FreeNAS – TrueNAS – Welcome to the Open Storage Era

TrueNAS vs FreeNAS (and why you should upgrade!)

Will Soteros — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 18:35:54 +0000

FreeNAS reigned as the world’s most popular Open Source Software-Defined Storage (SDS) from 2009 to 2020. During Q3 2020, TrueNAS 12.0 was introduced, which started the transition of FreeNAS merging into TrueNAS. Within a year, TrueNAS is now the new #1 Open Source SDS with more than twice the number of systems deployed. The final phase of the transition will be to merge the FreeNAS.org site into the TrueNAS.com site. While we kick off that process this week, we wanted to take the opportunity for one last comparative review of FreeNAS and TrueNAS, and discuss why now is the time to upgrade if you haven’t already.

FreeNAS is now known as TrueNAS CORE

TrueNAS CORE inherited the same free and Open Source attributes of FreeNAS and has continued to build on that foundation with new features. Below is a high-level overview of the capabilities of TrueNAS CORE.

Looking beyond features, both the quality and functionality of TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U5 are also now substantially superior to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 (which was the last official FreeNAS release). FreeNAS has been transitioned to “legacy” status and is no longer recommended for any new deployments.

Given this progress, we will be officially consolidating the freenas.org website into truenas.com to give users and contributors a single hub of information for all things TrueNAS. With this, we are also recommending that all users deploy TrueNAS for both security and support going forward.

Why Are FreeNAS and TrueNAS so Popular?

TrueNAS and FreeNAS share a common architecture and more than 90% of the same software. They provide the software for an extremely flexible unified storage system (i.e. – NAS, SAN, and/or object) on a proven and robust ZettaByte File System (ZFS) base. For more detail, please refer to the TrueNAS documentation.

Key capabilities of both FreeNAS and TrueNAS include:

File services: NFSv3/v4 and Windows SMB provide the foundation. Windows compatibility (Active Directory, Shadow copies) is excellent, and ZFS enhances it with superior performance and features.

Block services: iSCSI can be used for virtualization and backup, or other applications that need block storage. VMware compatibility (VAAI, snapshots, clones) simplifies deployments. Extreme reliability (RAID-Z1/Z2/Z3, scrubbing, and replication) ensures that block storage data is very safe. Fiber Channel is also available with TrueNAS Enterprise.

Object storage services: S3 API source and target are required for many modern applications. Emulate a local S3 service using the compatible Minio API or sync data with AWS S3 and other cloud services for long-term archive.

Application services: jails, plugins, and VMs simplify application deployments and reduce the physical footprints needed. Plex, NextCloud, Asigra, and many other applications can be integrated into the NAS and receive all the benefits of ZFS.

ZFS data management (snapshots, clones, scrubbing, RAID-Z protection, replication) underlies all of these services and allows data to be managed and protected simply and consistently. When hardware failures or operator errors happen, ZFS provides the tools to recover your data and continue operating.

System management coordinates all of the above services with powerful middleware that presents the users with an easy-to-use WebUI and a fully functional REST API for automation. TrueCommand was added to enhance management capabilities and enable the administration of many FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems from a single pane of glass.

Hardware flexibility gives the user the ability to install TrueNAS CORE on the consumer, professional, and enterprise hardware of their choosing. Virtually any x86 storage server can be built with industry-standard NICs, HBAs, and drives of any type. The community helps with validating an enormous range of components, including retired enterprise gear.

What Are the Differences Between FreeNAS and TrueNAS?

With FreeNAS receiving its final release with 11.3-U5, all new feature development is happening on TrueNAS. Beyond that (and apart from the obvious rebranding), TrueNAS also adds many technical enhancements that improve the user experience, both now and going forward. The current list of TrueNAS enhancements includes:

Unified TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise: TrueNAS Enterprise 11.3 and FreeNAS 11.3 were separate software images, each with their own QA process and unique bugs. With TrueNAS 12.0, the model is now a unified image with a license key to enable iXsystems Enterprise platform features like Fibre Channel, High Availability, KMIP, and Enclosure Management. The result has been a more efficient development cycle with fewer bugs and faster problem resolution within TrueNAS. TrueNAS CORE users now benefit from the same QA and testing that TrueNAS Enterprise users get.

Enhanced Software Quality: In addition to faster bug resolution, TrueNAS 12.0 has improved testing and quality. FreeBSD 12.1, SAMBA 4.12, OpenZFS 2.0, and Python 3.9 are all much better than their predecessors. The common software has allowed an increase in the QA test coverage, resulting in fewer critical issues and a generally more reliable experience. TrueNAS 12.0-U5.1 has been the best release so far, and we expect that to continue improving with each future TrueNAS release.

Improved OpenZFS Performance: TrueNAS moved from the FreeBSD version of OpenZFS to the multi-OS version of OpenZFS 2.0. This included feature parity with the Linux version and also included a wide range of performance enhancements and features. Fusion Pools, using special VDEVs, persistent L2ARC, and other general performance improvements have been the result of this transition. With this update, we’ve often measured 30% performance improvements on larger TrueNAS systems like the TrueNAS M60. TrueNAS has also made further virtualization improvements with version 12.0.

Better Security: The removal of security threats is a never-ending challenge. Many vulnerabilities have been removed by FreeBSD 12.1 and SAMBA 4.12. In addition, TrueNAS has been improved both in terms of its software quality, features, and documentation of issues. Security.truenas.com maintains the list of security vulnerabilities. TrueNAS 12.0 added ZFS dataset-level encryption, KMIP (Enterprise), and OpenVPN capabilities as well. Any vulnerabilities found will be patched in TrueNAS.

Modern Hardware: The update to FreeBSD 12.1 and the subsequent fixes improve support for modern hardware such as AMD’s high core-count processors and NVMe SSDs. Performance and system reliability have been improved with TrueNAS.

Cloud Management: The latest TrueCommand 2.0 uses a vastly improved TrueNAS stats collection system that offers per-second statistics and better CPU/network efficiency. TrueCommand users should update to TrueNAS 12.0-U4 or later to gain access to these improvements. TrueCommand Cloud enables multi-site management via SaaS.

Path to Scale-Out: TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 are the foundations for the Linux-based TrueNAS SCALE which provides Open Source Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and scale-out storage. There is a path for migrating TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise systems to TrueNAS SCALE for users that want these features. FreeNAS users will first need to migrate to TrueNAS CORE before making the jump to SCALE.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

The short-term and long-term benefits of TrueNAS are clear. We recommend FreeNAS users plan and execute their updates. The current version is TrueNAS 12.0-U5.1 which is a minor update to TrueNAS 12.0-U5 and includes all the same benefits.

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms – from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High Availability (HA) M-Series. The “FreeNAS Certified” Server line was also replaced by the new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.

For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U5 with a single click to retain roll-back options. While it is an easy web update, we do recommend updating your system’s zpool feature flags only after you are finished validating your performance and functionality.

For those with TrueNAS 11.x HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health and configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.

TrueNAS CORE is the Best-Ever Free NAS

In short, if you’ve been waiting to upgrade from FreeNAS to TrueNAS, now is the time. You lose nothing (heck, we even have a FreeNAS-themed UI skin for us nostalgists), and you’ll gain all the new improvements we’ve made and plan to release into the future, while also keeping your system security up to date.

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 still is and will continue to be the best ever “free NAS” system available. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog.

If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us.

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Cross-Site Disaster Recovery with TrueNAS

iX Team — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 16:09:49 +0000

This is historic content that may contain outdated information. For the newest information on FreeNAS and TrueNAS, please visit TrueNAS.com or read our latest Blogs.

TrueNAS has long supported disaster recovery (DR) scenarios. This blog attempts to address the various types of supported DR scenarios and their related workflows.
Point-in-Time Recovery – ZFS Replication
Of the native ways to replicate data, ZFS replication is the most efficient and reliable method for asynchronously replicating data from one TrueNAS system to another. Replication is based on snapshots of datasets or zvols and synchronizes the snapshots of the first system to the second system. There are numerous advantages to using ZFS replication. One of those is that a snapshot is a point-in-time, read-only copy of the data. This ensures that the contents of the snapshot cannot be altered.

Replicate in a single direction for DR

Replicate bi-directionally for dual-site DR

ZFS replication is commonly used for disaster recovery. Should the first system or site go down, the remote system can be brought back by cloning the snapshot to a new dataset and restoring the share. This recovery does require some work on the side of the admin, but it’s incredibly quick and ensures that whatever was transferred is retained. Snapshots and replications can be scheduled to run every few minutes.

Another benefit of ZFS replication is the capability for the snapshots and referenced data to be stored on systems and pools of different specs or pool configuration. All-flash, high-performance pools can be backed up to lower performance pools with traditional drives and different RAID configurations. Smaller systems can also be backed up to larger central repositories. Companies such as FirstLink and others use this to help clone edge devices like the TrueNAS Mini systems to a central core TrueNAS in their data center. ZFS replication on TrueNAS ensures data protection regardless of system complexity, size, or location.
File-based Recovery – Rsync
Rsync is a file-level migration that’s the same as rsync in the Linux/FreeBSD command line. It’s handy for semi-live sync of data if you need just the same files between sites each shared over a local share.

Rsync is useful for file transfer, but it’s not recommended if files are being modified. For example, if an rsync task starts while 100 GB is being written and the data is changed before the file is written, it will cause issues with versioning and data integrity. Rsync should never be used to copy active VM data stores, block-level data (iSCSI or fibre channel shares), or other data that could constantly be in use. Rsync is slower than ZFS replication, particularly for large datasets, so it’s recommended for convenience over data integrity. It can be used between TrueNAS and many other systems.
More information about setting rsync tasks in TrueNAS is located here.
File Recovery To or From the Cloud – Cloud Sync
TrueNAS can copy, pull, and sync data to a variety of cloud-based data storage systems, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Google Drive, Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Box, and more. By integrating rclone sync for file transfers, this feature can copy files on TrueNAS into a cloud repository of a user’s choosing.

For larger datasets, TrueNAS systems are more cost-effective long-term than cloud offerings, including Amazon AWS. For this reason, using TrueNAS as a backup target for protecting cloud-based data, e.g., from AWS, Dropbox, or Google Drive, is ideal because data stored in TrueNAS will get scrubbed, checked, and retained with an unlimited number of snapshots available.

Automatic Site-to-Site failover – DNS, Load-Balancing, Proprietary Tools
Automatic failover between sites is beyond the scope of TrueNAS systems alone. TrueNAS is a storage system, and while it handles data replication well in a variety of ways, automatic failover to a remote site requires knowledge of the services themselves. For environments with web or video streaming services, DNS round-robin with failover might be feasible. Several web servers, like NGINX, also feature load-balancing services which could help mitigate service overload or downtime. TrueNAS systems provide a stable backend in this topology, with the option of also running ZFS replication for additional safety. Contact iXsystems if you need assistance with designing a storage system for your business.

TrueNAS is a storage platform with powerful ways to ensure data integrity and consistency between local and remote sites. ZFS replication is the fastest and best way to ensure the data transferred is intact. Rsync is useful for file sync but cannot be used for live data or block-level data that could change during transfer. Cloud sync supports user workloads that archive to or from mainstream cloud providers. Beyond these tools, TrueNAS works with other systems, such as Asigra Backup and iconik smart media management, to provide an ultra-scalable backend with robust performance and a strong emphasis on data protection. The tools that TrueNAS provides combined with the flexibility to work with nearly any IT environment make it a robust system for cross-site and DR workloads.

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WD Red Plus drives are “Coke Classic”

iX Team — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 17:02:36 +0000

Previously, the community and iXsystems found incompatibilities between ZFS and the new WD Red SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) based drives (2 to 6TB), as we documented in a previous announcement. In response, Western Digital has just made a major product announcement via a June 23rd blog about its plans to introduce the WD Red Plus product line and reposition its previous WD Red product line.

What’s Old is New Again

Remember Coke Classic?
The tried-and-true CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) technology, that provides the solid performance and reliability on which the WD Red line was built, is back and here to stay in all capacities from 1 to 14TB! It just has a new name now to make it easy to identify as “not SMR”: WD Red Plus. No more checking model numbers and product codes when purchasing. When you buy a WD Red Plus drive, it will be guaranteed CMR technology in all capacities and function harmoniously with your ZFS NAS.

What’s New is Now Old

And, what of the 2, 3, 4, and 6TB SMR drives that were slipped into the WD Red product line and caused problems with NAS systems? Like “New Coke”, the market has spoken: most prefer the original flavor.
These SMR drives are now going to inherit the “WD Red” brand. We would have preferred “WD Red-SMR” just to be as crystal clear to customers as possible, but this works. iXsystems and some other major NAS vendors have taken these off their qualified hard drive lists, so these should be avoided or used only in NAS systems with very light workloads (and long periods of inactivity), or where data isn’t important, especially if using ZFS.

Confused yet?

You’re not alone. This is a complex judo marketing move that WD is making. While there will be confusion in the short term, the resulting product line is more clearly differentiated and better for it. The WD Red Plus will be a solid drive family for the FreeNAS Minis and will span all sizes from 1TB to 14TB each, and there are no expected cost increases from today’s WD Red prices. The new WD Red (SMR) line will come in at a lower price.

Western Digital has maintained the same model numbers for each of the drives and then sorted the drives into their “new” product families.

What about the FreeNAS Minis?

Our Mini systems will be delivered only with the CMR-based WD Red Plus drives. However, some of those drives are currently labeled “WD Red”, but they are not SMR drives. This labeling should be fixed in a few months, but we may have to add a sticker or use a sharpie to add a “plus” to those existing WD RED CMR drives! Or, who knows, maybe these drives will become collectors’ items some day?? Kidding about the sharpie, by the way.

And, the “Red SMR” Drives? Will those ever be compatible?

Can TrueNAS CORE or FreeNAS run on the SMR drives, the “new” WD Red drives? At this stage, both iXsystems and Western Digital cannot recommend running ZFS on these drives. The incompatibility that has been found still exists and under some conditions could result in low performance or even data loss. Western Digital and iXsystems are still investigating whether this risk can be reduced or alleviated. In the meantime, if you have WD Red drives with SMR (again, only 2 through 6TB with “EFAX” in the Product Code) in your NAS and are concerned about your data, contact iXsystems Support if you purchased from us, or WD Support if you bought them elsewhere.

Some upside!

The good news is that the WD Red Plus product line will re-enable the Minis with 2TB and 6TB CMR drives. During this SMR investigation, the Minis have continued to ship with CMR drives in all capacities except 2TB and 6TB, since we had exhausted CMR stock and placed a stop shipment on the SMR drives. We expect to enable the full range of sizes from 2TB to 14TB CMR drives during Q3 2020. This will enable the Mini lineup to support raw capacities from 4TB to over 100TB.
If you need one or more smaller NAS systems for a project, you can get a preconfigured Mini system from Amazon or custom spec your own using the online Mini configurator. Our sales team and partners can also provide a proposal for a fleet of Minis and other large systems like the X-Series and M-Series. All of these systems can run TrueNAS 12.0 and be managed via TrueCommand and its single-pane-of-glass interface.

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New-New TrueNAS Logo Unveiled

iX Team — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 20:58:42 +0000

Most are aware by now that we have decided to unify FreeNAS & TrueNAS into a single software image and brand: TrueNAS Open Storage. With the release of version 12.0, what was previously called FreeNAS will now be TrueNAS CORE. What was formerly TrueNAS will now be TrueNAS Enterprise.
Along with the announcement, we also unveiled a new “shark fin” logo that paid homage to the shark that had been the FreeNAS logomark for just over a decade. We liked it well enough, and user feedback was mostly positive, but some unexpected community feedback gave us second thoughts…

Thank you for removing ‘Free’ from the name

Specifically, there were a number of comments from community members thanking us for removing “Free” from the name, because it removed a stigma held by their peers, colleagues, or bosses that a product with “Free” in the name couldn’t also be of high quality or fit for business use. “I can finally look my boss in the eye when he asks what storage we are using in the lab” is a paraphrase of one such comment. Of course, comments like this were a little tough to hear about a name we held so dearly for so long, but it was awesome feedback to receive because it reinforced one of the major reasons we decided to unify the brands as TrueNAS in the first place.
If you’re reading this, you likely already know that FreeNAS is far more than just a free NAS. You likely already know that it is powerful, enterprise software defined storage. Since many of us use it in homelabs, you know that it automatically gets lumped in with low-end NAS systems and you might take offense when it gets compared to Synology or QNAP systems instead of Netapp or EMC. You know these things already, but it’s clear that not everybody does…yet. And, if you think back, it probably took you a while to get there, and the name “FreeNAS” likely didn’t help the cause. And, if we’re totally honest with ourselves, the shark didn’t make things any easier.
We want all users, old and new, to have full confidence in deploying TrueNAS CORE. It’s important to us that you can look your boss in the eye when he asks what storage you’re using in the lab. And, when you prove how successful that’s been, we want you to have that same confidence when you recommend TrueNAS Enterprise once it’s time to replace those overpriced Netapp or EMC arrays. And, we want to make sure everything we do down to our logo helps you make that case.

We’ve Gone Full Corporate

We say that in jest, of course. iXsystems was founded on the principles of “being different”. We embraced open source long before it was ever cool or mainstream. We develop in the open. We try to be as transparent as we can in all we do. We built an enterprise storage product and made it free when everyone else thought we were crazy, and now FreeNAS is the world’s most popular storage software. We have fought hard to keep this identity of being different from the rest of the industry.
Of course, behind that philosophy also exists a very serious company focused on building innovating, high-quality products, world class customer support, and outstanding customer experience. We understand that our desire to be different can’t ever get in the way of you getting your job done, and this extends to the impression our brand makes.

The Abstract Shark Fin?

So, we solicited the help of an outside design agency and started looking at other logomark designs entirely but ultimately came back to playing around with the shark fin: refining it, tweaking it, making it abstract. After all, we couldn’t lose that soul of the product entirely, right? So, during that part of the process, we ended up creating two sharks that were vertical mirror images of one another that once put together sort of formed a cool looking box (some said “shark tank” or “aquarium”). After initially chuckling at the similarity to the box references in the show “Silicon Valley”, we thought, “Ok, this does look pretty cool….box….storage, container…what if the box was open to represent the concept of “open storage”? That looks cool! What if we stacked the boxes for the TrueNAS Enterprise logo to represent the extra protection that comes with high-availability? And, what if we put four boxes side by side to represent TrueNAS SCALE? Wait…..what’s TrueNAS SCALE you ask? Oh, just a little thing we’re working on in the background 🙂 More to come on that soon!
Ok, ok, enough blabbing. Without further ado, we’re proud to unveil the monochrome version of the new TrueNAS CORE, TrueNAS Enterprise, and TrueNAS SCALE logos, we’ve lovingly dubbed “the shark tanks” or “shark boxes”.

Color is in the works, but we couldn’t wait any longer to show you since it’s going to start appearing in TrueNAS 12 nightlies as soon as this week!
We’re excited with what’s coming in TrueNAS 12, not least of which is this sharp new logo, that will hopefully send you marching into your boss’s office first thing tomorrow morning, look her dead in the eye and say, “we’re replacing all of our storage with TrueNAS.”
If you ever need our assistance in doing that, simply fill out a brief questionnaire or email us at info@iXsystems.com. We are standing by to help.

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Setting Up Windows iSCSI Block Shares on TrueNAS & FreeNAS

iX Team — Thu, 21 May 2020 20:03:58 +0000

In this tutorial, we’ll cover the basics of iSCSI, configuring iSCSI on FreeNAS (soon to be TrueNAS CORE), and setting up access from a Windows machine. A ZVOL, which is another type of dataset, is required to connect with iSCSI for block storage. One benefit of using iSCSI on TrueNAS is that Windows systems backed up with iSCSI get the ZFS rollback feature to quickly recover from CryptoLocker, ransomware, and data loss. This tutorial assumes that you have configured a ZFS Pool.

What is iSCSI?

iSCSI is a protocol standard that allows the consolidation of storage data. iSCSI is implemented in TrueNAS to act like a Storage Area Network (SAN) over an existing Ethernet network.

Specifically, iSCSI exports disk devices or “targets” over an Ethernet network that iSCSI clients or “initiators” can attach to and mount.
iSCSI can be used over an existing Ethernet network, although dedicated networks can be built for iSCSI traffic for higher performance.
Interestingly, SAN environments built on Fibre Channel can be expanded using iSCSI. iSCSI was designed with Ethernet in mind, but it works just as well with fiber. So it can be a cost-effective alternative add-on for existing fiber setups.
iSCSI also provides an advantage in an environment that uses Windows shell programs; these programs tend to filter “Network Location” but iSCSI mounts are not filtered.

Basic Information

Before configuring iSCSI on your TrueNAS system, you should be familiar with the following iSCSI terminology:

Initiator is a client that has authorized access to the storage data on the TrueNAS system. The client requires initiator software in order to initiate the connection to the iSCSI share–TARGET. ** Note that not all connections are authorized.
Target is a storage resource on the TrueNAS system that is shared with an initiator. Every target has a unique name known as an iSCSI Qualified Name (IQN).
Extent is the storage unit to be shared. It can be in the form of a file or a device EXTENT, that is provided as an iSCSI target.
CHAP, or Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol, is an authentication method that uses a shared secret and three-way authentication to determine if a system is authorized to access the storage device and to periodically confirm that the session has not been hijacked by another system. In iSCSI, the initiator (client) performs the CHAP authentication.
Mutual CHAP is a superset of CHAP in that both ends of the communication authenticate to each other.

