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
Warner Losh from iXsystems has kindly send me a disk image of the first FreeNAS 0.8 developer build. The guys at iXsystems have done a great job so far and the core of FreeNAS has been successfully ported to FreeBSD 8.1.
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.
iXsystems has uploaded a snapshot of their new FreeBSD 8.1-based FreeNAS.
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
‘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
PC Pro has a short article titled Don’t forget FreeNAS, in it Steve Cassidy explains why FreeNAS is worth investigating.
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).
‘yoyojazz’ has posted a review of the Learning FreeNAS book on Amazon.com.
In it he says:
I picked up Learning FreeNAS book about 6 days ago and I could not put it down! The book wastes no time and gets to the point fast!
Gary has an amazing ability to explain things clearly. I had no trouble being able to do some of the most complex configurations after the first read! (By day 3 I had a confidence in FreeNAS and a strong understanding of the technology that would oftaken me weeks to acquire!)
What is evidently clear from the book is that Gary has a passion for FreeNAS technology and he explains it so well. The book is well divided so information was placed in the perfect sections and with his website all the latest developments within FreeNAS are reported.
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.
Thanks to some great technology provided by WPtap.com you can now read LearnFreeNAS.com easily from your mobile phone. Just point the browser on your mobile device (including iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Windows Mobile and Android devices) to LearnFreeNAS.com and an easy to read mobile version of web site will appear!
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