2 contains fixes for issues that were encountered in RC1.  It does not contain the new functionality that was scheduled for RC2, but due to the bug fixes is a significant improvement over RC1.

FreeNAS 8 should be installed to a USB stick or Compact Flash device.  It requires a device of at least 1 GB in size.  In a departure from FreeNAS 0.7 releases, the OS drive can not be used as a component for a volume, nor can it be partitioned for sharing.

The following things are worth noting:

UPGRADES FROM FREENAS 0.7x ARE STILL UNSUPPORTED
The system has no way to import configuration settings from 0.7 versionsof FreeNAS, nor is there any sort of volume importer yet that will preservedata on existing volumes.  Attempting to upgrade from 0.7 will result in theloss of your configuration, your data, or quite likely, both.

IMPORTING EXISTING STORAGE VOLUMES IS UNSUPPORTED
We will get that working very shortly, for now, don’t feed disks with datayou care about to FreeNAS 8

Finally… while FreeNAS 8 system does support UFS based volumes, such as gmirror, gstripe,graid3, the primary focus is on ZFS.  Many of the features are provided via ZFS datasets, such as the ability to share subsets of volumes via CIFS. This delta is likely to increase over time, the compelling reasons to use ZFS are likely to increase as well.  It is highly recommended to use ZFS for new volumes, even if the underlying device is a volume exported by a hardware RAID controller.

You can download FreeNAS 8.0-RC2 from here.

FreeNAS 0.8 Beta is now available for testing and can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/. The FreeNAS team are looking for feedback to improve the product for final release.

FreeNAS 8 Beta includes ZFS version 14 and future versions of FreeNAS will include other ZFS benefits such as De-Duplication, which conserves disk space by sending a pointer to the location of the original file for any replicated data.

The base system has migrated from FreeBSD 7.x and the m0m0wall build system to FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE and NanoBSD. The system startup has migrated from the older php scripts to the standard FreeBSD rc.d boot system. We’ve pushed many of the bug fixes and system improvements back into FreeBSD.

You can read the full release notes here: http://support.freenas.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes8r5591

Warner Losh of iXsystems has been kind enough to let me know that the first Beta of FreeNAS 0.8 is imminent, he was also kind enough to give me a sneak peak of what is coming… So I have installed this pre-Beta and made some screenshots of what we can expect in the 0.8 Beta.

Brian Adeloye of Tenable Network Security has found a vulnerability  in all versions of FreeNAS before  0.7.2.5543. With this vulnerability root acccess can be gained via the web GUI without authentication.

There are two solutions:

1) Upgrade to the latest stable version of FreeNAS – 0.7.2.5543:  https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/stable/0.7.2/

2) Restrict web GUI access to trusted IP addresses only.

For most people using FreeNAS in their homes behind a firewall this shouldn’t be an issue, but it is worth upgrading anyway just to be 100% sure.

A maintenance update for FreeNAS 0.7.2 has been released by the FreeNAS development team. This new version includes Samba 3.5.5 and experimental iSCSI boot/install.

It is also worth noting that the system requirements have changed. The minimum space to install is now 128MB with 384MB of RAM for embedded and 400MB 256MB of RAM for a full install.

Full release notes:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/stable/0.7.2/NOTES%200.7.2.txt/view

Download:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/

Related links:
FreeNAS 0.7.2.5462 Sabanda Released!

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

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

Yesterday iXsystems released another internal/experimental snapshot of FreeNAS 0.8. I was able to download the source and build this latest developer preview version and now I am able to post the first screenshot of the new FreeNAS 0.8 web user interface:

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