Creating a ZVOL

The first step to configure iSCSI is to create a ZVOL for our device extent. A ZVOL is a type of dataset available in our ZFS pool. The iSCSI Wizard also allows you to create a ZVOL or dataset, which we will talk about later.
Go to “Storage” → “Pools”, open the Pool options by clicking the three dots on the right of your pool, then “Add Zvol”.

Enter a name and size for the ZVOL then click “SAVE“.

Configuring iSCSI

Now we will go ahead and configure iSCSI on a TrueNAS system.
On your TrueNAS machine, from the left side menu, select “Sharing” → Block Shares (iSCSI) → “Target Global Configuration”.

Review the target global configuration parameters.
You do not have to modify this, but remember that this is the base name that your targets will be associated with.

The iSCSI Wizard will help you easily create the block share with its step by step configuration. Let’s go ahead and click “Wizard”.
Give your iSCSI share a name.

For “Type”, select this based on your dataset type. If you have configured a normal dataset from your pool, choose “File”.
Otherwise, choose “Device” and you will be able to choose the ZVOL you created earlier, or create a ZVOL if you didn’t already. Click “Create New”, then browse to the path of your Pool.
Set the device size limit. We recommend not using more than 80% of available capacity. * More information can be found in the documentation.
Under “What are you using this for”, choose the entry that matches your use case. Since we’ll be connecting with Windows Server, we’ll choose “Modern OS”.

Click “NEXT” to move into the Portal section. Since you don’t have a Portal created yet, the default option is “Create New”.
If you want to enable security authentication, choose “CHAP” for “Discovery Auth Method” and fill out the Group ID, User, and Secret fields. The Secret must be between 12 and 16 characters.
You can leave the IP as “0.0.0.0” which is the wildcard address of the interface.

Click “NEXT” to move on to the Initiator section. You can leave the Initiators and Authorized Networks field blank, unless you want to limit access to specific initiator clients or IPs on your network.

Click “NEXT” and review your Wizard settings, then “SUBMIT”. The wizard should automatically associate your Extent with your Target.

Enable iSCSI Service

Click “Services” from the left menu and make sure iSCSI service is “Running”. Check the “Start Automatically” box to start iSCSI after every reboot.

Access Data on iSCSI share from Windows

In order to access the data on the iSCSI share, clients will need to use iSCSI Initiator software. An iSCSI Initiator client is pre-installed in Windows 7 to 10 Pro, and Windows Server 2008, 2012, and 2019. Please note that Windows Professional Edition is typically required.

Click the Start Menu and search for the “iSCSI Initiator”.
Go to the “Configuration” tab and click “Change” to change the iSCSI initiator to the same name you created earlier, which was “iscsishare”.

Go to the “Discovery Tab”, proceed to “Discover Portal”, and type in your FreeNAS or TrueNAS IP address. Leave the port at 3260.

If you set up CHAP earlier, click “Advanced Settings”, and then check “Enable CHAP log on”, then enter your initiator name and the same target/secret you set earlier on TrueNAS; otherwise, move to the next step.
Go back to “Targets” and click “Connect” on your iSCSI target, then click “OK”.

Search for and open the “Disk Management” app in your Control Panel.
A new window will ask you to format the drive. Your drive should currently be ”unallocated”. Complete the Wizard to format it and assign it a drive letter and name.

Go to This PC or My Computer and your new iSCSI volume should show up under the list of drives. You should now be able to add, delete, and modify files and folders on your iSCSI drive.

Thank you for reading through this tutorial! Be sure to check out our other tutorial videos on our YouTube channel, and don’t forget to comment, like, and subscribe. Don’t forget to click the “notification bell” to receive alerts on new videos.

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Open Source Infrastructure is Recession-Proof

iX Team — Mon, 11 May 2020 20:15:07 +0000

We are all living through a difficult time with the COVID-19 pandemic. At a personal level, our hearts go out to all those impacted. Let’s all do our bit to reduce spreading, save lives, and help those in distress. There will be better days ahead, but in the short term, the experts are predicting there could be a period of economic recession.

The Shelter-in-Place restrictions are hugely impactful on many businesses and employees. Many of our clients are facing severe downturns and will have to fight through it. Retaining employees, customer relationships, and supply chains is not a simple process. As with many recessions, budgets will be cut, and there will be huge pressure to do more with less. Thankfully, one of the major benefits of Open Source infrastructure is that it provides these impacted organizations with an avenue to keep budgets under control.

Some of our clients are facing a different problem, instead seeing a sudden increase in demand as their products or services are critical to the response to COVID-19 or the basic functioning of our cities and countries. These businesses need to be able to scale cost-effectively knowing that the demand will drop when COVID-19 is defeated. Open Source also enables faster and more economic scaling as a lifeline for these organizations.

In both cases, Open Source enables businesses to be agile and control costs, whether they are growing or shrinking through an economic downturn. It is our mission at iXsystems to empower our customers to face either challenge through Open Source infrastructure and economics.

Open Source Economics

Open Source software has been part of our history for decades and has progressively been embedded within the industry over time. Proprietary Unix has given way to Linux and FreeBSD. Amazon, the company notorious for stretching a dime into a dollar, could never have built its cloud empire without Open Source tools and software. Apple helped turn its business around a decade and a half ago by leveraging Open Source. Even industry pioneers in proprietary and closed software such as Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM have had to come to terms with the fact that they too must embrace Open Source or eventually go the way of the dinosaur. The advantage that Open Source users have is that they get to choose how much software and support they wish to pay for. We call this “Open Source Economics.” If the industry giants mentioned above can use it to their advantage, so can you. And, iXsystems is here to help you access it.

When building infrastructure and applications, Open Source solutions shift negotiating power and let users decide whether the “free” version is acceptable (e.g., FreeNAS) or whether it’s worth having professional support (e.g., TrueNAS) to reduce the number and duration of issues.
If a supplier or partner underperforms, Open Source makes it easier to shift business to another partner that can use similar software. It avoids vendor lockup with exorbitant software and support contracts. Have you seen the standard licensing prices for the largest storage, virtualization, and database vendors?
Open Source puts the power back into the hands of the user/buyer/customer, where it belongs.

Choose your own Destiny

Many businesses may not be as immersed in Open Source software as iXsystems, but every business can benefit from an Open Source strategy. Open Source strategies let you choose your destiny and where you should invest your limited budgets.

In a recession, there are huge savings to be made from shifting projects toward an Open Source model. Typically, you can get all the features you need and at a fraction of the total price of proprietary software from enterprise vendors. In the future, you’ll be able to scale more cost-effectively and control your own destiny.

iXsystems is an Open Source partner for tough times

We have built our business model on providing Open Source software with professionally supported solutions using industry-standard hardware. We also use and contribute to Open Source software from the FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and SAMBA communities. This business model has successfully allowed us to not only survive but grow through the last recession and will help carry us through this next recession while still making great technical progress with our products. We are already seeing increases in FreeNAS downloads and inquiries since the pandemic began, which we take as a sign that many organizations are already leveraging the power of Open Source economics as a means to help them through this difficult period. At iXsystems, we couldn’t be more proud to be able to offer a lifeline to these organizations.
If your budgets are limited and you need to invest more in your own applications or staff, we can surely identify with that challenge. Our goal is to give you a set of choices from “free” to Enterprise with Gold Support. Start with “free” today, and if budgets improve, we can help you upgrade your infrastructure and support as required.

Whether it’s server or storage infrastructure, iXsystems will give you the benefits of Open Source economics. You get to choose whether to use FreeNAS or TrueNAS. Soon, we’ll make it even easier with TrueNAS CORE or TrueNAS Enterprise.
To address the immediate needs of our customers during this global crisis, we hand-selected and pre-configured two high-availability TrueNAS systems at special discounts for this quarter: 11TB of All-Flash TrueNAS for under $10K, and 1PB of powerful hybrid storage for under $70K. If you’d like access to special deals like this in the future, simply sign up for our newsletter.
Wishing you all the best during this time. If we can help you keep your business ticking through this recession, please contact us.

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Understanding How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe

iX Team — Mon, 11 May 2020 16:20:59 +0000

Veteran technology writer Jim Salter wrote an excellent guide on the ZFS file system’s features and performance that we absolutely had to share. There’s plenty of information in the article for ZFS newbies and advanced users alike. Be sure to check out the article over at Ars Technica to learn more about ZFS concepts including pools, vdevs, datasets, snapshots, and replication, just to name a few.

For his testing, Jim Salter used OpenZFS 2.0 software that is in TrueNAS 12.0. One of the more interesting data points in the article was the major performance advantage of ZFS replication over standard rsync (which can also be used between ZFS and other file systems). ZFS replication (which is labeled “syncoid” – Open Source software that sets up ZFS replications) is more than 1,000 times faster at finding and sending the deltas between files.

TrueNAS systems are built on the legendary stability of FreeNAS and the OpenZFS (ZFS) file system, leveraging the underlying ZFS technology to easily recover from ransomware and other active data threats. For more information, reach out to an iXsystems Solution Architect and get your completely free and no-pressure quote on the complete line of TrueNAS storage systems.

For more information on ZFS (or if you just need some pointers for your next FreeNAS or TrueNAS CORE build), check out these additional resources and let us know what articles or how-to videos you’d like to see next in the comments below.

ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance >> Read the Article (Credit Jim Salter for Ars Technica)
Introduction to ZFS >> Read the Article
ZFS Drive Size and Cost Comparison Spreadsheet >> Read the Article
iXsystems, FreeNAS, TrueNAS, and OpenZFS Videos >> Visit the Channel

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You Can Influence the TrueNAS CORE Roadmap!

iX Team — Mon, 04 May 2020 22:04:58 +0000

Dear FreeNAS (and soon to be TrueNAS) Community,

We are making some changes to the FreeNAS and TrueNAS bug tracker that’ll give you yet another way to help contribute and democratize enterprise storage!

As many of you know, we’ve historically had three ticket types available in our tracker: Bugs, Features, and Improvements, which are all fairly self-explanatory. After some discussion internally, we’ve decided to implement a new type of ticket, a “Suggestion”. These will be replacing Feature and Improvement requests for the TrueNAS Community, simplifying things down to two options: Bugs and Suggestions. This change also introduces a slightly different workflow than before.

One issue we’ve had in the past with Features and Improvements is that just about all the ideas submitted have been “good” ideas. The challenge was determining which ideas were “best” or most desired by the community, which at times made it difficult for engineers to determine which ought to be integrated into our development roadmap.

Just because we think something is a “good” idea, or a community member submits a well-laid out feature request, we didn’t have a great way of determining how many people are interested. This made the process of picking and choosing too arbitrary. To address this, the Suggestion ticket has been created to help us better gauge interest in particular requests by implementing the concept of “voting” into the workflow:

As demonstrated above, we’re going to be looking to the community to help “Vote” on issues to provide an indication to our team what kind of interest there is for any particular idea. Once a Suggestion has reached the vote threshold (10 votes for the time being), we will then put it into a Review state, and then make a determination of if/when it should land on our TrueNAS roadmap.

So, how do you vote for a Suggestion? Easy! Simply login to our ticket system, find your issue, and click the “Vote for this issue” link on the top right of each ticket. If you can’t find a Suggestion that addresses your issue, create a Suggestion and let us know why it’s important to you.

The rest is up to you! To help create interest or garner more support for your own suggestions, you can solicit your Suggestion requests here on the community forums, social media, Reddit, email campaigns to friends and colleagues, etc.

Democratizing storage requires collaboration, and we’re expecting that this new process will allow us to be more responsive to the needs and wants of our community and prioritize changes to the product accordingly.
Thanks for reading, and as always, feedback is welcome!

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TrueNAS CORE is the new FreeNAS

iX Team — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:39:44 +0000

TrueNAS CORE is the New FreeNAS

We have previously announced the merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image and new naming convention. FreeNAS is becoming TrueNAS CORE. TrueNAS is becoming TrueNAS Enterprise. We’ve appreciated all of the positive feedback tremendously but noticed there were a few common questions from some of our more skeptical community members or ones that haven’t yet worked closely with iXsystems:
Will TrueNAS CORE still be open source and free?
The answer is 100% yes.
Will TrueNAS CORE have fewer features than FreeNAS?
The answer is 100% no. In fact, TrueNAS CORE will have MORE features than FreeNAS does today.
Will any “free” features now only be made available in TrueNAS Enterprise?
Nope. We have no intention of removing features from TrueNAS CORE. Hopefully, we’ve eased your minds. 🙂

Before we dive in and illustrate further the points above by comparing the features of FreeNAS, TrueNAS CORE, and TrueNAS Enterprise, let’s first do a quick recap of the benefits the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Unification plan delivers for all users and contributors:

Rapid Development: Unified images accelerate software development and releases (for example, 12.0 is a major release that would normally have taken 9-12 months to release, and with these new efficiencies, we are bringing that closer to six months)
Improved Quality: Reduced development redundancy and unified QA increases software quality and allows us to streamline testing
Earlier Hardware Enablement: Staying in-sync with upstream OS versions will be easier, allowing earlier access to newer hardware drivers. For instance, 12.0 brings improved support for AMD EPYC / Ryzen platforms and enhanced NUMA support for more efficient CPU core handling.
Simplified Documentation: Unified documentation eliminates redundancy such as separate user guides
Reduced Redundancy: Unified web content and videos refer to one software family without the need for duplication
Flexibility: Unified images enable simpler transitions or upgrades between editions
Resource efficiency: Frees up developers to work on new features and related products
OpenZFS 2.0: The planning for the “unified” 12.0 release began over a year ago and included the major investment in the development and integration of what will soon be released as “OpenZFS 2.0”. This effort is fast-forwarding delivery of advances like dataset encryption, major performance improvements, and compatibility with Linux ZFS pools.

In a nutshell: huge efficiency gains equal higher quality software, released faster.

TrueNAS CORE Features

FreeNAS 11.3 has a very rich set of features, and TrueNAS CORE adds incrementally and significantly to that list. Again, no features are being harmed in the transition to TrueNAS CORE :-). In fact, “CORE” is an acronym that makes a commitment to our community that all the core functionality that FreeNAS users love will always be included in TrueNAS CORE, the best free NAS software (see what we did there?).

The comprehensive feature list for TrueNAS 12.0 is actually quite enormous. To make it manageable, we’ve created a master feature list below. The features in black were existent in FreeNAS 11.3 and are shared by both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. The features in blue are new features being added with TrueNAS 12.0. The column to the right displays features that are available in TrueNAS Enterprise only. As you can see, no existing FreeNAS features have been moved over to the Enterprise column.

TrueNAS Enterprise has additional features that are needed for deployment in production applications. Many of these features are tied to the ability to support High Availability (HA) systems.
By default, all new TrueNAS 12.0 features are included in both TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise. The feature additions for TrueNAS 12.0 can be summarized as:

Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file systems metadata and dedupe tables. This is one of the core features of OpenZFS 2.0.
Fusion Pools: The special SSD vdevs can also be used for data based on I/O write size. This is configurable on a per dataset basis. Users can accelerate database datasets or special VMs.
SSD Wear Monitoring: Any SSD (Boot, L2ARC, slog or vdev) can be monitored for wear and alerts created.
Dataset Encryption: Specific datasets can be selected or deselected for encryption with a user-provided key. When replicating the dataset to another TrueNAS, the key does not have to be provided and so the data can be transmitted and stored in the original encrypted state.
Asynchronous ZFS Trim: Trim commands free up space, particularly within SSDs. By making these Trim commands asynchronous, they scale and perform better. This is particularly useful for deduplication of flash storage and can significantly reduce costs.
Faster ZFS Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times.
ZFS Linux Compatibility: Linux and FreeBSD are peer operating systems for OpenZFS 2.0. Compressed, deduplicated, and encrypted data can be efficiently replicated from a Linux host to a TrueNAS system for backup and archive. It is also possible to import a pool (drive set) from Linux to TrueNAS.
Accelerated ZFS: Several performance improvements have been made to reduce both drive IOPS and the CPU cycles required. More features and higher performance together is a big win for ZFS users :-).
OpenVPN Client and Server: VPNs provide security for remotely accessing storage services, such as SMB or NFS, across the Internet. This feature enables the OpenVPN Client or Server to be included in the NAS for simpler administration and lower costs. The other end of the VPN connection can be any OpenVPN client, such as another NAS, Firewall Device, or Personal Desktop/Laptop.
Two Factor Authentication: For increased security, two factor authentication is highly desirable. TrueNAS ensures that a compromised root password cannot be used by itself to gain access to the administrator interface.
API Keys: Access to the REST / WebSockets API can now be done by API key. Keys can be created and revoked directly via the WebUI for additional security.
KMIP Support: Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) is an enterprise approach to securing systems and data through a centralized key management system. This feature will be available in TrueNAS Enterprise to secure drives or datasets.
TrueCommand Dataset Management: TrueCommand is joined at the hip with TrueNAS and will provide some exciting features, including snapshotting, replicating, and migrating datasets between systems.
There should be something for everybody in this list. We hope you’re as excited by the increase in productivity as our devs are!

Onward to TrueNAS CORE!

TrueNAS 12.0 will go through the same NIGHTLY, ALPHA (Internal), BETA, RC1, RELEASE, UPDATE states that FreeNAS has gone through. There will be no changes to the software update process or the information available. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the community forums for this unification process and community feedback.
The TrueNAS CORE 12.0 nightly builds have reached a stage where they are largely “feature complete”. Some UI polish and a lot of testing is needed to get to RELEASE deployment quality. We appreciate developers and testers who work with these early images. Bugs that are caught and reported early are going to have less impact on the final schedule.

**Still the Best Free NAS**

Still open, still free, just with more features and a new brand. Nothing much will change in the UI dashboard. However, TrueNAS CORE will have the option to use a FreeNAS theme for those as attached to the FreeNAS name as we are!

TrueNAS CORE pictured with the “FreeNAS theme” for diehards and nostalgists alike!
We hope you are sharing in the excitement for TrueNAS CORE & Enterprise as we move closer to our release date. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the forums or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us. In the meantime, download FreeNAS 11.3 today in preparation, and you can later upgrade to TrueNAS CORE 12.0 with a single click!

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Setting Up Users, Permissions, and ACLs on FreeNAS

iX Team — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 16:25:56 +0000

In this tutorial, we’re going to talk about setting up Users, Permissions, and ACLs in FreeNAS. ACL stands for Access Control List, which designates access control entries for users and administrators on FreeNAS systems, specifically for Windows SMB shares. This tutorial assumes you already have your pool configured. If you need help getting started with configuring a pool, we recommend you watch our ZFS Pools Overview video first.

Setting up a FreeNAS group and user account

First, you’ll want to set up a FreeNAS user account and configure specific permissions.

To do this, click “Groups” under the left side menu under “Accounts”.

Click “ADD”
You can leave the Group ID as is, it will be unique to this group.
Give it a name, In this how-to, we’ll call it “officegroup”
Sudo is a root command, leave this unchecked to avoid giving root access to the group on this system.
Click “SAVE” when you’ve finished typing in your settings.

Next, go to “Accounts”, “Users”, then “ADD” a User

Fill in the required fields of Full Name, I’ll name it “Office User”
- Give the user a name. For this tutorial, we’ll name this “officeuser”.
- Give it a unique password
For Primary Group, choose the group you created earlier (officegroup) from the drop-down list. You can also check New Primary Group and it will create a group along with the user with the same name
Then click “SAVE” when you’re finished choosing your settings.

Setting up Permissions (for non-SMB datasets)

Permissions are generally used for non-SMB or Generic datasets, so that means any dataset using AFP or NFS shares. SMB datasets for Windows clients will utilize ACLs which we’ll talk about in the next section.
If you haven’t already, go ahead and create a Generic share-type dataset by clicking the three dots on your pool and then choosing “Add Dataset”. Name your dataset and click “SAVE”.

From the Pools window, open the Permissions options by clicking the three dots on the right of your target dataset, and “Edit Permissions”.

You can set the Owner to the user you created earlier, which was “officeuser” and the group to “officegroup”. On the right side under Access, this is where you can set the Read and Write permissions. Go ahead and check “Write” to give editing permissions when you assign this Group to the dataset.

Check “Apply Permissions Recursively” if you want to set these permissions to all directories and files that are currently in the dataset. Check “Traverse” to apply permissions to any child datasets, or datasets within the dataset. Click “SAVE” when done.

Setting up ACLs (for SMB datasets)

Next, we’ll talk about ACLs, or “Access Control List”. ACL is a security feature used in Microsoft Windows, which designates access control entries for users and administrators on a system. FreeNAS interacts with it through the SMB protocol. Note that the “Edit ACL” feature was recently introduced in FreeNAS 11.3.
If you haven’t already, go ahead and create an SMB dataset by clicking the three dots on your pool and “Add Dataset”. Name your dataset, and choose “SMB” under the Share Type. Lastly, click “SAVE” to proceed.

You can create a share for this SMB dataset as well, by going to “Sharing“, choosing “Windows Shares”, and then selecting “ADD”. Browse to the path of your SMB dataset. You’ll notice it says ACL next to the folder because you set the Share type as SMB earlier. In this tutorial, let’s call this “smbshare” and click “SAVE” to continue.

