Learn FreeNAS

Todd Dixon, an assistant engineer for Crawford Broadcasting in Birmingham, Ala, was introduced to open source software several years ago.

Since then he has been a die hard open source fan and has used Linux, LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project) and FreeBSD. Todd has recently discovered FreeNAS and has written all about it (see the link below).

Here are a few choice snippets:

“FreeNAS works fine with an old Pentium III (933 MHz), showing only 1 percent CPU usage and 20 percent of the 1 GB total of RAM. I’m not exaggerating, the thing screams.”

“It is elegant in function and a perfect option for us to continue to give even more data services to everybody here in Birmingham even while our budgets have been tightened.”

Related links:

FreeNAS: A Simple Data Storage Solution

admin General

Volker Theile and the FreeNAS team are proud to announce the release of FreeNAS 0.7. Codenamed Khasadar (which is a form of police from Frank Herbert’s famous novel Dune) you can download the ISO and image files here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/stable/0.7.

Majors changes:

• Add ability to configure the login shell for a user.
  
• Local users must join the group ‘ftp’ to be able to login via FTP if ‘Local users only’ in ‘Services|FTP’ is enabled.
  
• Add a user portal. This allows a local user to login and change it’s
  password. The user must have access permissions to login to the user
  portal.
  This can be configured in the user configuration WebGUI. Please note that
  the administrator needs to apply changes done by the local users because
  there have to be restarted several services (which is not allowed to be
  done by a user).
  
• Announce AFP shares using Bonjour/ZeroConf (FR 2839592). Thanks to Morton
  Jonuschat.
  
• Add AFP FP_SYNCFORK command support (FR 2836955). Thanks to Morton
  Jonuschat
  for the patch.
  
• Add Adaptec AACRAID 32/64-bit driver to v5.2.0 Build 17517.
  

Major software upgrades:

• Upgrade Samba to 3.0.37.
  
• Upgrade transmission to 1.72.
  
• Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.23.
  
• Upgrade ProFTPD to 1.3.2a.
  
• Upgrade iSCSI initiator to 2.2.3.
  
• Upgrade fusefs-ntfs/ntfs-3g to 2009.4.4.
  
• Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.8.
  
• Upgrade inadyn-mt to 02.14.10.
  
• Upgrade fuppes to SVN-0.640.
  

Minors changes:

• Set transmission umask to 0002 per default. This can be customize via the
  ‘Services|BitTorrent’ WebGUI or the rc.conf variable ‘transmission_umask’
  (FR 2813791).
  
• Add ixgbe driver to i386 kernel.
  
• Add ixgb driver to AMD64 kernel (BR 2813759).
  Add support for Blowfish 448 bits encryption (FR 2816028).
  Add configuration option in ‘Services|BitTorrent’ to enable/disable usage
  of distributed hash table (DHT).
  
• Add /usr/bin/getopt command (FR 2824548).
  
• Add extra options for S.M.A.R.T. in ‘Disks|Management|Disk|Edit’ (FR
  2824730).
  
• Add RAID1 balance algorithm ‘prefer’ (FR 2833989).
  
• Add latvian language support. Thanks to the translators.
  
• Update Quixplorer russian translation (BR 2841900). Thanks to Alexey
  Sannikov.
  
• Add ‘Max. login attempts’ to ‘Services|FTP’ (FR 2844193).
  
• Get AFP dbd cnid scheme working (BR 2844900).
  
• Set ‘dir-listing.encoding = “utf-8″‘ for the webserver directory listing
  (FR 2872624).
  
• Display volume serial number in ‘Disks|Management’ (FR 2881880).
  
• Now it is possible to configure iSCSI-Targets for export: removable media
  (static & dynamic size), pass-through devices. Thanks to Vasily Chalykh.
  

Bug fixes:

• Prohibit user ‘transmission’ to login via FTP.
  
• ZPool disk space usage isn’t displayed correctly (BR 2810584).
  
• Improved Unison WebGUI to be able to configure ZFS shares as working
  directory (BR 2795084).
  
• Synchronizing ZFS configuration fails (BR 2814324).
  
• Restrict bittorrent administrative WebGUI port to [1024,65535] (BR
  2835342).
  
• The ‘Unmount disk/partition’ checkbox on ‘Disks|Mount Point|Fsck’ was ignored (BR 2860297).
  

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.
  
• Downgrading to 0.69 via WebGUI fails because of broken pipe error.
  
• FreeBSD’s ext2fs module, as of release 7.1, cannot mount ext2 file systems
  with 256-byte large inodes, only 128 byte sized. Unfortunately, 256
  byte is
  the default size with many recent Linux distributions.
  

admin FreeNAS Releases

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

admin Tips

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

admin Tips

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

admin Tips

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

admin Tips

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

admin Tips

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

admin Tips

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

admin Tips

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:

• My FreeNAS Project Part 1: Introduction
• My FreeNAS Project Part 2: The Parts
• My FreeNAS Project Part 3: The Build
• My FreeNAS Project Part 4: The Install
• My FreeNAS Project Part 5: The Config
• My FreeNAS Project Part 6: Final Build and Overview

admin Tips