FreeNAS - The Open Source Network Attached Storage OS

Part 2 of Build Your Own Open Source NAS Device Using FreeNAS Published

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:42:16 -0600

As I mentioned here, Train Signal Training has published a guide about building a NAS device using FreeNAS.

Part 2 has now been published and covers configuring the disks and sharing them on the network.

You can read part 2 here.

Build Your Own Open Source NAS Device Using FreeNAS

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:51:15 -0600

Train Signal Training has published the first part of a guide about building a NAS device using FreeNAS. This first part covers booting and accessing the web interface. Part 2 promises to cover setting up the disks and testing the device.

You can read the guide Build Your Own Open Source NAS Device Using FreeNAS

Guide to expanding your RAID set size with FreeNAS

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 01:32:35 -0600

One of the popular questions that are asked about FreeNAS is can the RAID size be increased later on when new disks are added. It is possible if you are prepared to use the command line and get your hands dirty.

Mike Oliver has posted a great post about growing RAID arrays. He is using FreeNAS 0.7 and he gives full details on how to do it!

You can read more here: FreeNAS 0.7.3953, RAID 1, growfs... oh my!

ARTiGO A2000 DIY NAS from VIA

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 01:22:31 -0600

VIA have launched the ARTiGO A2000 Barebones Storage Server. IT is a fully featured 1.5GHz low power consumption PC motherboard inside a dual 3.5in SATA drive bay chassis. It supports FreeNAS (as well as other operating systems) out of the box.

The A2000 is powered by a custom Nano-ITX board with 1.5GHz C7-D Processor and VX800 Chipset supporting up to 2GB of DDR2 SODIMM memory. Two 3.5in SATA drive bays support 3TB of storage with 1.5TB drives installed. A bootable type 1 Compact Flash adapter is located underneath the board, perfect for locating a NAS OS. The whole unit measures just 135 x 120 x 260 mm (5.3 x 4.7 x 10.2in) and is supplied with an external AC power adapter.

You can read more here.

iXsystems' Quad-Core Storage Appliance using FreeNAS

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:35:51 -0600

iXsystems, the corporate sponsor of the PC-BSD Project, have announced the FreeNAS Titan a FreeNAS-based Network-Attached Storage server.

The features of the FreeNAS Titan Storage Appliance Solution are as follows:

FreeNAS Management Software
2U 12-Bay SATA Hot-Swap Chassis
Intel Quad-Core CPU
Dual Gigabit Ethernet Interfaces (supports up to 10)
2GB DDR2-667 Memory (expandable to 8 GB)
High Performance Raid Controller with Battery Back-Up Unit
Supports up to 12TB Capacity
Single or Redundant 800 Watt High-Efficiency Power Supplies
Compact Flash based FreeNAS Image

You can find more details here.

Mercian Labels abandon Buffalo Terastation Live and switches to FreeNAS

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:51:28 -0600

Mercian Labels, a label printing company in the UK bought a Buffalo Terastation Live 1TB at the end of September and after the initial configuration everything seemed to work well.

In their blog they reported that "It configures easily using the web interface, and just works... I'd recommend it on the basis of what we have seen so far as a good value NAS for SMEs."

However after only 2 weeks one of the hard drives failed and they had to get a replacement... Now they have abandoned the Terastation all together.

Again from their blog, "I found the Terastation to be slow, with unreliable hardware, reasonably difficult to configure network shares and ftp access on, and the lack of ssh control ability meant we couldn't do much with it if it went wrong. For this reason, I can not recommend it for business use."

The blog concludes with "The FREENAS box however seems to have gone in a lot better."

Mercian Labels decided in 2007 to migrate all of their software to open source solutions. They have already succesfully migrated their email (using Zimbra), Web server (migrated to Ubuntu dedicated server) and CRM. They are aiming to use Ubuntu on the desktop.

You can read more in their blog entries:

Open source migration update

Replacing our TERASTATION NAS with a FREENAS box

FreeNAS 0.69RC2 released

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:47:36 -0600

FreeNAS 0.69RC1, code name Kralizec has been released. It can be downloaded from here.

This will be hopefully the last release candidate before the stable release can be published.

Majors changes:
- Upgrade to FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE.
- Add system firewall. Please note this is only for the local system and not for the network (this will also never be implemented, use pfSense or m0n0wall instead).
- Upgrade transmission to 1.40.
- Introduce new WebGUI look (fixes some MSIE rendering bugs also).

Minors changes:
- Add UPS service WebGUI option to define shutdown mode.
- Add option 'Use sendfile' to 'Services|CIFS/SMB|Settings'. Some users report problems with this option (which is enabled by default), so now it is really easy to disable it.
- Check if configured port is already used (e.g. UPnP, Bittorrent, DAAP, ...).

Bug fixes:
- Fix web server security hole (file .htpasswd was downloadable) (BR 2255936).
- Re-enable fuppes transcoding support (BR 2276571).
- Remove garbage at end of downloaded log files (BR 2309257).

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.

Known bugs:
- If DHCP for IPv4 is used, the IPv6 statically configured DNS server will be overriden by the IPv4 DNS server.

SketchUp Ada A NAS (Network Attached Storage)

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:40:46 -0600

Nexxo has a great design for a FreeNAS box.

Called Ada (after Ada Lovelace), it is a NAS consisting of FreeNAS running on an Epia C7 mini-ITX platform, driving two 1Tb drives in a RAID 1 configuration. Simple, quiet, cheap, low in power consumption.

There is a nice 3D concept picture which is worth looking at here.

Pro DIYer looks at FreeNAS

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:34:03 -0600

The Pro DIYer "Inside the mind of an engineering student" blog has a post about NAS and FreeNAS.

"The software setup for my NAS was pretty easy but it did take a little while for me to get it going. I used FreeNAS which is a free open source NAS OS which a huge range of different features..."

You can read more here.

FreeNAS and ESX 3.5 Performance

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:59:51 -0600

Eric Kiel has written an interesting post on his blog about getting the best performance from VMware ESX 3.5 server and FreeNAS.

The secret is in using a "faithful virtual implementation of a physical network adapter" which in this case means the Intel E1000 NIC.

You can read more at FreeNAS and ESX 3.5 Performance