From the SMB window, open the share options by clicking the three dots on the right, and “Edit ACL”. On the left side, leave “root” and “wheel” as the original owners of the dataset.

To give another user ownership permissions, click “Add ACL Item”, then choose “User” for the Who field, and “officeuser” for the User field. You may copy the same settings as the ACL items above on the right side. Do the same for the group, and choose “officegroup” for the Group field. Note: to set open permissions or guest access, you can choose “OPEN” from the “Default ACL Options” dropdown list.

The settings on the right side under “Group” allow you to configure the dataset’s ACL settings according to your network and security needs. Note that when you set the Share Type to “SMB”, the ACL options will default to that specific configuration, which is shown here. Lastly, click “SAVE” when you’re finished choosing your settings.
If you want to read more about configuration and recommendations for ACLs, make sure to check out the FreeNAS Documentation.
Now you have properly set up Permissions and ACLs for your datasets. Repeat the process above each time you need to give a User specific permissions to access a shared dataset on your network or simply use the same group with a new user. To learn how to access a share on Windows with the specific user, make sure to check out our Windows SMB Shares tutorial.
Thank you for reading this tutorial! Be sure to watch our other tutorial videos on our YouTube channel.

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iXsystems Introduces New TrueNAS Security Hub

iX Team — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 17:28:52 +0000

This is historic content that may contain outdated information. For the newest information on FreeNAS and TrueNAS, please visit TrueNAS.com or read our latest Blogs.

Data and systems security is important to every business. The cost of security breaches can be extremely high and consumes IT administration resources. The best strategy is to avoid and minimize those breaches.
TrueNAS and FreeNAS provide many features to assist with security issues. Unlike other storage systems, the software is Open Source and enables anyone to audit the source code and report back to iXsystems about any potential vulnerabilities. iXsystems will then privately investigate, fix any vulnerabilities, and make our community aware how to best address the issues.
The new TrueNAS Security Hub empowers you with the information you need to maintain the security, integrity, and availability of your data in the midst of possible threats to your IT infrastructure such as vulnerabilities, malware, and ransomware.

The hub includes CVEs (“Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures”: publicly known information on security vulnerabilities and mitigations), errata (technical descriptions of unintended faults in hardware and/or software components), and articles (notices and best practices for security issues regarding TrueNAS and TrueCommand).

The hub also includes security information for FreeNAS and the upcoming release of TrueNAS CORE 12.0. For home and small business users, the goal is to make the latest software robust enough that using the hub is unnecessary.

For Security Officers, there is also a security white paper which details how security and privacy practices have been applied to TrueNAS. To obtain a copy of the white paper, please send an email to security-info@ixsystems.com.

We hope these newly available resources are beneficial to the community and provide System Administrators with the tools to operate their storage systems in a safe and secure manner. iXsystems is constantly improving the TrueNAS software, and there are already several more security features slated to be included in TrueNAS 12.0. To report a potential product-related privacy or security issue (incident, breach or vulnerability), please contact our Security Team at security[at]ixsystems.com.

Visit the TrueNAS Security Hub today for the latest in TrueNAS and FreeNAS security info.

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How to Set Up Windows SMB Shares on FreeNAS

iX Team — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 19:40:21 +0000

In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to set up an SMB share on your FreeNAS machine. To share data with Windows clients, FreeNAS uses CIFS, also known as SMB or Samba. SMB shares are also compatible with macOS offering great flexibility for client operating systems. Before you get started, you should already have a pool configured in FreeNAS. To learn how to configure a pool, see our FreeNAS ZFS Pools Overview tutorial.

Setting up a FreeNAS User Account
First, we will go ahead and set up a FreeNAS user account, which allows you to securely access your shares. Go to “Accounts” then “Users” on the left menu. I’ll be creating a new user called “homeuser” and adding a new primary group with it. I’ll be configuring the new share to use this user and group, but be sure to substitute your own users and groups as needed.

Setting up a Windows (SMB) Share
Go to “Storage” then “Pools” on the left hand side. Open the pool options by clicking the 3 dots on the right of the pool then, “Add Dataset”

I’m calling this ‘windowset’ and setting the share type to ‘SMB’. Click “SAVE” when done.

Next, we’ll create the Windows Share. Go to “Sharing”, and “Windows Shares (SMB)”.

Click “ADD”
Click the folder icon, and browse to the path of the dataset you want to share, which was “windowset”
Give your share a name. Let’s call this one “windowshare”
Select Allow Guest Access if you would like guests to view your files without a password *Note that some Windows 10 and Server systems have Guest Access disabled by default, and on MacOS you will need to set the “Connect as:” option to “Guest”.
Click “SAVE” when done. It will ask you to “Enable Service” for the SMB protocol.

Editing ACLs
For this next step, we’ll need to assign the user we created earlier with the Share. From the SMB window, open the share options by clicking the 3 dots on the right, and “Edit ACL”.

On the left side, leave “root” and “wheel” as the original owners of the dataset. To give another user ownership permissions, click “Add ACL Item”, then choose “User” for the “Who” field, and “homeuser” for the “User” field. You may copy the same settings as the ACL items above.

These settings on the right side allow you to configure the dataset’s Access Control List according to your network and security needs. Note that when we set the Share Type to “SMB” earlier, the ACL options will default to that specific configuration, which is shown there. Refer to the FreeNAS documentation for configuration recommendations for ACLs.

Click “SAVE” when that is done.

Enabling SMB Services
Go to the Services page, and make sure “Running” is enabled next to SMB. To ensure that SMB is always running after FreeNAS reboots, check “Start Automatically”. For additional options to configure the SMB service, you can click the “Edit” icon here. More information about these options can be found in the documentation, but the default values will work fine.

Accessing SMB Share from Windows

Head on over to your Windows machine.

Open up File Explorer, and type in “\\” followed by your FreeNAS IP address
You should be able to see your share here.
Right click that shared folder and click “Map Network Drive”.
Check the box “Connect using different credentials” then click “Finish”.
Enter the login details of the account you created in the beginning, which was “homeuser”.
You should now be able to add, delete, and create files or folders.

Thank you for reading this tutorial! Be sure to check out our other tutorials and videos on our YouTube channel.

The post How to Set Up Windows SMB Shares on FreeNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying

iX Team — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 15:47:59 +0000

FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been separate-but-related members of the #1 Open Source storage software family since 2012. FreeNAS is the free Open Source version with an expert community and has led the pursuit of innovations like Plugins and VMs. TrueNAS is the enterprise version for organizations of all sizes that need additional uptime and performance, as well as the enterprise-grade support necessary for critical data and applications.
From the beginning at iXsystems, we’ve developed, tested, documented, and released both as separate products, even though the vast majority of code is shared. This was a deliberate technical decision in the beginning but over time became less of a necessity and more of “just how we’ve always done it”. Furthermore, to change it was going to require a serious overhaul to how we build and package both products, among other things, so we continued to kick the can down the road. As we made systematic improvements to development and QA efficiency over the past few years, the redundant release process became almost impossible to ignore as our next major efficiency roadblock to overcome. So, we’ve finally rolled up our sleeves.
With the recent 11.3 release, TrueNAS gained parity with FreeNAS on features like VMs and Plugins, further homogenizing the code. Today, we announce the next phase of evolution for FreeNAS and TrueNAS.
With the 12.0 release coming in the latter half of the year, we will not only bring more features and improvements than any release that has come before it, we will also unify both products into a single software image and name! This shift will have a great many benefits for users, but before we go into further detail, we’d like to first reassure you that there are no plans to stop releasing a free version, close the source or limit features. Just want to make sure that’s out of the way before we go on! 🙂

The Benefits

This isn’t just a union of convenience, there are major technical benefits for all users and contributors:

Rapid Development: Unified images accelerate software development and releases (for example, 12.0 is a major release that would normally have taken 9-12 months to release, and with these new efficiencies, we are bringing that closer to six months)
Improved Quality: Reduced development redundancy and unified QA increases software quality and allows us to streamline testing
Earlier Hardware Enablement: Staying in-sync with upstream OS versions will be easier, allowing earlier access to newer hardware drivers. For instance, 12.0 brings improved support for AMD EPYC / Ryzen platforms and enhanced NUMA support for more efficient CPU core handling.
Simplified Documentation: Unified documentation eliminates redundancy such as separate user guides
Deduplication of Effort: Unified web content and videos refer to one software family without the need for duplication
Flexibility: Unified images enable simpler transitions or upgrades between editions
Resource Efficiency: frees up developers to work on new features and related products
Open ZFS 2.0: The planning for the “unified” 12.0 release began over a year ago and included the major investment in the development and integration of what will soon be released as “OpenZFS 2.0”. This effort is fast-forwarding delivery of advances like dataset encryption, major performance improvements, and compatibility with Linux ZFS pools.

Overall, this union provides a solid foundation for a more feature-rich future.

What to Expect

In the 11.3 release, FreeNAS and TrueNAS share over 95% of the same source code but are built into separate images, each with their own name. The Version 12.0 release will change this process by moving to one unified image with two different editions: a free, Open Source edition (this will never change!) and an enterprise edition.
Both editions will have common Open Source code, unified documentation, and a shared product name. The web interface and REST APIs will be relatively unchanged from version 11.3 with only additions for new features. Our VP Engineering, Kris Moore, describes the change in process in this video blog.

Two Names Become One

For years we’ve talked longingly about unifying the images, documentation, and web content due to all of the efficiency gains and benefits to be had. The one thing that always held us back was the question of what to do with the name: after all, unification of the software meant that two distinct product names were no longer workable, and we’ve grown as attached to both names as have our Community and customers (and perhaps even more!).
On the one hand, we have the FreeNAS brand that everyone has come to know and love; it lets users know immediately the product doesn’t cost anything to use and also hints at the fact that it’s Open Source. On the other hand, TrueNAS is a better name for an enterprise product. Some may remember that TrueNAS was originally released as “FreeNAS Pro”, but the feedback received was that many companies didn’t take it seriously. They felt a product with “Free” in the name didn’t inspire the necessary confidence for critical infrastructure and data. Hence, the name TrueNAS was born to overcome that stigma, and the enterprise side of our business has grown reliably since then.
So, after many months of analysis, weighing pros and cons, and spirited debate, we’ve decided that the technical benefits and efficiencies from unifying the products are too significant to ignore and now overwhelmingly outweigh our attachment to names. Therefore, we’ve decided to merge the names to share the stronger enterprise brand, TrueNAS. By doing so, we continue to give all users the confidence to use the product in important and mission-critical applications, while still paying homage to FreeNAS through the use of a shark-themed icon in the logo. We also continue to emphasize the benefits of Open Source through the sub-moniker “Open Storage”.
We now present to you:

There will be two different editions: TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. Without any license keys, TrueNAS CORE provides all the same, unrestricted FreeNAS functionality you know and love, while the source code will still be Open Source and forever free to use. TrueNAS Enterprise will enable an extended feature set using a license key on supported platforms. This move elevates FreeNAS to the enterprise-grade quality levels of TrueNAS to further cement its position as the world’s #1 Open Storage OS.

TrueNAS CORE: always open, always Free NAS

The only thing changing is the name. FreeNAS will take on the name of “TrueNAS CORE”. More than just a “Free-NAS”, TrueNAS CORE is enterprise-quality software-defined storage that can be used without restrictions or cost. It is also the core of the full-fledged enterprise edition, TrueNAS Enterprise, which provides the additional fault-tolerance, performance, and support that businesses and critical applications require.
CORE is a commitment that all the core functionality that FreeNAS users love will be included in the best free NAS software. CORE also defines itself with the acronym:

We’re immensely proud of FreeNAS and its community. The change in name does not change the underlying FreeBSD OS, the FreeBSD-based license, or our commitment to free and Open Source software. Long-time FreeNAS diehards will have the option to use the existing FreeNAS name and logo in the banner of the web interface by simply selecting a FreeNAS theme from the dropdown in the upper right-hand action bar, if they so choose.
Web visitors will eventually be forwarded to the new TrueNAS web pages, but that’s still a little while away. The freenas.org domain will remain in place, but over time we will use a TrueNAS domain to provide a common source of information. There will be no changes to community logins or newsletters.
TrueNAS CORE 12.0 will have some major advances over FreeNAS 11.3. These include support for Fusion Pools (mixing SSD and HDD vdevs) and encrypted datasets. A more complete list of the hundreds of improvements will be made with the 12.0 BETA release announcement.

TrueNAS Enterprise: the best value in enterprise storage

TrueNAS customers will see a smaller name change with the move to version 12.0 but will see a change to the new shark fin icon. The FreeNAS shark icon is well known, but this modernized icon represents the stealthy but mighty storage competitor that TrueNAS has become.

The new name is “TrueNAS Enterprise” and it inherits all the same enclosure management, high availability, and support that TrueNAS 11.3 benefits from. TrueNAS Enterprise systems will automatically inherit the TrueNAS CORE features and a pre-installed key unlocks enterprise features.

The TrueNAS 12.0 Preview

Everyone is invited to experience an early preview of TrueNAS 12.0. Nightly images will be available March 11th for anyone that has a spare system to test and develop with, and we would love to hear your feedback. Be sure to check out Fusion Pools and dataset encryption and let us know what you think.

We’ve started a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the community forums for this blog and community feedback. In general, we’re always looking for opinions and ideas on how we can improve TrueNAS products.

Next Steps

TrueNAS CORE 12.0 will go through the same ALPHA, BETA, RC1, RELEASE states that FreeNAS has gone through. There will be no changes to the software update process or the information available. The process will be more efficient within iXsystems, and we expect to deliver our users more with the same resources we have today. TrueNAS CORE 12.0 is planned for release in Q3 2020, which will be a much shorter development cycle for a release of this magnitude, thanks to this change.
Some users have asked us whether there will be a paid option to upgrade a system running TrueNAS CORE to Enterprise? The change in the release process makes that upgrade more possible, and we will be investigating options to enable this. There will also be opportunities to develop more radical improvements to TrueNAS functionality. Please contact us if your organization needs something that isn’t yet available.
As always, a huge thanks goes out to our community and customers for your continued support in helping us democratize enterprise storage. We are excited to work side by side with you on this next phase of the FreeNAS and TrueNAS journey. Many more great things to come!
For more information on TrueNAS 12.0, please check out our new blog about the features coming in TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise.

The post FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Warning! Active Directory Security Changes Require TrueNAS and FreeNAS Updates

iX Team — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 23:45:26 +0000

Critical Information for Current FreeNAS and TrueNAS Users

Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. Unfortunately, these new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet.
FreeNAS and TrueNAS users that utilize Active Directory should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March.
Full details are available in this iXsystems Technical Note about LDAP channel binding and LDAP signing.
Users not using Active Directory are unaffected by these Microsoft updates and therefore can update their FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems at their leisure.
SMB Sharing on FreeNAS and TrueNAS
FreeNAS and TrueNAS are used to provide SMB shares in over 80% of deployments. Windows, Mac, and now Linux clients use SMB to share files. In many cases, SMB3 is preferred to NFSv3 and includes some file integrity advantages because the client behavior is well defined. SMB clients gain the advantages of the highly robust OpenZFS file system and all the replication and administration tools that FreeNAS and TrueNAS provide.
SMB3 is usually deployed in organizations with Active Directory to manage user authentication and permissions. All Windows Servers and FreeNAS/TrueNAS units can be configured to use the same security control.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS Release 11.3
The good news is that version 11.3 includes many improvements to SMB and Active Directory support beyond the compatibility with the new Microsoft security patches:

The methods of communicating with the Active Directory Domain Controller now use strong authentication. The strong authentication methods are either SSL-encrypted transport or signed sasl_gssapi bind (Kerberos). This is the additional feature needed to avoid disruption with the change in security defaults.
Setup wizards for SMB and Active Directory have been added. The user feedback on ease of deployment has been excellent.
SMB and OpenZFS snapshots have been better integrated. Now ZFS snapshots are automatically visible to clients’ systems as Shadow Copies with all the previous versions of files. A file from an old snapshot can be copied and restored to a current share without any help from a storage administrator. More impressively, only snapshots with file changes are visible to the client so it’s much easier to find the right snapshot.
Tools and best practices have been added to improve the ability to share the same files with NFS and SMB clients. NFSv3 has some weaknesses where clients can be configured to ignore network locking, but as long as best practices are followed, mixed protocol shares can be safely operated.
ACL manager has been added to provide an easy-to-use web UI to set permissions on an SMB share. This greatly simplifies SMB setup and reduces the setup time.
ZFS Replication between SMB datasets to a backup system has been greatly improved. The speed of replication on high bandwidth links has been increased by 8X to over 10Gbit/s (5 TB per hour). For large datasets, these replication tasks now support a suspend and resume model that can withstand a network outage. This is probably the most efficient SMB share replication available.
ZFS user quotas are now exposed as NT quotas to SMB clients. Windows users can manage these quotas using File Explorer, and Linux and FreeBSD users can use the smbcquotas utility for quota management.

Please contact us if we can help you with your next SMB server deployments.

The post Warning! Active Directory Security Changes Require TrueNAS and FreeNAS Updates appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Introducing the FreeNAS Mini E+ and All-Flash Minis

iX Team — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 21:34:04 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

The much-anticipated 3rd generation of our FreeNAS Mini products (the FreeNAS Mini E and XL+ models) was introduced in Q3 2019. After reviewing customer feedback and requests, we added the FreeNAS Mini E+ along with the option for all-flash configurations to the entire Mini lineup!

The FreeNAS Mini E+ is built off of the same whisper-quiet enclosure as the FreeNAS Mini E, however, the Mini E+ has double the cores and threads, a higher CPU base frequency, and increased memory capacity and speed. Below is a reference chart for comparison between the FreeNAS Mini E and the new FreeNAS Mini E+. The extra CPU and memory of the FreeNAS Mini E+ makes it well suited for running multiple Plugins and VMs.

The Breakdown of the Mini E+
Building on the success of the FreeNAS Mini E, the FreeNAS Mini E+ adds some significant performance improvements.

Despite the entry-level price, all components are server-grade.

Quad Port Motherboard & Processor
The FreeNAS Mini E+ includes an integrated quad core Intel® Atom CPU with a base frequency of 2.20 GHz. This highly-efficient processor can perform two simultaneous 1080p transcodes in applications like Plex.
The motherboard includes four gigabit RJ45 data ports with full LACP support, two ECC-capable DDR4 DIMM slots, one USB 3.0 port, two front-mounted USB 2.0 ports, gigabit IPMI remote management port, UID switch, an RS232 serial port, and a VGA port. Although the motherboard has a PCIe slot, it is disabled by the CPU/chipset to maximize SATA device connectivity.

Rear-view highlights: Quad gigabit ethernet ports, whisper-quiet fan, and a dedicated management port

Power Efficient NAS Workhorse
The new C3558 Atom processors are powerful and highly efficient with a thermal design power (TDP) of only 16W. This allows the Mini E to achieve a baseline idle power consumption of less than 26W!
Hard drives play a significant role in overall power consumption. We build all FreeNAS Minis with NAS-grade hard drives (Western Digital Red to be specific) to get the highest power efficiency, best acoustic performance, best reliability, and lowest price per TB. For a system fully populated with four 10 TB NAS drives and two cache devices, idle power consumption is less than 45W, and less than 65W under maximum load.

ECC Memory & Caching
Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory is the front line defense against data corruption and is one of the major features that sets the FreeNAS Mini apart from lower cost consumer-grade NAS systems. With ECC memory, single bit errors are corrected on the fly before they are written to disk, and if multiple bit errors are detected, the memory will halt the system before any data corruption is committed to disk.
The FreeNAS Mini E+ comes standard with 16GB DDR4 ECC memory. The motherboard has four DIMM Slots and can be upgraded to 32GB RAM using 8GB DIMMs. Other configurable performance upgrades include Read (L2ARC) and Write Cache (SLOG) SATA SSDs.

Whisper Quiet
The FreeNAS Mini E+ is also whisper quiet, and uses one of the quietest 120mm fans available, making it a perfect match for a sensitive work environment that requires near-silence.
Drive selection matters for maintaining low noise in a NAS system. If users buy a Mini E+ without hard drives, pay attention to the acoustic specifications of the hard drives you select. For reference, the NAS-grade hard drives that come with our pre-built systems idle around 20-21 dBA, and Seek from 24-29 dBA, which is quiet by spinning disk standards. SSDs are effectively silent and cooler, which reduces fan speed and reduces sound levels even further.\

HTML5-Based Remote Management
Another feature unique to systems in its class is the ability to manage and administer the FreeNAS Mini E+’s hardware from a remote location, via the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) console.The IPMI web interface uses HTML5, providing remote console access without Java, or the need for a physical monitor or keyboard.

The FreeNAS Mini E+ always ships with the latest version of FreeNAS.

All-Flash Minis
In addition, the FreeNAS Mini product family can now be configured with SSDs. The Mini E and Mini E+ models can be equipped with up to six SSDs and up to ten for the Mini XL+! The FreeNAS Mini Configurator provides SSDs at 960 GB, 1.9 TB, 3.8 TB, and 7.6 TB capacities. These cost effective QLC SSDs have been verified to operate and perform well with FreeNAS and provide power-loss safe operation. They are ideal for applications that need a performance boost over HDDs.
A FreeNAS Mini XL+ with dual 10Gbe and 9 x 3.8TB QLC SSDs is a QUIET, high performance workhorse with performance that would typically require high-end server configurations that sound like a small jet engine. The web configurator price for this all-flash 34 TB system is under $7000.

World’s #1 Open Source Storage Software
Of course, the FreeNAS Mini E+ comes installed with the latest version of FreeNAS. The new FreeNAS 11.3 web interface offers improved usability, easier system management, and better responsiveness. FreeNAS also provides several options to easily back up your data to another FreeNAS or TrueNAS system, Asigra, or to a public cloud provider like AWS S3, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or Backblaze B2, among others. FreeNAS 11.3 provides many wizards to simplify setup of ZFS pools, iSCSI extents, and SMB shares.
FreeNAS Minis can also be managed using the new TrueCommand multi-system management application. TrueCommand provides a “single pane of glass” for managing and monitoring groups of FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems with automated alerts and customized reports.

Get yours today!
The FreeNAS Mini line is available through Amazon, starting at $699 without hard drives, or $999 for a ready-to-deploy 8TB configuration. The FreeNAS Mini E+ starts at $849. Any FreeNAS Mini can be custom-configured to your specifications and ordered through the iXsystems online Mini Configurator. Visit www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/ for full FreeNAS Mini technical and use case information.
With the introduction of the FreeNAS Mini E+, the 2nd generation FreeNAS Minis are also being officially retired. For more information about the FreeNAS Mini 2.0, and FreeNAS Mini XL, please click here!

The post Introducing the FreeNAS Mini E+ and All-Flash Minis appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Plex Permissions in FreeNAS 11.3

iX Team — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 21:05:51 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Plex Media Server is a popular Plugin available for FreeNAS, allowing the user to stream media directly from their FreeNAS system. Because Plugins reside inside a jail, Plex must have access to the media files to be shared which are generally stored in a separate dataset that is mounted inside the Plex Plugin jail. A media dataset can also be mounted in multiple jails to allow access to other Plugins like Radarr, Sonarr, or Sabnzbd to manage and share the centralized media.
Once Plex is installed, its permissions will be in a default state set during the initial creation of a dataset on FreeNAS. Unless otherwise modified, this means the dataset will be owned by the user “root” and group “wheel”. Because Plex Media Server runs as the user “plex” in the default configuration, Plex will not be able to read or write to the media dataset and thus not be able to access the media files stored there. To create an ACL for the media dataset with the correct Plex user ID, first verify that user ID by running id plex in the Plugin Jail’s shell. This should be 972; with that information, launch the FreeNAS 11.3 ACL manager:

1. 1. Click the three dots next to the media dataset; in this example, it is called “media”
  2. Select “Edit ACL”
  3. Click the “Add ACL Item” button. A new section will appear at the bottom of the list of existing ACL items.
  4. Fill in the following:
    Who: User User: 972 (Don't worry if it says "Could not find a username for this ID") ACL Type: Allow Permissions Type: Basic Permissions: Full Control Flags Type: Basic Flags: Inherit
  5. If files already exist in the dataset, select the “Apply permissions recursively” checkbox.
  6. Click “Save”
  7. Add media in Plex Media Server through its web interface as normal

Other popular Plugin user ID’s include:

Radarr = 352
Sonarr = 351
Transmission = 921
Sabnzbd = 350

Visit the General Plugin Discussion in the FreeNAS Forums for more information and enjoy your media serving with FreeNAS!

The post Plex Permissions in FreeNAS 11.3 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS Plugins Development

iX Team — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 21:40:19 +0000

Plugins are a technology for easily and securely deploying 3rd party applications directly on FreeNAS and TrueNAS storage systems. Users can use the web interface to deploy, start, stop, and update applications, along with configuration tasks such as assigning storage to them. Plugins are popular for content, security, development, collaboration, and backup applications for home and business use. FreeNAS and TrueNAS both support Plugins, with TrueNAS adding High Availability (HA) for business use.
Jails are the basis of Plugins. Jails are FreeBSD’s container technology and are highly efficient in their use of resources, are secure, and provide flexible network infrastructure to applications. iocage is the FreeBSD Jail container management framework in FreeNAS.

This tutorial will walk through the creation of a SABnzbd newsreader Plugin using iocage based on the news/sabnzbdplus port to help users get involved in FreeNAS development and leverage FreeNAS as an application platform.
Each of the most popular FreeNAS Plugins such as Plex Media Server, NextCloud, and SyncThing begin as FreeBSD ports: multimedia/plexmediaserver/, deskutils/nextcloudclient/, and net/syncthing/ respectively. These can each be installed on a FreeBSD system with the pkg package manager, i.e. pkg install plexmediaserver and configured manually. A Plugin adds metadata that provides an installation source, reasonable defaults, and user interface elements such as an icon. The metadata components for the sabnzbd Plugin are:

README.md: A popular convention for a file in markdown format for describing the project
sabnzbd.json: The JSON “Artifact” file containing various Plugin properties including an inventory of all other metadata components which may be in the same or a remote repo
overlay: An optional directory containing the files to be copied into the Jail
ui.json: A file containing the Plugin management interface URL and port number
settings.json: An optional JSON file that contains variables used during Plugin startup and for its configuration
sabnzbd.png: A .png image such as sabnzbd.png that will appear in the FreeNAS Plugins Index
post_install.sh: A shell script ran after jail creation to perform necessary configuration steps. It runs only once.

Requirements

FreeNAS provides everything necessary for Plugin development but a FreeBSD system is also a good choice. The requirements are:

A FreeNAS or FreeBSD system running iocage
An internet connection and at least 1GB of available disk space
A publically-accessible Git repo, self-hosted or on a service like GitHub, Gitia or GitLab, or you can run GitLab as a Plugin itself
A text editor such as vi, ee, or nano, all of which are available in FreeNAS
Basic knowledge of FreeBSD and shell scripting

Creating Each Component

Note that // and # comments are not supported in JSON. Copy any examples from the Git repo in “raw” mode.
The Artifact file sabnzbd.json

{
  "name": "sabnzbd",		//The name of the Plugin and resulting Jail
  "plugin_schema": "2",		//The Plugin schema version
  "release": "11.3-RELEASE",	//FreeBSD version (not significantly newer than host)
  "artifact": "https://github.com/ConorBeh/iocage-plugin-sabnzbd.git",
				//The Git repo containing the Plugin
  "properties": {		//Jail properties that can be overridden by the user
    "nat": 1,
    "nat_forwards": "tcp(8080:8080)"
  },
  "pkgs": [			//FreeBSD packages to be installed, one per line
    "sabnzbdplus",
  ],
  "packagesite": "http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:11:amd64/latest",
				//The package site, latest, quarterly, or self-hosted
  "fingerprints": {
    "iocage-plugins": [
      {
        "function": "sha256",
        "fingerprint": "b0170035af3acc5f3f3ae1859dc717101b4e6c1d0a794ad554928ca0cbb2f438"
      }				//The checksum of the FreeBSD port
    ]
  },
  "revision": "0"		//Internal version number
}

The artifact file properties
These are commonly-used properties specified in the artifact file. Any supported iocage property can be specified.
nat: Enables Network Address Translation to utilize the host’s IP address
nat_forwards: Required when NAT is enabled. Syntax:
< protocol >(< jailport >:< hostport >)
dhcp: Enables DHCP on the jail to allow it to automatically obtain an IP address
allow_tun: Allows the creation of a tun network device inside the jail, required for VPN connections
allow_raw_sockets: Allows the jail to create raw sockets
The artifact repository options
The official FreeBSD repository provides “latest” and “quarterly” branches. The “latest” branch contains binary packages that are updated immediately, while the “quarterly” branch binaries are only updated every quarter, and are the default of FreeBSD releases. The fingerprint remains the same for all official FreeBSD repositories. If custom port build options are required, the preferred solution is to set up a custom Poudriere build server.
The overlay Directory
The “overlay” is a directory of files that are copied into the jail after creation and before the execution of post_install.sh. The layout of these files should follow the same paths as they should have in the root filesystem of the jail. For example, a file placed in /overlay/usr/local/www/lighttpd/ inside the Git repo will be placed in /usr/local/www/lighttpd/ in the jail. This is very useful for providing pre-made configuration files, additional scripts, or even binaries that may not be available in the pkg repository.
The ui.json file
A small JSON file containing the address of the WebUI and port. Use the variable %%IP%% to automatically display the correct IP address. Make sure to include any extra components in the URL following the domain name or IP address, for example “/admin” or “/web/index”.
The settings.json file
A JSON file that is used when working with generated or user-specified data such as passwords or database names. These variables can be used in the post_install.sh. In addition to these variables the servicerestart command must also be set. This is the command that is run when a setting is changed or the jail is restarted, such as restarting a web server.
The sabnzbd.png Icon file
A link to a .png file that will be displayed in the FreeNAS Plugins Index. The image requires a transparent background and should be 128 pixel by 128 pixel square in size to produce quality results when automatically resized.
The post_install.sh script
A POSIX shell script that leverages all the other files to automate installation of the Plugin. In simple Plugins, it may only contain a few lines enabling and starting a few services. It is important to note that iocage executes the file all at once, not line by line, and to give the file execute permissions before uploading it to the Git repository.
To enable execute permissions on a FreeNAS or FreeBSD system run:
chmod +x post_install.sh
Common post-installation steps include:

Setting file and directory permissions
Moving, copying, and editing configuration files
Generating random passwords
Adding a user and/or group
Creating a database

The /root/PLUGIN_INFO file
A text file that stores easily accessible information which can be recalled again from the web interface by clicking the “Post Install Notes” button. Information can be entered into this file via echo “relevant information” >> /root/PLUGIN_INFO in post_install.sh.

Git Repo Initialization

Create and initialize a Git repository and Readme for the Plugin with a name following the format as “iocage-plugin-“. The name iocage-plugin-sabnzbd and GitHub through the web are used in this example.

Once initialized, clone the project at the command line:

mkdir Plugins && cd Plugins git clone "https://github.com/ConorBeh/iocage-plugin-sabnzbd.git" cd iocage-plugin-sabnzbd
Create a new artifact file or use a template, containing the Git URL of the project. The NextCloud and Asigra Plugins offer a good example of more complex syntax.
Create and populate an overlay directory as appropriate.

mkdir overlay

Create the post_install.sh shell script with a text editor:

#!/bin/sh
# Enable and start the service which will generate the config file
sysrc sabnzbd_enable="YES"
service sabnzbd start
# Sleep is needed to ensure that the service starts in time for the next command
sleep 5
# Edit config to allow outside access
sed -i '' 's/127.0.0.1/0.0.0.0/g' /usr/local/sabnzbd/sabnzbd.ini
# Restart the service for config change to take
service sabnzbd restart

Save any Plugin info such as options, credentials, or other information to /root/PLUGIN_INFO inside the jail.
Make the post_install.sh script executable. These permissions will be preserved in the Git repository.
chmod +x post_install.sh
Create a settings.json file if needed. This example does not require one. Consider enabling JSON syntax highlighting and checking in the text editor to continuously validate it.
Create a ui.json file

{
"adminportal": "http://%%IP%%"
}
Append any additional URL components or ports after the %%IP%% such as:
{
"adminportal": "http://%%IP%%:32400/web"
}

Upload the Files to the Git Repo

The following commands will authenticate with GitHub:
git config user.name
git config user.email
git config user.password

Commit the changes to the repository:
git add .
git commit -m "descriptive message"
git push origin master

Test the Plugin via the CLI

Change to the Plugins parent directory with:
cd ..
Run the following commands to fetch and install the Plugin:
iocage fetch -P iocage-plugin-sabnzbd/iocage-plugin-sabnzbd.json

Test the Plugin via Web Interface

Edit the INDEX file located at: /mnt/iocage/.plugins/github_com_ix-plugin-hub_iocage-plugin-index_git/INDEX
Add a new section alphabetically containing the following:

"sabnzbd": { 			//The name of the plugin
"MANIFEST": "sabnzbd.json", 	//The plugin artifact file
"name": "Sabnzbd",		//The name of the plugin in the web UI
"icon": "https://icons.freenas.org/community-icons/sabnzbd.png",
				//The direct link to the icon image
"description": "Sabnzbd is a newsgroup reader.",
//A one-sentence description for the web UI
"official": false,		//Leave this false
"primary_pkg": "sabnzbd"	//The primary package to be installed,
					//version will be displayed in the web UI
},

Place your Plugin artifact JSON file in the following directory:
/mnt/iocage/.plugins/github_com_ix-plugin-hub_iocage-plugin-index_git/INDEX
Open the FreeNAS web interface and click Plugins, then select the Community option under the drop down. Click the Refresh button, then select the newly created Plugin from the list and install it.

Adding the Plugin to the Community Repository

The Community Plugin repository resides on GitHub. To submit a Plugin to the Community repository, first fork the GitHub repository. Modify the forked version of the repository by adding the artifact file for the new Plugin, modifying the INDEX file, and adding a Plugin icon if needed. When everything is satisfactory, submit a Pull Request to the original repository. Include a short description of the content and why it should be included. Be prepared to make modifications or improvements. If the Pull Request is approved the Plugin will appear in the Community repository in FreeNAS.

Resolving Common Issues

The Plugin may not work on the first try. Some common issues you may encounter are:

No internet connectivity in the jail. The jail likely had problems getting a DHCP lease or a NAT option was specified incorrectly.
Permission is denied on “post_install.sh“. Ensure the proper permissions were set by running “chmod +x post_install.sh” before committing the file to the Git repo

Plugin Maintenance

When future modifications to the Plugin arise such as when the upstream port is updated, the Community repository will need to be cloned, modified, and a pull request issued. Follow the commands in “Adding the Plugin to the Community Repository” above to accomplish this. This will update the JSON artifact file present in the Community repository. For updates to post_install.sh, settings.json, or ui.json, the Plugin’s repository itself must be updated. To do this, clone the repository again and make any modifications. When finished, commit those changes following the commands in “Upload the files to the Git Repo” above.
While most community plugins are best suited to live inside the community repo, there may be some that should be considered by iX to become officially supported. If you believe a plugin should be considered, please let us know by opening a ticket in our bug-tracker, with details about the plugin and why it would be a good candidate for official inclusion.

Visit the General Plugin Discussion in the FreeNAS Forums for more information and welcome to the world of FreeNAS Plugins Development!

The post FreeNAS Plugins Development appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

How To Back Up Google Drive to FreeNAS

iX Team — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 22:27:07 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Google Drive and G Suite are widely used tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with team members. While cloud-based tools have inherent backups and replications included by the cloud provider, certain users may require additional backup or archive capabilities. For example, companies using G Suite for important work may be required to keep records for years, potentially beyond the scope of the G Suite subscription. FreeNAS and TrueNAS offer the ability to back up Google Drive easily, using the built-in cloud sync.
This blog will explain how to set up Google Drive sync with FreeNAS 11.3, as well as provide a few caveats and workarounds when backing up Google Docs and other Google created content.

Setting up Google Drive credentials
Set up the credentials under System ➞ Cloud Credentials.

Click LOGIN TO PROVIDER and login with the appropriate Google user account. Google will request to allow access to all the Google Drive files for the FreeNAS device.

Allow access and the appropriate access key will be inserted to the FreeNAS access token. Assign a Team ID if required, but it is not necessary in all cases.
Click VERIFY CREDENTIAL. Once successful, click SAVE. The new cloud credentials will be visible in the web interface.

Set the cloud sync task

Go to Tasks ➞ Cloud Sync Tasks and set the backup time frame, frequency, and folders – both the cloud-based folder and FreeNAS dataset. Set whether the synchronization should sync all changes, just copy new files, or move files. Remove files from the cloud source or FreeNAS source depending on push or pull.
Add a description for the task and select the cloud credentials.

Choose the appropriate cloud folder target and FreeNAS storage location.

Select the file transfer mode:

Sync: Keep files newly created or deleted the same.
Copy: Copy new files to the appropriate target (i.e., FreeNAS pulls files from Google Drive or pushes files to Google Drive).
Move: Copies files to the target and then delete files from the source. Using Move, users can set a folder in Google Drive for archival, and move older documents to that folder from their Drive account. Those files would then automatically get backed up to their FreeNAS storage.

Once created the Task will run during the designated period of time. Edits can be made by clicking the down arrow on the right-hand side.

Clicking RUN NOW will prompt the task to start immediately and the web interface will show the status as RUNNING and SUCCESS upon completion. Details can be accessed via the Task Manager icon in the upper right-hand corner.

To verify success, SSH to the FreeNAS or use the built-in Shell Terminal to verify that the files are visible.

If file access to a client PC or other device is needed, create a share to the same dataset that was set to store the cloud sync. An SMB share is used as an example.
Go to Sharing ➞ Windows Shares (SMB) and click ADD. Choose the appropriate dataset, permissions, and settings to create a new SMB share.

Once mounted to the client, the files should all be visible.

Working with Google created content
One caveat is that Google Docs and other files created with Google tools will have their own proprietary set of permissions and their read/write characteristics will be unknown to the system over a standard file share. Files are unreadable as a result.

To allow Google created files to become readable, allow link sharing to access the files before the backup. Doing so will ensure that other users will be able to open the files with read access, make changes, and then save as another file should further edits be needed. Note that this is only necessary if the file was created using Google Docs, Google Sheets, or Google Slides; other files should not require modification of their share settings.

TrueNAS and FreeNAS are perfect for storing content, including cloud-based content, for the long-term. Not only is it simple to sync and backup from the cloud, but users can rest assured that their data is safe, with unlimited snapshots, copy-on-write, and built-in replication functionality.
Please contact us at https://www.ixsystems.com/contact-us/ for more information on what iXsystems can do for your organization.

The post How To Back Up Google Drive to FreeNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

How To Enable Wireguard on FreeNAS 11.3

iX Team — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 22:44:00 +0000

WireGuard is quickly gaining popularity in the VPN marketplace due to its speed, simplicity, and modern cryptography standards. Starting with FreeNAS version 11.3-RC1, it is possible to connect your NAS directly to a WireGuard network with a few easy steps.
We get started on this by creating some custom tunables to enable the WireGuard service and give it a default interface. To do this you must first navigate to System -> Tunables -> Add.
Enable the WireGuard service by adding “wireguard_enable” -> “YES” in rc.conf.

Next, create another tunable and add “wireguard_interfaces” -> “wg0” in rc.conf.

When finished, you should have the following two variables set and enabled.

Next, we will need to create a post-init script that will place the WireGuard config into the correct location at startup. Navigate to Tasks -> Init/Shutdown Scripts -> Add.
Create the following command and set it to run at post-init:
“mkdir /usr/local/etc/wireguard && cp /root/wg0.conf /usr/local/etc/wireguard/wg0.conf && /usr/local/etc/rc.d/wireguard start”
You can configure the /root/wg0.conf file and apply a WireGuard configuration to attach to whatever WireGuard network you define. It can be a single point-to-point to anything running WG, or even with full routing. Example use cases are:

Access data on a NAS from your Remote Laptop
Linking NAS to NAS for replication
Attaching a managed NAS to a remote network
Access to your NAS from your smartphone

We need to create the /root/wg0.conf which will contain the specific WireGuard configuration to apply at boot. This configuration is beyond the scope of this article, but there are quickstart guides and tutorials available online as well as the built-in ‘wg-quick’manpage.
Once you have a valid /root/wg0.conf, rebooting the system should bring up the WireGuard interface, and you’ll see a ‘wg0’ device in the output of ‘ifconfig’.

Congratulations, you have successfully linked your FreeNAS system to a secure WireGuard tunnel!

The post How To Enable Wireguard on FreeNAS 11.3 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The Official FreeNAS Hardware Guide

iX Team — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 23:27:40 +0000

This is historic content that may contain outdated information. For the newest information on FreeNAS and TrueNAS, please visit TrueNAS.com or read our latest Blogs.

Long-time FreeNAS users will never forget the FreeNAS 8.0 days when flashing an IBM M1015 controller card with LSI firmware was a right of passage, 3TB drives were the largest you could buy, and floods in Thailand would soon turn every hard drive into a valuable asset.
Fast-forward to the amazing new FreeNAS Mini XL+ and a vastly improved user experience through the new web interface to see just how much has changed in the FreeNAS ecosystem. While FreeNAS Mini and FreeNAS certified are excellent turn-key systems, we appreciate that do-it-yourself users have always played a critical role in the growth and success of FreeNAS around the world. From repurposed systems to highly-custom builds, fundamental freedom of FreeNAS is the ability to run it on nearly any x86 computer.
In celebration of the upcoming FreeNAS 11.3 release, we have brought together the wisdom of our engineering staff and top blog posts to produce the first comprehensive FreeNAS Hardware Guide to complement the official hardware requirements and the community’s highly-detailed Hardware Recommendations Guide. Have something to add? Please submit it in this forum thread!
Here’s to building your best NAS ever in 2020!
The FreeNAS Team

Introduction
Storage Device Considerations

Spinning Disks
SATA NAS Disks
Nearline SAS Disks
SAS Disks
SATA and SAS Flash Storage SSDs
NVMe
Hybrid Storage & Flash Cache (SLOG/ZIL/L2ARC)
Self Encrypting Drives
USB Hard Disks
Boot Devices
Hot Swapability
Storage Device Sizing
Storage Device Burn-In
Storage Controllers
SAS Expanders
Storage Device Cooling

Memory, CPU, and Network Considerations

Memory Sizing
Error Correcting Code Memory
Central Processing Unit (CPU) Selection
Remote Management: IPMI
Power Supply Units
Uninterruptible Power Supplies
Ethernet Networking

Virtualized FreeNAS

Introduction

The FreeNAS community has a rich ecosystem of advice when it comes to the art and science of choosing the ideal hardware for their favorite storage operating system. From the official Hardware Requirements to the Hardware Recommendations Guide maintained by the community, to countless blog posts, users have a comprehensive, if not overwhelming choice of answers to the simple question, “What hardware should I buy?” The FreeNAS Mini and FreeNAS Certified lines of purpose-built FreeNAS systems from iXsystems are the official answers to this question, but they also serve to provide templates for users that want to build their own systems or repurpose existing ones. Therefore, this guide will use the FreeNAS Mini and FreeNAS Certified systems as points of reference to all of the criteria to consider when building FreeNAS-compatible systems of any size.

Storage Device Considerations

At the heart of any storage system is the symbiotic pairing of its file system and its physical storage devices. The ZFS file system in FreeNAS provides the best available data protection of any filesystem at any cost and makes very effective use of both spinning disk and all-flash storage, or a mix of the two. ZFS is fully prepared for the eventual failure of storage devices and is highly-configurable to achieve the perfect balance of redundancy and performance to meet any storage goal. A properly-configured FreeNAS system can tolerate the failure of multiple storage devices and even its boot media which can be quickly re-created with a copy of the configuration file. Choosing storage media is the first step in designing the storage system to meet immediate objectives and prepare for future capacity expansion.

Spinning Disks

Until the next unforeseen scientific breakthrough in storage media, spinning hard disks are here to stay, thanks to their balance of capacity and cost. The arrival of double-digit terabyte consumer and enterprise drives has provided more choices to FreeNAS users than ever. FreeNAS Mini and Certified systems ship with Western Digital NAS and NL-SAS respectively for good reason, and understanding the alternatives will explain this decision.

SATA NAS Disks

Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) is still the de facto standard disk interface and can be found in many desktop/laptop computers, servers, and some non-enterprise storage arrays. SATA disks first arrived offering double-digit gigabyte capacities and have since been produced to meet a myriad of capacity, reliability, and performance goals. While consumer desktop SATA disks are not as problematic as they used to be in terms of overall reliability, they are still not designed or warrantied for continuous operation or use in RAID groups. Therefore, Enterprise SATA disks were introduced to address both the “always-on” factor, vibration tolerance, and drive error handling required in storage systems. However, the price delta between desktop and enterprise SATA drives was (and still is) vast enough that it drove users to push their consumer drives into 24/7 service in pursuit of cost savings.
Drive vendors responded to this gap in the market (and likely grew tired of honoring warranties for failed desktop drives used in incorrect applications) by producing “NAS” drives, made famous by the original Western Digital (WD) Red™ drives with CMR/PMR technology (now called WD Red Plus). WD Red™ Plus NAS drives (non-SMR) are designed for use in systems with up to eight hard drives, up to 16 drives in the case of the WD Red™ Pro drives, and WD UltraStar™ drives for systems beyond 16 drives.
WD drives are known among the iXsystems Community Forum as the preferred hard drives for FreeNAS builds due to their exceptional quality and reliability. All FreeNAS Minis ship with WD Red™ Plus drives unless requested otherwise.

Nearline SAS Disks

“Nearline” SAS (NL-SAS) disks are essentially 7200 RPM enterprise SATA disks with the industry-standard SAS interface found in the majority of enterprise storage systems. SAS stands for “Serial-Attached SCSI”, the traditional SCSI disk interface in serial form. SAS systems are designed for data center storage applications and therefore have accurate, verbose error handling, predictable failure behavior, reliable hot swapping, and have the added feature of multipath support. Multipath access means that each drive has two interfaces and can be connected to either two storage controllers, or one controller over two cables. This redundancy protects against cable failure, controller card failure, or complete system failure in the case of the TrueNAS high-availability architecture in which each “controller” is in fact an independent server that accesses the same set of NL-SAS drives. NL-SAS drives are also robust enough to handle the rigors of systems with more than 16 disks. Therefore, capacity-oriented TrueNAS and certain FreeNAS Certified systems ship with Western Digital UltraStar NL-SAS disks thanks to the all-around perfect balance of capacity, reliability, performance, and flexibility that NL-SAS drives offer.

SAS Disks

Enterprise SAS disks were the traditional heavy-lifters of the enterprise storage industry and are built for maximum performance and reliability that a spinning platter can provide. SAS disk capacities are surprisingly low compared to NL-SAS or NAS drives, due to the speed at which the platters spin, reaching as high as 15,000 RPMs. While SAS drives may sound like the ultimate answer for high-performance storage, the many consumer and enterprise flash-based options that have come onto the market have significantly reduced the competitiveness of SAS drives. For example, Enterprise SAS drives were discontinued from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS product lines, and replaced almost entirely by flash drives (SSDs or NVMe) in 2016 due to their superior performance/cost ratio.

SATA and SAS Flash Storage SSDs

Flash storage technology has made significant progress in recent years, enabling a revolution in mobile devices and the rise of flash storage in general-purpose PCs and servers. Unlike hard disks, flash storage is not sensitive to vibration and can be significantly faster with comparable reliability. Flash storage remains more expensive per gigabyte but is finding many ways into FreeNAS systems as that price gap continually narrows.
The shortest path for the introduction of flash storage into the mainstream market was for vendors to use standard SATA/SAS hard disk interfaces and form factors, effectively emulating standard hard disks but with no moving parts. For this reason, flash storage Solid State Disks (SSDs) have SATA interfaces and are the size of 2.5” laptop hard disks, allowing them to be drop-in replacements for traditional hard disks. Flash storage SSDs can be used in place of HDDs for primary storage on a FreeNAS system, resulting in a faster, though either smaller or more expensive storage solution. If going “all-flash”, buy the highest-quality flash storage SSDs the budget allows with a focus on power safety and write endurance that matches your expected write workload.

NVMe

While it made sense for SSDs to pretend they were HDDs for rapid adoption, the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) standard is a “native” flash protocol that takes full advantage of the non-linear and parallel nature of flash storage. The key advantage of NVMe is generally its low-latency performance and it’s quickly becoming a mainstream option for boot and other tasks. While it was originally limited to expansion-card form factors such as PCIe and M.2, the new U.2 interface offers a rather universal solution that includes the 2.5” drive form factor and an externally-accessible (but generally not hot-swappable) NVMe interface. Note that NVMe devices can run quite hot and may require dedicated heat sinks.

Hybrid Storage & Flash Cache (SLOG/ZIL/L2ARC)

With hard disk providing double-digit terabyte capacities and flash-based options providing significantly higher performance, a “best of both worlds” option is available. With FreeNAS and OpenZFS, you can merge both flash and disk to create “hybrid storage”, which makes the most of both storage types. In a hybrid configuration, large-capacity spinning disks store the data, while DRAM and flash act as hyper-fast read and write caching. The technologies work in conjunction with a flash-based separate write log (SLOG), which can be thought of as a write cache that keeps what’s called the ZFS-intent log (ZIL), used to accelerate writes. On the read side, flash can be used as a level two adaptive replacement (read) cache (L2ARC) to keep the hottest data sets on the faster flash media. Workloads with synchronous writes such as NFS and databases consistently benefit from SLOG devices, while workloads with frequently-accessed data may benefit from an L2ARC device. The reason that an L2ARC device is not always the best choice is because the level one ARC in RAM will always provide a faster cache; also, some RAM will be used by the L2ARC table.
A SLOG device need not be large as it only needs to service five seconds of data writes delivered by the network or a local application. A high-endurance, low-latency device between 8 GB and 32 GB in size is adequate for most modern networks, and multiple devices can be striped or mirrored for either performance or redundancy. Paying attention to the published endurance claims of the device is imperative, since a SLOG will be the funnel point for a majority of the writes made to the system.
It is also vital that a SLOG device has power protection. The purpose of the ZFS intent log (ZIL), and thus the SLOG, is to keep sync writes safe in the event of a crash or power failure. If the SLOG isn’t power protected and its data is lost after a power failure, it defeats the purpose of using a SLOG in the first place! Check the manufacturer’s specifications to ensure the SLOG device is power safe or has power loss/failure protection.
Random read performance is the most important quality to look for in an L2ARC device, as it needs to be able to support more IOPS than the primary storage media it is caching. For example, a single SSD as an L2ARC is not effective in front of a pool of 40 SSDs; the 40 SSDs will be able to handle far more IOPS than the single L2ARC drive. As for capacity, 5x to 20x larger than RAM size is a good guideline. High-end TrueNAS systems can have NVMe-based L2ARC in the double digit terabytes in size, as an example.
Keep in mind that for every data block in the L2ARC, the primary ARC needs an 88 byte entry; this can cause the ARC to fill up unexpectedly and actually reduce performance in a poorly-designed system. For example, a 480GB L2ARC filled with 4KiB blocks will need more than 10GiB of metadata storage in the primary ARC!

Self Encrypting Drives

FreeNAS supports two forms of data encryption at rest to achieve privacy and compliance objectives: GELI software partition encryption and Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs). SEDs do not experience the performance overhead introduced by software partition encryption but aren’t as readily-available as non-SED drives (and thus can cost a little bit more).

USB Hard Disks

USB-connected hard disks should be avoided for primary storage with FreeNAS but can be used for very basic backups in a pinch. While FreeNAS does not automate this process, a USB HDD can be connected, replicated at the command line, and ideally taken off-site for safe keeping.

Boot Devices

It was once very popular to boot FreeNAS systems from 8 GB or larger USB flash drives, but with the wide variance in USB drive quality and the increased drive writes done to the boot pool by modern FreeNAS versions, it’s advisable to look at other options. For this reason, all FreeNAS Mini and Certified systems ship with either M.2 drives or SATA DOMs. SATA DOMs, or “disk-on-modules”, offer close to the reliability of consumer 2.5” SSDs with a smaller form factor that mounts to an internal SATA port and therefore doesn’t consume a drive bay. Because SATA DOMs and motherboards with m.2 slots are not as common as the other storage devices mentioned here, it is popular to boot FreeNAS systems from 2.5” SSDs and HDDs (often mirrored for added redundancy). 8 GB is the recommended minimum size for the FreeNAS boot volume, but using 16 or 32 GB (or a 120 GB 2.5” SATA SSD) provides room for more boot environments.

Hot Swapability

FreeNAS systems come in all shapes and sizes, but it is highly desirable to have external access to all storage devices for efficient replacement if issues occur. Most “hot swap” drive bays require a proprietary drive tray into which each drive is installed. These bay and tray combinations also often include convenient features like activity and identification lights to both visualize activity and illuminate a failed drive with sesutil(8). FreeNAS Mini systems ship with four or more hot swap bays and FreeNAS Certified systems can support dozens of drives in their head units and external expansion shelves. Because pre-owned or repurposed hardware is popular among FreeNAS users, pay attention to the maximum performance offered by the hot swap backplanes of a given system, watching for at least 6 Gbps SATA III support. Note that hot-swapping PCIe NVMe devices is not supported at this time.

Storage Device Sizing

While zpool layout (the organization of LUNs and volumes, in FreeNAS/ZFS parlance) is beyond the scope of this guide, the availability of double-digit terabyte drives raises a question that FreeNAS users have not traditionally had the luxury of asking: how many drives should I use to achieve my desired capacity? Just because one can mirror two 16TB drives to achieve 16TB of available capacity, it doesn’t necessarily mean that one should. Mirroring two large drives offers the advantage of redundancy and balancing reads between the two devices, potentially lowering power draw, but little else. The write performance of two large drives will be at most that of a single drive. By contrast, an array of eight 4TB drives would offer a wide range of configurations to optimize performance and redundancy at a lower cost. If configured as striped mirrors, eight drives could yield four times greater write performance with similar total capacity. You may also consider adding a “hot spare” drive with any zpool configuration to allow for the zpool to automatically rebuild itself in the event a primary drive fails in the zpool.

Storage Device Burn-In

Spinning disk hard drives have moving parts, by definition. These parts are highly-sensitive to shock and vibration, and will eventually wear out with use. Consider pre-flighting every storage device before putting it into production, paying attention to:

Start a long HDD self test (smartctl -t long /dev/)
After the test is done (could take 12+ hours), check the results (smartctl -a /dev/)
Pending sector reallocations (smartctl -a /dev/ | grep Current_Pending_Sector)
Reallocated sector count (smartctl -a /dev/ | grep Reallocated_Sector_Ct)
UDMA CRC errors (smartctl -a /dev/ | grep UDMA_CRC_Error_Count)
HDD and SSD write latency consistency (diskinfo -wS ) Unformatted drives only!
HDD and SSD hours (smartctl -a /dev/ | grep Power_On_Hours)
NVMe percentage used (nvmecontrol logpage -p 2 nvme0 | grep “Percentage used”)

Take time before deploying the system to create a pool and subject it to as close to the real-world workload as possible. This may reveal individual drive issues but also can help determine if an alternative pool layout is better suited to that workload. Be cautious of used drives as vendors may not be honest or informed about the age and health of any given drive. Check the number of hours on all “new” drives using smartctl(8)as they may in fact be “recertified” or simply untruthfully advertised. A drive vendor may also zero the hours of a drive during recertification, masking its true age. All storage devices sold by iXsystems are tested for a minimum of 48 hours prior to shipment.

Storage Controllers

The uncontested most popular storage controllers used with FreeNAS are the 6 and 12 Gbps (“Gigabits per second”, sometimes expressed as “Gb/s”) Broadcom (formerly Avago, formerly LSI) SAS host bus adapters (HBA). These occasionally ship as embedded controllers on some motherboards but are generally PCIe cards with four or more internal or external SATA/SAS ports. The 6 Gbps LSI 9211 and its rebranded siblings that also use the LSI SAS2008 chip, such as the IBM M1015 and Dell H200 are legendary among FreeNAS users who are building systems using parts from the second hand market. Broadcom controllers should be flashed with the latest IT or Target Mode firmware to disable the optional RAID functionality found in the “IR” firmware. For those with the budget, newer models, like the Broadcom 9300/9400 series give 12 Gbps SAS capabilities and even NVMe to SAS translation abilities with the 9400 series. FreeNAS includes the sas2flash, sas3flash, and storcli commands to flash to perform reflashing operations on 9200, 9300, and 9400 series cards respectively. The FreeNAS Certified line ships with Broadcom 12 Gbps controllers.
Onboard SATA controllers are popular with smaller builds, but motherboard vendors have been better at catering to the needs of NAS users by including more than the traditional four SATA interfaces. Be aware that many motherboards ship with a mix of 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps onboard SATA interfaces and that choosing the wrong one could impact performance. If a motherboard includes hardware RAID functionality, do not use or configure it, but note that disabling it in the BIOS may remove some SATA functionality, depending on the motherboard. Fortunately, most SATA compatibility-related issues are immediately obvious.
In addition, there are countless warnings against using hardware RAID cards with FreeNAS, but it’s really not as cut and dry as that. ZFS and FreeNAS provide built-in RAID that protects your data better than any hardware RAID card, eliminating the need for one entirely. However, they can be used if it’s all you have, but like life, there are rules. First and foremost, do not use their RAID facility (there is one caveat in the bullets below). Ideally, the chosen hardware RAID card supports HBA mode, also known as “passthrough” or “JBOD” mode, which will allow it to perform indistinguishably from a standard HBA. If your RAID card does not have this mode, you can configure a RAID0 for every single disk in your system. It’s not ideal, but it works in a pinch.
If repurposing hardware RAID cards with FreeNAS, be aware that some hardware RAID cards:

Mask disk serial number and S.M.A.R.T. health information
May perform slower than their HBA equivalents
Can cause data loss if a write cache is used with a dead battery backup unit (BBU)

SAS Expanders

A direct-attached system where every disk is connected to an interface on the controller card is optimal but not always feasible. A SAS expander is essentially a port multiplier or splitter that enables each SAS port on a controller card to service multiple disks. They typically only reside on the drive backplane of servers or JBODs that have more than twelve drive bays. For example, there are TrueNAS JBODs that eclipse 90 drives in only four rack units of space! This wouldn’t be possible without the miracle of SAS expanders. Otherwise, imagine how many eight port HBAs would be required to access 90 drives!
While SAS expanders are designed for SAS disks, they can often support SATA disks via the SATA Tunneling Protocol or STP. SAS disks are still preferred for reasons mentioned in the NL-SAS section above but SATA disks will function on a SAS-based backplane. Note that the opposite is not true: you can’t use a SAS drive in a port designed for SATA drives.

Storage Device Cooling

There is a much-cited study floating around that asserts that drive temperature has little impact on drive reliability. That makes for a great headline or conversation starter but when reading the report carefully, it is clear that the drives were all tested under optimal environmental conditions. The average temperature that a well-cooled spinning hard disk will reach in production is around 28 °C and one study found that disks experience twice the number of failures for every 12 °C increase in temperature. While additional drive cooling often comes with additional noise, especially on older systems, there is always a risk of throwing money away by running a server in a data center or closet without noticing that the fans are set to their lowest setting. Pay close attention to drive temperature in any chassis that supports 16 or more drives, especially if they are exotic, high-density designs. Every chassis will have certain areas that are warmer for whatever reason but do watch for fan failures and the tendency for some models of 8TB drives to run hotter than other capacities. In general, try to keep drive temperatures below the drive vendor’s specification.

Memory, CPU, and Network Considerations

Memory Sizing

FreeNAS has higher memory requirements than many Network Attached Storage solutions but for good reason: it shares dynamic random-access memory (DRAM or simply RAM) between sharing services, add-on Plugins, Jails, and Virtual Machines, and sophisticated read caching. RAM will rarely go unused on a FreeNAS system and sufficient RAM is key to maintaining peak performance. A minimum of 8 GB of RAM is required for basic FreeNAS operations with up to eight drives. Beyond that, there are use cases that each have distinct RAM requirements:

An additional 1GB per additional drive after eight will benefit most use cases.
In general, if there are more clients connecting to the FreeNAS system, it will need more RAM. A 20 TB pool backing lots of high-performance VMs over iSCSI might need more RAM than a 200 TB pool storing archival data. If using iSCSI to back VMs, plan to use at least 16 GB of RAM for reasonable performance and 32 GB or more for optimal performance.
Directory Services require an additional 2 GB of RAM for the winbind internal cache
Plugins and Jails each have specific application RAM requirements
Virtual machines have specific guest operating system and application RAM requirements
Deduplication depends on an in-RAM deduplication table with a suggestion of 5 GB per TB of storage.
Attaching an L2ARC drive to a pool will actually use some RAM, too. ZFS needs metadata in ARC to know what data is in L2ARC. As a conservative estimate, plan to add about 1 GB of RAM for every 50 GB of L2ARC in your pool.

Consult the RAM section of the Hardware Recommendations section of the FreeNAS User Guide for detailed guidelines for each of these applications.

Error Correcting Code Memory

Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system can cause a single bit of RAM to spontaneously flip to the opposite state, resulting in what’s known as a memory error. Memory errors can cause security vulnerabilities, crashes, transcription errors, lost transactions, and corrupted or lost data. Therefore, one of the most vital areas for preventing data loss is where data is temporarily stored: RAM.
Error Correcting Code or ECC RAM detects and corrects in-memory bit errors as they occur. If the errors are severe enough to be uncorrectable, ECC memory will cause the system to “hang” (become unresponsive) rather than continue with errored bits. For ZFS and FreeNAS, this behavior virtually eliminates any chances that RAM errors will be passed to the drives and cause corruption of the ZFS pools or errors in the files.
The lengthy, Internet-wide debate on whether or not to use Error Correcting Code (ECC) system memory with OpenZFS and FreeNAS can be summarized as:

Using ECC RAM is strongly recommended as another data integrity defense

However:

Not all CPUs or motherboards support ECC RAM
Many FreeNAS systems operate every day without ECC RAM
Any type or grade of RAM can fail and cause data loss
Test all RAM before deployment as it is most likely to fail in the first three months

Central Processing Unit (CPU) Selection

Choosing ECC RAM will significantly reduce the available CPU and motherboard options, but this is actually a good thing. Intel® makes a point of limiting ECC RAM support to their lowest and highest-end CPUs, cutting out the mid-range i5 and i7 models. All FreeNAS Mini systems ship with either Intel Avoton C2000 or Intel Denverton C3000 series CPUs, and all FreeNAS Certified and TrueNAS systems ship with Intel Xeon® CPUs.
Exactly what CPU to choose can come down to a short list of key factors:

An underpowered CPU can be a performance bottleneck due to the way OpenZFS checksums, compresses, and (optionally) encrypts data.
Samba, the FreeNAS SMB daemon is lightly-threaded, so a higher-frequency CPU with fewer cores will usually perform best for SMB-only workloads.
A higher-core-count CPU is better suited for parallel encryption and virtualization.
AES-NI encryption acceleration support will improve the speed of file system and network encryption.
Server-class CPUs are recommended for their power and ECC memory support.
A Xeon E5 (or similar) CPU is recommended for use with software-encrypted pools.
Intel Ivy Bridge or later CPUs are strongly recommended for virtual machine use.
Watch for VT-d/AMD-Vi device virtualization support on the CPU and motherboard to pass PCIe devices to virtual machines.
Be aware if a given CPU contains a GPU or requires an external one. Also note that many server motherboards include a BMC chip with a built-in GPU. See below for more details on BMCs.

AMD CPUs are making a comeback thanks to the Ryzen and EPYC (Naples/Rome) lines but support for these platforms has been relatively limited on FreeBSD and, by extension, FreeNAS. They will work, but there has been less run time and performance tuning.

Remote Management: IPMI

As a courtesy to further limit the motherboard choices, the Intelligent Platform Management Interface or IPMI, a.k.a. Baseboard Management Controller (or BMC, iLo, iDrac, and other names depending on the vendor) should be considered if you need:

Remote power control and monitoring of remote systems
Remote console shell access for configuration or data recovery
Remote virtual media for FreeNAS installation or reinstallation

Because FreeNAS relies heavily on its web-based user interface (UI), console access can occasionally be needed to make network configuration changes. FreeNAS administration and sharing default to a single network interface, and this becomes a challenge when it comes time to upgrade, for example, LACP aggregated networking. The ideal solution is to have a dedicated subnet for access to the FreeNAS web UI, but this luxury is not available to all users. This is why the occasional visit to the hardware console is necessary for global configuration and, possibly, system recovery. The latest FreeNAS Mini and Certified systems ship with full-featured, HTML5-based IPMI support on a dedicated gigabit network interface.

Power Supply Units

The top criteria to consider for a power supply unit or PSU on a FreeNAS system are its:

Power capacity (in watts) for the motherboard and number of drives it must support
Reliability
Efficiency Rating
Relative noise
Optional redundancy to keep an important system running if one power supply fails

It is critical that PSU(s) are rated for the initial and future load that will be placed on them. If the plan is to gradually populate a large storage chassis, be sure to have adequate power for the fully-populated chassis. Also consider a hot-swappable redundant PSU to help guarantee uptime. Users on a budget can keep a cold spare PSU to limit their potential downtime to hours, rather than days. A good, modern PSU is efficient and is fully integrated into the IPMI management system to provide real time fan, temperature, and load information.
Most power supplies are certified with an efficiency rating known as an “80 Plus” rating. This rating indicates how much power drawn from the wall will be lost as heat, noise, and vibrations, instead of doing useful work like powering your components. If a power supply needs to draw 600 watts from the wall to provide 500 watts of power to your components, it’s operating at 500/600 = ~83% efficiency. The other 100 watts gets lost as heat, noise, and vibration. Power supplies with higher ratings will be more efficient, but can also be far more expensive. Do some return-on-investment calculations if you’re unsure what efficiency to purchase. For example, if an 80 Plus Platinum PSU costs $50 more than the comparable 80 Plus Gold, it would need to save you at least $10 per year on your power bill for that investment to pay off over 5 years. You can read more about 80 Plus ratings in this post.

Uninterruptible Power Supplies

FreeNAS provides the ability to communicate with a battery-backed, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) over a traditional serial or USB connection to coordinate a graceful shutdown in the case of power loss. FreeNAS is known to work well with APC brand UPSs, followed by CyberPower, and consider budgeting for a UPS with pure sine wave output. Some models of SSD can experience data corruption on power loss. If multiple SSDs experience this simultaneously, this could cause total pool failure, making a UPS a critical investment.

Ethernet Networking

The “Network” in “Network Attached Storage” is obviously just as important as Storage but the topic can be reduced to a few key points:

Simplicity is often the secret to reliability with network configurations.
Faster individual interfaces such as 10/25/40/100GbE are preferred to aggregating slower interfaces.
Intel and Chelsio interfaces are the best supported options.
Only consider a “jumbo frames” MTU with dedicated connections such as between servers or video editors and FreeNAS that are not likely to experience packet fragmentation.
Interfaces with LRO and LSO offload features will generally alleviate the need for jumbo frames and their use can result in lower CPU overhead.

Virtualized FreeNAS

Finally, the ultimate FreeNAS hardware question is whether to use actual hardware at all or go with a virtualization solution. The FreeNAS developers virtualize FreeNAS every day as part of their work, and cloud services are obviously popular among users of all sizes. The fact remains, however, that OpenZFS at the heart of FreeNAS has been designed from day one to work directly with physical storage devices, fully aware of their strengths and compensating for their weaknesses. Also, at the heart of FreeNAS is FreeBSD, which offers exemplary hardware performance and health reporting. When the need arises to virtualize FreeNAS:

Pass hardware disks or the entire storage controller to the FreeNAS VM if possible (requires VT-d/AMD-Vi support)
Disable automatic scrub pools on virtualized storage such as VMFS, and never scrub a pool while storage repair tasks are taking place on another layer
Use a minimum of three vdevs to provide adequate metadata redundancy, even with a striped pool
Remember to provide one or more 8GB or larger boot devices
Provide the FreeNAS VM with adequate RAM, as per its usual requirements
Consider “jumbo frame” networking if supported by all devices
Be prepared that the “guest tools” in FreeBSD may lack features found in other guest operating systems
Enable MAC address spoofing on virtual interfaces, and enable “promiscuous mode” to use VNET Jail and Plugins

Follow these rules when buying or building your next FreeNAS system to achieve maximum reliability, performance, and manageability. The FreeNAS Mini and FreeNAS Certified systems are tailor made for FreeNAS and take each of these best practices into consideration for the very best FreeNAS experience.

The post The Official FreeNAS Hardware Guide appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Breaking Down the FreeNAS Mini E!

iX Team — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 17:00:41 +0000

The FreeNAS Mini E is a recent addition to the FreeNAS Mini series. As the entry to the product line, it’s designed to be our most compact, cost-effective, and power-efficient NAS system. Powered by FreeNAS, the world’s #1 Open Source storage operating system, and protected by the self-healing ZFS filesystem, the Mini E is an excellent storage system for small and home offices. Its big brother, the FreeNAS Mini XL+, was released at the same time and has since received rave reviews from ServeTheHome.
The Mini E is ideal for file sharing and media streaming. Built-in ZFS-based RAID keeps data safe and available, error-protection keeps it free from corruption, and unlimited snapshots and replication protect it from ransomware attacks and human error.
Complete with server-grade hardware, including ECC RAM and IPMI, the Mini E minimizes the chances of data loss and simplifies remote administration.
Base Configuration:

Intel® Dual-Core Atom (C3338) CPU (8.5W)
8GB DDR4 1866MHz ECC RAM
4x 3.5” Hot-Swap SATA Drive Bays
2x 2.5” Internal SATA SSD Bays
4x 1 Gigabit Ethernet Ports
IPMI Remote Management
2x USB 2.0 Ports (Front)
1x USB 3.0 Port (Rear)
1x 16GB SataDOM Boot Device

Despite the entry-level price, the sub-components are all server-grade

Motherboard & Processor
The FreeNAS Mini E is based on a specially-built motherboard from ASRock which uses Intel’s Atom Denverton C3000 Series technology. It includes an integrated two core Intel® Atom CPU with a base frequency of 1.50 GHz and a maximum frequency of 2.20 GHz. This highly-efficient processor can still perform a 1080p transcode in applications like Plex.
The ASRock motherboard includes four gigabit RJ45 data ports (with full LACP support), a USB 3.0 port, two front-side USB 2.0 ports, a gigabit IPMI remote management port, UID switch, an RS232 serial port, and a VGA port. Although the motherboard has a PCIe slot, it is disabled by the CPU/chipset to maximize SATA device connectivity.

Rear-view highlights: Quad gigabit ethernet ports, whisper-quiet fans, and dedicated management port

Power Efficiency
The new C3338 Atom processors are powerful and highly efficient with a thermal design power (TDP) of only 8.5W. This allows the Mini E to achieve a baseline idle power consumption of less than 18W!
Hard drives play a significant role in overall power consumption. We build our Minis with NAS-grade hard drives to get the highest power efficiency, best acoustic performance, and best reliability. For a system fully populated with four 2TB NAS drives and two cache devices, idle power consumption is less than 36W, and under load less than 50W. With four 12TB NAS drives and two cache devices, idle power consumption is less than 38W and full-throttle power consumption is less than 56W.

Memory & Caching
Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory is the front line defense against data corruption and is one of the major features that sets the FreeNAS Mini apart from lower cost consumer-grade NAS systems. With ECC memory, single bit errors are corrected on the fly before they are written to disk, and if multiple bit errors are detected, the memory will halt the system before any data corruption is committed to disk.
The FreeNAS Mini E comes standard with 8GB DDR4 ECC memory. The motherboard has two DIMM slots and can be upgraded to 16GB RAM by adding another 8GB DIMM. Other configurable upgrades to improve performance include Read (L2ARC) and Write Cache (SLOG) SATA SSDs.

Shhhhhhhh
The FreeNAS Mini E is whisper quiet! We constantly gather customer feedback, and we found that low fan noise was a major need in many deployments where users were producing audio and video content. In designing this new product, we tested many fans to find the quietest 120mm fan on the market. If you have a sensitive work environment that requires near-silence, the FreeNAS Mini E will be a perfect match!

Drive selection matters for maintaining low noise in a NAS system! If users buy a Mini E without hard drives, pay attention to the acoustic specifications of the hard drives you select. For reference, the NAS-grade hard drives that come with our pre-built systems idle around 20-21 dBA, and Seek from 24-29 dBA, which is quiet by most spinning disk standards.

Remote Management & Administration
Another feature unique to systems in its class is the ability to manage and administer the FreeNAS Mini E’s hardware from a remote location, via the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) console. This is especially ideal when managing FreeNAS Mini E systems at remote offices or sites. Additionally, the iKVM now uses HTML5, providing remote console access without the Java maintenance headaches (version compatibility, security, etc) or the need for a physical monitor or keyboard.

The FreeNAS Mini E always ships with the latest version of FreeNAS software.

Software
And, of course, the FreeNAS Mini E comes installed with the latest version of FreeNAS and all software features enabled. The new FreeNAS 11.2 web interface offers improved usability, easier system management, and better responsiveness. FreeNAS 11.2 also supports the new TrueCommand management interface. TrueCommand provides a “single pane of glass” for managing and monitoring groups of FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems with automated alerts and customized reports. FreeNAS also provides several options to back up your data to another FreeNAS or TrueNAS system, or to a public cloud provider like AWS S3 or Backblaze B2. The upcoming FreeNAS 11.3 will provide many wizards to simplify the setup of ZFS pools, iSCSI extents, and SMB shares.

Get yours today!
The FreeNAS Mini E is available through Amazon, starting at $749 without hard drives, or $999 for a ready-to-deploy 8TB configuration. Any FreeNAS Mini can be custom-configured to your specifications and ordered through the online Mini configurator. To learn more about the FreeNAS Mini product line, visit www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/.

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DCIG: The Compelling Economic Benefits of OpenZFS Storage

iX Team — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 18:14:33 +0000

Have you had a key software vendor go from support increases of 3-5% to more than 20% annually? Have you had your key software vendor acquired and the acquirer then end development of the product? Have you had a key technology vendor exit your region at a time you were planning to expand your facilities? As an IT Director, I endured all these untimely and costly outcomes of vendor decisions. And then I discovered how to mitigate these risks through Open Source software such as OpenZFS, which solves these problems for software-defined storage.

OpenZFS Avoids the Costs of Proprietary Storage Systems

Many enterprises have endured the pain of having proprietary storage systems abandoned in one way or another by the vendor. At that point, feature enhancements stop and support ends or begins to lag. Data security can even become an issue. As a result, many enterprises have been forced into costly and time-consuming migrations or into paying punitive maintenance and support costs.
OpenZFS storage shifts power away from the vendor to the customer. OpenZFS has multiple vendors competing to provide the best value without vendor lock-in. Businesses can gain access to a complete solution with professional support, access to the community, complete documentation and source code, and an ability to migrate data easily. This competition reduces total storage costs both in terms of initial investment and long-term cost of ownership.

OpenZFS has a Rich History and an Active Ecosystem

A team of talented engineers at Sun Microsystems created ZFS in 2001. In 2005, Sun released ZFS as Open Source software as part of OpenSolaris. Consequently, ZFS was ported to multiple operating systems. In 2010, Oracle purchased Sun and stopped releasing enhancements to OpenSolaris, effectively reverting ZFS to closed source.
Development of Open Source ZFS continued, but without the coordination that Sun had provided. In 2013, OpenZFS was founded as a multivendor initiative to promote awareness of Open Source ZFS and to facilitate easier sharing of code among operating system platforms. This collaboration will ensure consistent reliability, functionality, and performance of all ZFS systems, regardless of their base Operating System (OS).
Matt Ahrens, one of the original authors of ZFS, continues to be actively involved with OpenZFS. In a recent presentation, he highlighted the degree of active open development that continues under the OpenZFS banner.

The OpenZFS website currently includes the logos of 33 companies delivering products with OpenZFS as an integral part. These include iXsystems, Datto, Delphix, Intel, Nexenta by DDN, and others. iXsystems FreeNAS and TrueNAS are the most widely deployed ZFS-based solutions, with more than one million deployed TrueNAS and FreeNAS storage systems.

OpenZFS is Scalable Open Source Enterprise Storage

ZFS is a proven file system suitable for enterprise storage. OpenZFS storage is a best-in-class open storage technology that is widely deployed in enterprises. ZFS provides a rich set of data services. These include snapshots, clones, replication, compression, and encryption.
The reliability of ZFS is very well known. Integrated into the file system is a RAID algorithm capable of single, dual, and even triple parity. All data is committed via a Redirect-on-Write model that avoids any overwrites of existing data. A Write log is maintained to ensure integrity during unexpected power events or hardware failures.
ZFS can deliver enterprise-class high availability when implemented as a dual-controller storage system. This scale-up design is familiar to, and well understood by, enterprise technology professionals.
Its multi-tiered ZFS caching architecture is both efficient and scalable. ZFS can take full advantage of ongoing advances in persistent memory. This includes the option to use low-latency NVDIMMs and NVMe SSDs, as represented in this diagram of the iXsystems TrueNAS M50 storage system. The efficiency of ZFS translates into lower costs for both storage capacity and performance.

Consequently, OpenZFS-based systems can be built to suit a wide variety of storage use cases. These include high-performance all-flash arrays for critical business applications, general-purpose storage, and secondary storage. Storage clients can use industry-standard protocols such as iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and in some cases even Fibre Channel and S3 object storage APIs to access the ZFS-based storage.

OpenZFS Delivers Compelling Economic Benefits

Enterprises can trust business-critical data to OpenZFS running on highly available dual-controller storage systems with enterprise-class commercial support. These are available as pre-configured appliances at very affordable prices. For example, iXsystems recently offered pre-configured dual-controller TrueNAS systems for purchase with raw capacities of 40 TB for $9,900 and 6 PB for $450,000. Put in public cloud terms, that is 6PB of enterprise-class storage for a one-time acquisition cost of $0.075 per GB.
Even less expensive options bring ZFS to non-HA servers for non-critical workloads. Businesses can build their own software-defined storage system by installing free OpenZFS software such as FreeNAS on servers already owned by the business. FreeNAS storage systems are also available as pre-configured appliances. These inexpensive systems can even serve as replication targets for commercially supported systems.
Organizations can further reduce operating costs by using management applications to automate administrative tasks. These include managing disk failures, updating software, analyzing capacity needs, and creating new data shares. ZFS-aware unified management systems such as TrueCommand can operate across both HA appliances and off-the-shelf servers simultaneously.

OpenZFS Gives Enterprises Control and Long-Term Cost Savings

The flexibility of OpenZFS to provide new features, services, platforms, and vendors on top of an enterprise-proven Open Source file system is a powerful proposition. OpenZFS-based storage systems empower enterprises to take control of their budgets and destinies without sacrificing data services or commercial support. When any organization is considering a new storage solution, it should give strong consideration to open storage for long-term cost savings.
*This article was written by Ken Clipperton, Lead Analyst for Storage at DCIG. The original article can be found here: https://dcig.com/2019/11/the-compelling-economic-benefits-of-openzfs-storage.html

The post DCIG: The Compelling Economic Benefits of OpenZFS Storage appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

AMD Rome Scalability is EPYC

iX Team — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 18:26:23 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

After more than a year of success and traction with the first generation AMD EPYC 7000 CPUs (formerly known as “Naples”), iXsystems has introduced AMD’s second generation EPYC 7002 processor family (formerly known as “Rome”) into its line of iX servers. AMD Rome brings exciting possibilities and truly “EPYC” value to the table with incredible scalability, increased memory speeds and bandwidth, bountiful next-gen I/O capability, and cost efficiency leadership.
EPYC 7002 is uniquely scalable from 8 to 64 cores in both single and dual socket versions. More importantly, pricing per core scales linearly, making high core count processors predictably priced and affordable at less than $80 per core. As an example, a system with a single 64-core processor has lower cost, power and space requirements than a system with two 32-core processors.

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

The architecture for EPYC processors is a major change with processor chiplets and an IO Hub. The second generation EPYC 7002 uses a 7nm process for its processors to get lower costs and improved power efficiency. Scalability is provided with more chiplets and more cores per chiplet.
The IO Hub uses a 14nm process and is the first to support PCI Gen4 with 20Gb/s per lane. This will enable 200Gb networking capabilities per NIC. With more than 128 PCIe lanes on a single socket processor, there is phenomenal bandwidth of over 250 GB/s.
The additional PCIe lanes make EPYC very well suited to NVMe drives. Each NVMe drive can support >2GB/s of bandwidth and accelerate I/O sensitive applications. You can run FreeNAS or ZFS on these NVMe drives and replicate to a TrueNAS hybrid storage system.
Initial validation and deliveries of EPYC 7002 systems have gone very well. Newer motherboards with Gen4 support have been validated with Gen4 NICs. Broadcom has a dual 100GbE NIC that can run at line rate on both ports. Our friends at Liqid have developed a stunning 32TB SSD with 24 GB/s of bandwidth using 16 lanes of PCIe Gen4.
For an in depth review of the EPYC 7002, we recommend this excellent article from ServeTheHome.

Why go to Rome?

Apart from the unique architecture, EPYC’s high core counts at lower costs are very useful in applications where cost per socket and cost per core are critical.
Virtualization software and many database applications are licensed per socket. The 64 core sockets can reduce software costs by more than 60%.
High performance compute workloads like EDA, simulation, and analytics can benefit from the higher core count per socket.
Single socket servers with high I/O requirements can also benefit from the additional PCIe lanes. Some AI/ML workloads can now use a single EPYC CPU with multiple GPUs.

These Servers are EPYC

There are many server options that can utilize AMD EPYC 7002 processors. Examples of servers that are recommended include servers for Virtualization, Analytics, and Machine Learning.
Virtualization: 2U 4Node
Each dual socket node supports 128 Cores, 1TB RAM, 6 x low cost SATA or NVMe SSDs, and 2 or more 100GbE ports. With over 500 Cores in 2U, this system delivers more than 500 VMs with a very low TCO. It’s an ideal compute node for a high performance private cloud.

Analytics: 1U Single socket
With 10 x U.2 NVMe bays and dual 100GbE ports, this system delivers extreme storage bandwidth for analytics and big data applications. Select the core count to match the application and then build out a powerful cluster.

Machine Learning: 1U with 4 GPUs
This single socket system delivers 64GB/s of bandwidth for GPUs and dual 100Gbe. It is ideally suited as the building block for an AI/ML GPU farm.

EPYC Servers Need 100GbE Storage

To get the most of 100GbE servers, there will be an increasing need for high bandwidth and cost-effective storage. The TrueNAS M-Series provides the high bandwidth iSCSI, NFS, and SMB capabilities needed to satisfy these EPYC servers. For example, ten of the 2U 4Node Virtualization Servers paired with a TrueNAS M50 (150+TB SSD storage) would deliver up to 5,000 VMs in a little over half a rack.
Contact iXsystems if you would like more information on these EPYC platforms!

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FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 make their Debuts

iX Team — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 20:47:36 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

FreeNAS 11.3 will represent another major advancement in the quality and functionality of the leading Open Storage platform. Building upon the very popular API and Web UI improvements of FreeNAS 11.2, FreeNAS 11.3 introduces easy-setup wizards, major replication improvements, and over 500 other enhancements.
FreeNAS 11.3 has now reached the important milestone of a public BETA release. Release notes with full feature descriptions and download instructions are provided in the FreeNAS Library. As with any pre-release software, we recommend against using it in production environments and make sure your data is backed up before trying it out. Please report any bugs or issues.
TrueNAS 11.3 is also inheriting an abundance of FreeNAS features from previous releases including the upgraded web UI as well as the ability to use and manage jails, plugins, and VMs. All of these features have now been integrated with TrueNAS high-availability and hardware management features. TrueNAS 11.3 is in a Preview release form and will be released after further software quality validation. TrueNAS is available on the X-Series and M-Series platforms which scale from 10TB to over 10PB with hybrid or all-flash media.
Key Features of FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 include the following:

Improved ZFS Replication: 8x performance, Parallel tasks, Auto-resume, Setup wizard
New Wizards for faster setup: iSCSI, SMB, Pools, Networking
SMB Improvements: User quotas via AD, Shadow copies, ACL manager
Plugin improvements: UI redesign, Categories, NAT reduces IP addresses
Dashboard and Reporting Improvements: Faster response, more relevant data
Configuration Management: API enables config save and audits in TrueCommand
TrueNAS Features: Web UI, HA Jails/Plugins/VMs, Graphical enclosure management

Due to a major investment in quality assurance and automated testing over the past 18 months, we are confident that there will be significant improvements in software quality and ease of use relative to Beta versions of previous releases. FreeNAS is benefiting from the large investment in software QA for TrueNAS products. TrueNAS 11.2 has been the highest quality release we have ever deployed and FreeNAS 11.2 has benefited.
In addition, a new TrueCommand release is on the way. For the uninitiated, TrueCommand is a unified management system that monitors and controls both FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems from a “single pane of glass”. TrueCommand 1.1 will be available on November 12, and chief among its new features are the ability to save system configurations and provide audit logging of any changes made to FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 systems under management.
Rest assured the iXsystems team is working around the clock to get FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 to its release phase during Q1 of 2020. Thanks to all the community members and clients who provided extensive feedback on FreeNAS 11.2. That feedback has significantly helped create a more powerful and simpler environment for managing your data. We look forward to receiving your feedback on FreeNAS 11.3.

11.3 Screenshots

The Dashboard provides an intuitive view of system status

The Replication Wizard simplifies backup between two NAS systems

The Pool Manager makes it easier to set up larger pools

TrueNAS enclosure management provides visual confirmation of drive and pool status

Plugin selection and installation is greatly simplified

About FreeNAS
FreeNAS is the leading Open Source software-defined storage operating system. With its proven OpenZFS filesystem, powerful web interface, and full suite of data protection features, FreeNAS can be installed on virtually any x86 hardware platform to create a highly-reliable and efficient storage system that is accessible over block, file, or object protocols. To optimize FreeNAS for specific solutions, an ecosystem of plugins and VMs provide media server, backup management, cloud collaboration and a variety of other network applications.
iXsystems proudly develops and maintains FreeNAS as the Community Edition of the TrueNAS Family. It has been deployed on over a million systems, from homes to Fortune 100 enterprises, and is supported by a vibrant, technical community at www.freenas.org. For organizations that need high-availability, Enterprise support, or best-in-class performance, TrueNAS appliances are available at www.ixsystems.com/TrueNAS.

The post FreeNAS and TrueNAS 11.3 make their Debuts appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Veeam Configuration Recommendations for TrueNAS

iX Team — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 20:07:41 +0000

TrueNAS® is well suited to back up and archive storage workloads. Offering incredible scalability in a single share, TrueNAS systems can continuously extend storage pools to grow to several petabytes in size without the need for clustering. For users looking to deploy Veeam, or to update their storage repositories, TrueNAS is the ideal data target.

Data integrity first
Checksums, copy-on-write, unlimited snapshots, and replication are all native to TrueNAS. The OpenZFS file system is designed for data integrity first to ensure files saved to the storage pool are kept intact as long as needed. Any changes are recorded and checked, while the snapshots can be cloned and replicated to separate systems. Deploying multiple TrueNAS or FreeNAS systems allows for easy disaster recovery at no extra cost. For backup and archival, no storage helps protect against corruption more than TrueNAS.

Updated guidelines for Veeam
Certified on release, iXsystems has updated its recommendations for sizing and optimizing performance for Veeam workloads. The quick reference guide is designed to help explain the features and optimum configurations used when benchmarking Veeam backup. For more information view the guide at the link here.
Key highlights:

TrueNAS is Veeam certified and scales to over 7.5 PB in a single share.
Increasing proxies and using a scale-out repository dramatically improve performance.
Capacity must also take into account storage snapshots; plan for more than the current online systems use for optimal data recovery and recovery.
More information about setting an iSCSI or SMB share, and links to Veeam Best Practices all included.

Contact Us
For more information, you can visit our page to learn more about backups, replication, and disaster recovery with TrueNAS. We’ve conducted countless backup deployments and have decades of experience in providing storage and server solutions driven by Open Source for thousands of clients, many which have been with us for over a decade. Learn more about TrueNAS by emailing info@ixsystems.com, or calling 1.855.GREP.4.IX.

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iXsystems Supports the Iozone Benchmarking Lab with a FreeNAS Certified System

iX Team — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 17:40:32 +0000

This year, iXsystems donated a FreeNAS Certified storage array to the Iozone test lab in support of its important benchmarking research and development activities. The FreeNAS Certified system provides an ideal mix of open standard protocol support, consistent performance, 10 GbE networking, performance monitoring, and ease of administration to bring a new level of efficiency to the project.
Developing a storage performance benchmark can be done with as little as one computer, but validating the behavior of that benchmark takes an entire high-performance test lab. Don Capps, maintainer of the Iozone benchmark and primary developer of netmist, the load generator used by the SPEC SFS® 2014 benchmark, maintains an extensive performance test lab. This lab serves many functions:

Development of new benchmark features
Regression testing of new benchmark releases
Evaluation of new storage technologies and protocols

“Iozone.org develops and distributes file system benchmarking software for a vast array of different platforms and operating systems. SPEC and Iozone.org collaboratively develop the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark, which is an industry standard benchmark used by vendors and customers to measure the performance of their network storage file servers. The SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark is also used by SNIA and the EPA in its Energy Star for Data Center Storage certification.”

– Don Capps

All of the benchmarking software that SPEC produces is vendor-neutral, and the SPEC SFS benchmark has been protocol-agnostic since the release of SPEC SFS 2014. Systems running NFS, SMB, Lustre, GPFS, or even iSCSI can use these software benchmarking products, and this testing can be done from a wide variety of client platform types. These client nodes can be homogeneous or heterogeneous platform types such as a mix of Windows and Unix operating systems. The benchmarks may also generate activity over multiple protocols within a single test including NFS, SMB, and iSCSI over any network interconnect.
Because of the popularity of the Iozone and SPEC SFS benchmarks with industry partners around the globe, it is critical that these software products are tested for correctness, neutrality, portability, integrity, and reliability. All platforms undergo this testing and certification process inside what’s known as the Iozone.org “test ring”. While there are numerous types of clients that run this benchmarking software, including Windows, AIX, BSD, MacOS, Linux, and Solaris, the one thing they can all leverage is a sturdy, high-performance, and flexible storage system that can be used to validate that the protocols, clients, and software are all working correctly.

This is where the iXsystems FreeNAS Certified server steps in. It provides the backbone of Iozone.org’s testing and validation for SMB, NFS, and iSCSI for all of the various vendor clients that are in the test ring.

“I use the FreeNAS for testing while developing industry standard benchmarks. It’s quite nimble, and easy to use while providing excellent performance for all of my benchmark development and testing.”

– Don Capps

This donation will play a key behind-the-scenes role for the important work that Don and his team do on behalf of vendors, SPEC members, companies, and users around the world who are all committed to consistent storage benchmarking.
Nick Principe, Performance Engineering Supervisor

The post iXsystems Supports the Iozone Benchmarking Lab with a FreeNAS Certified System appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Overview of Datasets and Snapshots in FreeNAS

iX Team — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 18:37:10 +0000

In this blog, we are going to cover creating datasets and configuring snapshots after you’ve already set up pools on FreeNAS.

A dataset is like a directory or a folder in your storage pool. When a user or application accesses the dataset, they will only be able to view or modify files that are in that dataset. Users can view or edit files depending on the permissions of the dataset and of the files and folders therein. We will talk about dataset permissions in the next section.

A dataset gives you a bit more control over how its data is stored than a traditional folder would. For example, each dataset can have different compression, deduplication, or quota settings. These settings can be applied separately from the rest of the file systems. Just like with folders, datasets can be nested within one another. Nested datasets can either inherit properties from their “parent” dataset or be set with their own, unique properties.

First, go to “Storage” then “Pools”. Click the arrow to expand the pool. This will show a list of datasets on that pool. It will also show any ZVOLs that you may have created for iSCSI shares. Both zvols and iSCSI will be covered in a later video. Click the three dots on the right then click “Add Dataset”. Give the dataset a name; we will call it “mydataset”. We recommend that you leave the compression level as lz4, which is both capacity efficient and performs well. Choose the Share Type that matches the type of system you will access the share from. If you click “ADVANCED MODE”, you can define a quota for this specific dataset. When you are done, click “SAVE”.

Next, we are going to make a ZFS snapshot. A snapshot preserves your data exactly as it was the instant it was created.

Go back to “Storage”, then “Pools”. Expand the pool to show a list of the datasets. Click the three dots on the right for the pool or dataset you want to create a snapshot for, then click “Create Snapshot”. Give it a name. Checking the Recursive box will set it to include child datasets of the chosen dataset. Then click “Create Snapshot”.

Once the snapshot is created, the filesystem state at that time is preserved. As the live filesystem data is changed, the snapshot will remain static. The snapshot will only consume disk space equal to the amount of data that has changed since the snapshot was taken. For example, if you snapshot a dataset with 100TB of data, the snapshot initially takes up only a few kilobytes for its metadata. If you then change 1GB of data from the live dataset by deleting it or modifying it, the snapshot will take up 1GB of disk space.

Now let’s look at how to restore your volume to that snapshot. Before performing this step, note that doing so permanently deletes all data added after that snapshot. Go to “Storage”, then “Snapshots”. Here you will see a list of the manual and automatic snapshots. Select the snapshot you want to rollback to and click the three dots, then click “Rollback”. It will ask you if you want to continue with the rollback. Click “Yes”.

Cloning a Snapshot
An alternative to rolling back to a previous snapshot is to clone the snapshot. You might do this if you need to retrieve old data, but do not want to undo all changes since the snapshot. The cloned dataset can be deleted once you are done retrieving data.

Select the snapshot you want to clone and click the three dots, then click “Clone”. It will generate the name of the original snapshot with “clone” added. Click “Save” to continue. You’ll now be taken to the “Pools” window. When you clone the snapshot, it creates a dataset with a copy of what the snapshot of the dataset contained. Note that this clone is writable, too! Cloned snapshots are also a great way to create test environments with existing data.

Periodic Snapshot Tasks
If you don’t want to manually create snapshots every time you want to preserve your dataset’s state, you can take snapshots automatically. Go to “Tasks” then “Periodic Snapshot Tasks”. Click “Add”. You can choose a Pool or Dataset from the drop-down list that you want to create an automatic snapshot for. Choose the lifetime and frequency of the snapshots.

Make sure the “Enabled” box is checked. When you are done click “SAVE”. You should now see an entry under the Periodic Snapshot Tasks. In this example, they will be created every hour from 9AM to 6PM Monday through Friday. They have a lifetime of 2 weeks before they are deleted automatically.

Thank you for reading this tutorial! Be sure to check out our other tutorial videos on our YouTube channel.

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IBC 2019 Conference Recap

iX Team — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 19:32:30 +0000

The International Broadcasters Convention has grown since 1967 to over 1700 exhibitors and over 50,000 attendees. Taking place in Amsterdam RAI each September, the event is a perfect place for organizations around the world to meet up with their European partners, customers, and advocates. iXsystems attended with our partner Cantemo iconik to announce the release of the iconik storage gateway plugin for FreeNAS®. The same plugin will be available for TrueNAS in version 11.3.

The conference was fantastic, as we met up with old and new friends alike. Users from all corners of the EMEA region who had been using either iconik or FreeNAS/TrueNAS were interested in the joint solution.

Running the iconik storage gateway on FreeNAS helps users automate file uploads to a media asset manager (MAM), but also allows cloud accessibility with the performance and economics of on-premise storage. Iconik’s media asset management platform hosts proxy files in the cloud that are auto-generated and only use a minimal amount of space, while RAW or source files remain safe on the FreeNAS system with all the protection OpenZFS provides. The same benefits will apply to the entire TrueNAS family.

New advances in data management, recording, and augmented reality were in prime view at the show. Right across from our shared booth, other vendors were demonstrating tracking technology that imposes 3D objects on top of set objects with a dynamic green screen producing real time graphics both interactive and photo-realistic. File sizes are exploding, and it’s up to storage vendors to keep up and adjust. The TrueNAS family, which is scalable to petabytes in size is perfect for nearline or tier 2 storage, with the performance of tier 1 for smaller teams of editors. It’s perfect for the space.
Several new partners and customers came to our booth 7.D67, and it was truly a pleasure to meet every one of them. We’re sincerely looking forward to better serving the EMEA market, particularly the media and entertainment industry, in the coming months and years.
To find out more about the iconik storage gateway plugin click here. As always feel free to contact us for any further questions or inquiries.

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Media Editing at All-Flash Speeds

iX Team — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 19:25:24 +0000

Media editing needs speed, and high-end workstations are only one piece of the puzzle. Powerful NAS storage performance is critical for 4K and 8K video editing with a team of editors. Not only does the storage have to stream and write video at multi-gigabit speeds, but editors may “scrub” (scroll through) many video feeds simultaneously and saturate storage bandwidth and 10 GbE networks.
Each media editor needs a seamless experience without dropped frames or any slowdown, so focus stays on video quality and not on storage issues. Our goal is to make it easy to provide this editing storage performance with Open Source economics.

FreeNAS with All-Flash

iXsystems has been building FreeNAS systems with all-flash for a few years now. Every year, it gets faster and cheaper as more users make the switch to all-flash for their performance workloads.
Recently, Linus Sebastian (LinusTechTips) and Patrick Kennedy (ServeTheHome) produced a video and a blog documenting their use of FreeNAS on an All-Flash server for a 12 workstation video production environment. The 100 TB flash system with RAIDZ2 (RAID6) config across 26 SSDs and 4 x 10 GbE saturated the network and even CPU bandwidth of a dozen workstations simultaneously running Adobe® Premiere®. This was achieved using hardware costing roughly as much or less than proprietary storage systems still using traditional hard drives.

FreeNAS “Centurion” meets the Challenge

Per the video, the system designed was a 100 TB All-Flash system with a budget of around USD 35,000. This system was possible due to the new price points of SATA SSDs in the marketplace today, and the system only factored in parts cost, not time and expertise needed to install and configure the system.
iXsystems is now offering a special 2U FreeNAS Certified system to meet the same requirements – preassembled, preloaded and ready to deploy. After optimizing the “Centurion” system for performance and cost, we found we can deliver a full FreeNAS All-Flash 100TB system for $24,900. That price also includes dual 100GbE or 6x10GbE ports. With over 100Gb/s bandwidth and the latest all-flash SSDs, the “Centurion” is ready to take your editing environment to a whole new level.

Check out the specs here and contact us to make the switch to All-Flash media editing.

Storage Options for Every Stage of Production

While the “Centurion” is optimized around a specific requirement for capacity and performance. Larger organizations with more complex requirements may require many systems, tiers of storage, high-availability, and 24/7 support. FreeNAS systems are perfect as edge devices, while TrueNAS offers 99.999% availability for mission-critical applications, and both can work together seamlessly.
iXsystems can spec-out and support the best-fit storage solution for any workload(s) spanning an entire production flow. Other systems that might be used in a production flow include:

Deep-archiving – 6 PB TrueNAS system with 504 x 12TB HDDs which is ideally suited to video archiving of many thousands of hours of HD video footage.
Small-office / home-office – Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome also recently reviewed our FreeNAS Mini XL+ with dual 10GbE. It’s a compact, lower power system that has the performance for a small video editing environment. It can be loaded with SSDs or HDDs.

Talk to iX

Find out more from the iXsystems media and entertainment solution page. For any questions, please contact us to talk to a storage expert, and we can help configure, size, and price a system that meets (and exceeds) your needs.

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Mount a TrueNAS or FreeNAS Share to a Docker Host

iX Team — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 20:21:15 +0000

This blog will go over the steps necessary to create a share in FreeNAS and then use that as storage in a Docker container. FreeNAS has the functionality to act as either independent storage or as a storage server with Docker running in a virtual machine (VM). Many users with existing Docker environments, however, may be more interested in pointing their host system to a FreeNAS share. This piece will demonstrate using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as the host system and FreeNAS as a separate storage target. Developers on other operating systems with Docker environments can follow similar steps.
TrueNAS users can follow the same process and provide high-availability (HA) shares to their Docker hosts. With the upcoming TrueNAS 11.3 release, the TrueNAS web interface will also be similar to the FreeNAS web interface shown in this blog.
Setup the Dataset and Share
Go to the FreeNAS web interface and click on Storage -> Pools. Click the three-dot menu on the right of the master dataset and click Add Dataset.

Fill in a name for the dataset and select any other desired settings. Defaults are fine for this example.

Click on the three-dot menu on the right of the new dataset and select Edit Permissions. Allow Owner, Group, Other Read, Write, and Execute access. This setting could also be more tightly controlled if users on the Docker host are configured properly, though the containers may need write access for certain tasks.

Go to Shares and select Unix (NFS) Shares. Select the new dataset as the Path and click All dirs.

Go to Services and ensure NFS is running.

Set up the Docker Container on the Ubuntu Host
Ensure Docker and Docker Compose are installed. Docker Compose is not necessary, but that is the method this example uses and is an easy way to edit and manage multiple different kinds of containers without having to re-enter long commands in the terminal. Click here to find out more about the Docker installation.
This blog will cover a basic Docker container running an HTTPD service, and pointing its source files at a mounted folder from the FreeNAS share.
Create a new directory to run the container called apache_test. In that new directory, create another to store the files called data.

In the terminal, mount the FreeNAS share to the data directory. Type sudo mount [FreeNAS IP address / DNS name ]:/mnt/[NFS share]/ data.

Outside of the apache_test directory, create a docker-compose.yml file. This is the configuration file that names the container, and the volume we want to share. Using a text editor add the info as shown. This example follows the httpd Docker image.

Note: The volumes: section sets the data directory as the HTTPD source directory with the host path (now mounted to FreeNAS) first followed by the container’s path.
Create a Dockerfile inside the apache_test directory. This file tells Docker which image(s) to use and whether to expose any ports.

Note: There is no file extension for the Dockerfile.
Final directory structure:

In the terminal of the Ubuntu host, navigate to the folder with the docker-compose.yml file and type sudo docker-compose up. Docker will start, fetch the necessary images, and bring up the service.

TIP: If you run into any trouble starting the container, and both Docker and Docker Compose are correctly installed, check the spacing in the docker-compose.yml file. There are two spaces before each indent.
Open a web browser and type 127.0.0.1 or localhost in the navigation bar.

Add HTML files to the data folder from the Ubuntu host system, or another system that can access the FreeNAS share. Just as with a normal website, all files can be navigated to after the slash, i.e. localhost/test.html.

All files in the data folder are accessible to multiple editors or even multiple containers if you need to run a distributed system or load balancing. Best of all, they are protected by the robust ZFS file system with unlimited snapshots, recoveries, data scrubbing, and checksums to prevent data corruption or loss.

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ZFS vs. OpenZFS

iX Team — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 20:30:04 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

You’ve probably heard us say a mix of “ZFS” and “OpenZFS” and an explanation is long-overdue. Our Senior Analyst clears up what ZFS and OpenZFS refer to and how they differ.

I admit that we geeks tend to get caught up in the nuts and bolts of enterprise storage and overlook the more obvious questions that users might have. You’ve probably noticed that this blog and the FreeNAS blog refer to “ZFS” and “OpenZFS” seemingly at random when talking about the amazing file system at the heart of FreeNAS and every storage product that iXsystems sells. I will do my best to clarify what exactly these two terms refer to.

From its inception, “ZFS” has referred to the “Zettabyte File System” developed at Sun Microsystems and published under the CDDL Open Source license in 2005 as part of the OpenSolaris operating system. ZFS was revolutionary for completely decoupling the file system from specialized storage hardware and even a specific computer platform. The portable nature and advanced features of ZFS led FreeBSD, Linux, and even Apple developers to start porting ZFS to their operating systems and by 2008, FreeBSD shipped with ZFS in the 7.0 release. For the first time, ZFS empowered users of any budget with enterprise-class scalability and data integrity and management features like checksumming, compression and snapshotting, and those features remain unrivaled at any price to this day. On any ZFS platform, administrators use the zpool and zfs utilities to configure and manage their storage devices and file systems respectively. Both commands employ a user-friendly syntax such as‘zfs create mypool/mydataset’ and I welcome you to watch the appropriately-titled webinar “Why we love ZFS & you should too” or try a completely-graphical ZFS experience with FreeNAS.

Yes, ZFS is really as good as people say it is.

After enjoying nearly a decade of refinement by a growing group of developers around the world, ZFS became the property of database vendor Oracle, which ceased public development of both ZFS and OpenSolaris in 2010. Disappointed but undeterred, a group of OpenSolaris users and developers forked the last public release of OpenSolaris as the Illumos project. While most if not all users of Illumos and its derivatives are ZFS users, the majority of ZFS users are not Illumos users, thanks significantly in part to FreeNAS which uses the FreeBSD operating system. This imbalance plus several successful ZFS Day events led ZFS co-founder Matt Ahrens and a group of ZFS developers to announce the OpenZFS project, which would remain a part of the Illumos code base but would be free to coordinate development efforts and events around their favorite file system. ZFS Day has grown into the two-day OpenZFS Developer Summit and is stronger than ever, a testament to the passion and dedication of the OpenZFS community.

Oracle has steadily continued to develop its own proprietary branch of ZFS and Matt Ahrens points out that over 50% of the original OpenSolaris ZFS code has been replaced in OpenZFS with community contributions. This means that there are, sadly, two politically and technologically-incompatible branches of “ZFS” but fortunately, OpenZFS is orders of magnitude more popular thanks to its open nature. The two projects should be referred to as “Oracle ZFS” and “OpenZFS” to distinguish them as development efforts, but the user still types the ‘zfs’ command, which on FreeBSD relies on the ‘zfs.ko’ kernel module. My impression is that the terms of the CDDL license under which the OpenZFS branch of ZFS is published protects its users from any patent and trademark risks. Hopefully, this all helps you distinguish the OpenZFS project from the ZFS technology.

June 2019 Update

As readers have correctly pointed out, the role of ZFS on Linux a.k.a. “ZoL” is a hot topic. OpenZFS has been experiencing rapid development on Illumos, FreeBSD, and GNU/Linux in recent years which has led to feature inconsistency and potential feature incompatibility. Recognizing what a disservice OpenZFS fragmentation would be to the community, the OpenZFS Project leadership is discussing how to encourage OpenZFS feature compatibility through various mechanisms such as a month and year that represent a specific set of OpenZFS features that can be expected on multiple platforms. In parallel, iXsystems is upstreaming native FreeBSD support into the ZoL code base to make the ZoL code base truly platform-agnostic. This will help the OpenZFS project reach its goal of unification on a common upstream OpenZFS source code repo for all supported platforms. This is significant, considering that OpenZFS is undergoing testing on NetBSD and Windows and this work will allow FreeNAS 12 to deliver the latest OpenZFS features. Please help test the new OpenZFS kernel module and userland tools on FreeBSD to accelerate this unification!

Michael Dexter, Senior Analyst

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Backup Evolved: Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS

iX Team — Fri, 31 May 2019 20:05:31 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hundreds of thousands of FreeNAS systems are deployed around the world and can now be used as a turnkey backup solution with Asigra. Users can run the Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS to enable fully agentless backup of all the devices on their network.

Asigra automatically gathers data from desktops, laptops, servers, mobile devices, and even cloud sources. Backup data is compressed, encrypted, and deduplicated before being sent to your FreeNAS system for safekeeping.

Asigra also incorporates a sophisticated signature-less malware detection engine that identifies and quarantines unauthorized or malicious embedded code, including unknown and zero-day attacks, from penetrating backup and replication streams. By continually scanning backup data, ransomware attacks can be detected and prevented automatically.

Asigra Backup Features

Full range of backup sources
Fully agentless backup
Global data deduplication
Full encryption with FIPS support
Defeats ransomware attack loops
Rapid restoration
Automatic file versioning
Point-in-time restoration

For more information about the Asigra product, please refer to the datasheet.

Free Community Version
The Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS is free to download and use without any purchase or contract along with FreeNAS version 11.2-U4 or later. The Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS provides backup capability for up to 10 systems and 10 cloud accounts at no charge, which is perfect for small businesses or as a trial of the Asigra functionality for broader use. The free license of the Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS is available with community-based support. Fully supported Asigra subscription services are also available for larger enterprise use.
The Asigra platform relies on two primary components: the DS-System (hosted by the FreeNAS plugin) and the DS-Client (which can be hosted in some other Windows- or Linux-based environment). The DS-Client will fetch data from local endpoints and transmit that backup data to the DS-System on the FreeNAS. The DS-Client can also hold backup data on its own local storage, but this local backup is limited to 1TB in the community edition of the plugin. By connecting the DS-Client to the DS-System, the backup set size is unlimited. The Asigra DS-System setup guides below go into more detail on how to properly connect the two services.
The standard Asigra license is based on the number of systems and cloud accounts backed up. For information about pricing, please contact Asigra at info@asigra.com.

Asigra for Enterprise Use
Asigra on TrueNAS enterprise storage systems was released in September 2018 with version 11.1-U7. Since that time, many enterprise customers have deployed Asigra TrueNAS systems to back up their critical infrastructure.

Installing the Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS
The Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS is installed like any other FreeNAS plugin. A typical small business deployment for the Asigra FreeNAS plugin will look like the diagram below. The Asigra plugin on FreeNAS acts as the Asigra DS-System (Storage Target) and an Asigra DS-Client (Backup Agent) is deployed as a VM on a server or on a FreeNAS unit. The same FreeNAS unit can also perform both Asigra functions for a small business environment.

Before installing the Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS, ensure that your FreeNAS system is running version 11.2-U4 or later.

1. Log in to your FreeNAS web UI.
2. Expand the Plugins menu on the left navigation bar, and click Available.
3. Under Available Plugins, click the three dots beside the Asigra Backup plugin, and then click Install.

4. On the plugin configuration screen, you can optionally configure additional settings for the Asigra DS-System plugin jail. When you are finished, click Save.
Note: The Asigra plugin supports DHCP or a static IP address for its jail, but a static IP address is recommended. To set a static IP address, clear the DHCP box, select an IPv4 interface, and then enter an IP address and netmask. When you are finished, click Save.

5. When the installation is complete, expand the Plugins menu on the left navigation bar, and click Installed.
6. Under Installed Plugins, click the three dots beside the Asigra plugin, and then click Register.

Once the installation is complete, select ‘Available’ from the ‘Plugins’ menu on the left navigation bar and the Asigra plugin will be listed. You can click the three dots on the right side of the row to control the plugin. Start by selecting “Register” in this menu to create your free trial login information on Asigra’s site. You can then launch the Management interface by selecting “Management”:

7. Follow the instructions on the the Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS registration page to create and register your free Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS trial account.
8. After you have completed the registration process, under Installed Plugins, click the three dots beside the Asigra plugin, and then click Management.

This will download and launch the Java-based DS-System management interface (DS-Operator) and you can begin using the Asigra Plugin for FreeNAS.
For additional information on using the Asigra platform, please refer to the following user guides:

DS-Operator User Guide: This guide describes how to manage the DS-System running in the FreeNAS plugin using the DS-Operator interface (accessed through the Management link on the plugin listing).
DS-Client Installation Guide: This guide describes how to install the DS-Client software which aggregates backup content from endpoints and transmits it to the DS-System service.
DS-Client Management Guide: This guide describes how to manage the DS-Client after it has been successfully installed at one or more locations.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS with Integrated Asigra Backup
iXsystems is committed to providing the community with an excellent open source platform for storage and plugins. FreeNAS is increasingly popular with home users, in labs, and with SOHO deployments, while TrueNAS appliances continue to deliver great value to enterprises, universities, schools, studio design houses, and other organizations. With Asigra backup now available on both platforms, everyone can enjoy enterprise backup with turnkey simplicity!

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Back Up Plugins and Jails on FreeNAS

iX Team — Wed, 22 May 2019 21:35:57 +0000

For years, FreeNAS has offered functionality expansion through premade plugins and jails. In Version 11.2, the management platform was updated to make it even easier to manage and create new plugins.
FreeNAS users can treat their NAS as a server. Advanced services running on top of the ultra-secure ZFS file system allow streaming and managing media, running a website, and even handling surveillance. As usage becomes more versatile and valuable, protecting plugins and jails becomes even more important. Luckily, FreeNAS makes it easy with the ZFS file system.
Plugins and jails are stored in the iocage dataset, which is created automatically when the first plugin or jail is installed. Users can create snapshots of the entire dataset or sub-directories of individual plugins and jails. If an issue occurs, the user can roll back a jail to a previous state.

Going a step further, snapshots can also be replicated to other FreeNAS or TrueNAS systems to aid with disaster recovery and data protection. If there are replacements or upgrades to the hardware, these images and their data can be moved over to new systems with ease.

Creating Snapshots:
Go to Storage -> Pools in the FreeNAS web interface and locate the iocage dataset.
Open the options menu (three dots) and select Create Snapshot. Enter a name and click CREATE SNAPSHOT. Snapshots can be regularly taken after a defined amount of time by going to Tasks -> Periodic Snapshots and selecting the appropriate dataset.

To test or rollback the iocage dataset, go to Storage -> Snapshots, find the snapshot to recover, and click Rollback.

This graphic demonstrates the effectiveness of rolling back a dataset. A snapshot of Storage/iocage/jails/FAMP is created. Text file test.txt is then added to the jail. After rolling back the dataset to the snapshot image, test.txt is gone.

This overview demonstrates how effectively FreeNAS protects jails and plugins with snapshots. Using snapshots and replication preserves your valuable data and can save you many hours of recovery time.
For more tips on using FreeNAS, go to our forums and iX University. Jails and Plugins are also coming to TrueNAS in version 11.3. If your organization is looking for a specific deployment with enterprise support, please contact us.

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Make FreeNAS your Server OS

iX Team — Fri, 17 May 2019 22:47:53 +0000

What if you could have a server OS that had built in RAID, NAS and SAN functionality, and could manage packages, containers and VMs in a GUI? What if that server OS was also free to download and install?

Wouldn’t that be kind of awesome?

Wouldn’t that be FreeNAS?
FreeNAS is the world’s number one, open source storage OS, but it also comes equipped with all the jails, plugins, and VMs you need to run additional server-level services for things like email and web site hosting. File, Block, and even Object storage is all built-in and can be enabled with a few clicks. The ZFS file system scales to more drives than you could ever buy, with no limits for dataset sizes, snapshots, and restores.
FreeNAS is also 100% FreeBSD. This is the OS used in the Netflix CDN, your PS4, and the basis for iOS. Set up a jail and get started downloading packages like Apache or NGINX for web hosting or Postfix for email service.

Not familiar with FreeBSD and need to run Windows applications? FreeNAS has you covered! The FreeNAS web interface allows you to create a small partition in your storage pool (zvol) and install Windows Server as a VM. You can even create an SMB share from FreeNAS that maps to both your work client and the Windows Server. This functionality lets you use FreeNAS to share files seamlessly between a work client and Windows Server. FreeNAS is also independent of the Windows environment, with great snapshot and recovery functions to ensure your data is safe.
Linux user? FreeNAS also supports virtualizing Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RedHat, or any other Linux distro. SMB and NFS are available on FreeNAS and supports mounting those shares across your workstations and server VMs.

Most importantly, FreeNAS handles all of this with ease using a robust web interface. The UI makes it easy to start expanding functionality with a universe of plugins from media streaming (Plex), torrent management and downloads, and surveillance (Zoneminder). Plugins are installed as a predefined FreeBSD jail, which is a container-like solution.
FreeNAS is not just a NAS, it’s a NAS+SAN+Server+Hypervisor+Jail Manager+ one heck of an OS. FreeNAS has all the functions you need for edge devices, remote servers, home data, and most small offices. All of this is contained in an easy-to-use interface.

Give it a try and find out why FreeNAS is an exceptional server OS for data-centric applications.

Looking for hardware? Our range of FreeNAS Minis is perfect for small and medium office use. iXsystems™ offers a full line of customizable and Certified hardware that scales from terabytes to petabytes.
If you need more robust support and mission-critical data management or backup, check out our TrueNAS line of products. TrueNAS systems include high-availability and enable your applications to run with “five nines” availability.

Just released, our new TrueCommand management platform also streamlines alerts and enables multi-system monitoring.

Our team is here to help you lower TCO and improve your workflow. Feel free to contact us to find out more.

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Overview of ZFS Pools in FreeNAS

iX Team — Wed, 15 May 2019 21:41:58 +0000

This blog provides an overview of creating pools after installing FreeNAS.

To begin, we are going to create a pool so storage disks can be allocated and shared. Head over to Storage, then Pools. This window lists all pools and datasets currently on your FreeNAS machine, and will not have any entries until you create a new pool or import a previously created pool. Click Add to create a new pool (or import an existing pool), then give it a name. NOTE: Some naming restrictions apply

Encryption can be used to protect sensitive data when removing a disk from your system. Encryption must be managed VERY carefully as you can potentially lose all access to your data if you forget the passphrase or lose the encryption keys.
FreeNAS uses the OpenZFS (ZFS) file system, which handles both disk and volume management. ZFS offers RAID options mirror, stripe, and its own parity distribution called RAIDZ that functions like RAID5 on hardware RAID. The file system is extremely flexible and secure, with various drive combinations, checksums, snapshots, and replications all possible. For a deeper dive on ZFS technology, read the ZFS Primer section of the FreeNAS documentation.

In ZFS, drives are logically grouped together into one or more vdevs. Each vdev can combine physical drives in a number of different configurations. If you have multiple vdevs, the pool data is striped across all the vdevs.
NOTE: If an entire vdev in a pool fails, all data on that pool will be lost. Ensure you have both redundant drives and hot spares ready to protect against data loss. We’ll be discussing the different RAIDZ options and vdev layouts below.
SUGGEST LAYOUT attempts to balance usable capacity and redundancy by automatically choosing an ideal vdev layout for the number of available disks.

The following vdev layout options are available when creating a pool:

Stripe data is shared on two drives, similar to RAID0)
Mirror copies data on two drives, similar to RAID1 but not limited to 2 disks)
RAIDZ1 single parity similar to RAID5
RAIDZ2 double parity similar to RAID6
RAIDZ3 which uses triple parity and has no RAID equivalent

The first vdev option is Stripe which simply combines all the disks into one single volume. A striped pool provides the best performance and most storage. However, since there is no redundancy, any disk failure will result in the loss of all data on the pool.

Mirroring, similar to RAID1, duplicates the data across every drive in the vdev. Because the pool data is striped across all the vdevs, a pool with multiple mirrored vdevs behaves sort of like a RAID 1+0 array. This setup has excellent redundancy and performance. As long as the mirrored vdev has at least one functional drive, your data will still be intact. Read operations can be read from all the drives, and writes are spread across all the vdevs. The downside to pools of mirrored vdevs is the high capacity penalty. As an example, to get 10TB of usable space, you would need over 20TB of RAW capacity.

RAIDZ1 (similar in concept to RAID5) offers a higher capacity while maintaining a layer of protection for the data. RAIDZ1 requires at least three disks per vdev and consumes one drive’s worth of capacity for parity protection distributed across all the drives. While RAIDZ1 does offer more protection than a simple striped pool, using RAIDZ1 is generally discouraged. With large 6+ TB drives, resilvering an array will usually take several hours. The resilvering operation puts a high load on the disks; if you’re using RAIDZ1 and any disk in the faulted vdev fails during resilver, the whole pool will fail with it.

Because RAIDZ1 is vulnerable to total pool failures during a resilver operation, we typically recommend using RAIDZ2 for backup and file-sharing configurations. Similar to RAID6, RAIDZ2 adds a second set of parity data to the vdev, again distributed across all the disks. You can lose up to two disks per vdev while maintaining data integrity, meaning RAIDZ2 is safer than RAIDZ1 but has a greater capacity penalty. RAIDZ2 requires a minimum of four disks.
RAIDZ3 adds a third set of parity data to the vdev. It requires at least five disks but allows you to lose up to three disks per vdev without any data loss. This could be good for very large disk arrays handling data archiving, but generally not used due to the performance impact of triple-parity. iXsystems typically recommends multiple RAIDZ2 vdevs grouped into a large pool for ultra-high capacity builds.
For additional information on ZFS Pools and how their configurations can affect performance, read our blog: Six Metrics for Measuring ZFS Pool Performance.
A hot Spare is a drive that isn’t used for storage but instead will immediately replace a failed drive in the pool. Because the pool is most vulnerable while it’s in a degraded state (i.e. it has failed drives, but is still functioning), it’s very important to begin the pool resilver operation as soon as possible. Having a hot spare in the pool ensures that this operation will start immediately, so it’s highly recommended to have a hot spare in your pool if you have space for one.
After you’ve selected a vdev layout, click Create to continue.

You should now see your newly created pool listed here.
Make sure to check out all of the FreeNAS tutorial videos on our YouTube channel. You can also find more information about managing pools in the FreeNAS Documentation here.

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Run S3 Object Storage on FreeNAS and TrueNAS

iX Team — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 08:05:53 +0000

This is historic content that may contain outdated information. For the newest information on FreeNAS and TrueNAS, please visit TrueNAS.com or read our latest Blogs.

S3 is an object storage provided by many major cloud providers including Amazon Web Services™ and is well suited for storing unstructured data like multimedia files (video, audio, photos) and big data. TrueNAS and FreeNAS run Minio object storage as a native service, allowing NAS storage to act as an S3 storage target with standard S3 APIs.
The video below and the more-detailed quick guide discuss how to set up the S3 service on FreeNAS, as well as how to connect several S3 tools to the storage.
With Plugins, Jails, Docker, VMs, S3 object storage, and cost savings of up to 80% compared to renting cloud storage, FreeNAS and TrueNAS are the perfect storage platforms for developers and web service providers.

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Sync Files to Dropbox with TrueNAS or FreeNAS

iX Team — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 16:38:07 +0000

Dropbox is one of the most common file-sharing services around, with over 500 million registered users and 400 billion pieces of content. The platform makes it easy to upload content, share links to files, and has free and business versions so organizations can tailor how they wish to implement.
Syncing FreeNAS or TrueNAS with Dropbox has many advantages:

Organizations may have a particular dataset on their local NAS accessible via Dropbox for external partners, remote users, or those on a business trip.
Individuals or organizations using Dropbox as a business solution may have local backups of Dropbox files so Dropbox space can be freed up periodically, risk-free.
Developers using Dropbox for online assets can easily publish and archive deliverables by copying to a NAS share and letting the NAS handle the upload to Dropbox.
Users might want to use a Dropbox auto-update folder without having to install Dropbox on their computer or mobile device.

Step 1: Go to your Dropbox account, click on the three dots on the lower right-hand side, and choose Developers. Click Create apps to open the DBX platform and create an app. This process is needed to create a unique access token which FreeNAS and TrueNAS use to identify the account and files.

Step 2: After the app is created, generate the key by clicking Generate access token.

Step 3: In the FreeNAS or TrueNAS web interface set up your Cloud Credentials under System ➡️ Cloud Credentials. Select Dropbox from the menu and copy in your access token.

Step 4: Save, then go to the Tasks section. Under Cloud Sync Tasks, select your Dropbox account and schedule a sync task. Select the folder on the FreeNAS or TrueNAS system. This can be an existing dataset to sync to Dropbox or a new dataset to back up files in your Dropbox share.
Note: Set the kind of sync needed (Push or Pull) and how to transfer the content: Sync, Copy, or Move.

Sync copies any changes from the source system to the destination.
Copy copies new files. Files deleted on the host are not deleted on the destination.
Move copies files to the destination, then deletes them from the source after the transfer is complete.

Step 5: The Cloud Sync is ready to run at the set time. In the example, FreeNAS is the backup target for a Dropbox account, providing several good features:

A FreeNAS or TrueNAS likely has far more capacity than the Dropbox account.
Files are protected in case users delete them from the account accidentally.
Snapshots can protect files from malware.
The dataset can be shared over SMB, NFS, WebDAV, or AFP to a local network for faster access.

Step 6: Check the files. In this example, the Cloud Sync pulled files from Dropbox to the FreeNAS dataset. Creating an SMB, NFS, or WebDAV share of the dataset makes it possible to see if the files are available. If the transfer is set to push data from the FreeNAS or TrueNAS to Dropbox, log in to Dropbox to verify that the files uploaded correctly.

The post Sync Files to Dropbox with TrueNAS or FreeNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

February Plugin Updates and New Plugins for Testing

iX Team — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 17:27:10 +0000

Today we released another Plugins update to address some security vulnerabilities. We also have quite a few new Plugins that are looking for testers.

Updated Plugins for Security Updates

Before updating a plugin, be sure to read its hyperlinked Release Notes to determine if the update will impact your configuration. To update a plugin, open Shell and run the Update Command listed in the table. Note that you will need to restart the plugin once the update is finished.

Plugin	Version and Changelog	Update Command
GitLab	11.7.4	iocage update gitlab
Jenkins	2.163	iocage update jenkins
Nextcloud	15.0.4	iocage update nextcloud
qbittorrent	4.1.5_3	iocage update qbittorrent
Radarr	0.2.0.1293	iocage update radarr
Sonarr	2.0.0.5301	Iocage update sonarr
XMRig	2.11.0	iocage update xmrig

New Plugins Ready for Testing

To install a testing plugin, you will need the latest copy of the iocage-ix-plugins git repository. If you have never cloned this repository from your FreeNAS system, run this command from Shell:
git clone https://github.com/freenas/iocage-ix-plugins
Then, change to that directory:
cd iocage-ix-plugins
If you already have a copy of that directory, make sure it is up-to-date:
cd iocage-ix-plugins
git pull https://github.com/freenas/iocage-ix-plugins
While in the iocage-ix-plugins directory, you can install the desired testing plugin using the command specified for that plugin. Once a testing plugin is installed, it will be added to the Plugins → Installed Plugins page of the UI where it can be managed like any other plugin.
If you run into any issues using these plugins or have comments on how to improve one of these plugins, create a github pull request or issue at https://github.com/freenas/iocage-ix-plugins.
Bitcoin Node
iocage fetch -P -n ./bitcoin-node.json dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept
Channels DVR
iocage fetch -P -n ./channels-dvr.json dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept
Gitlab Runner
Note: Before installing this plugin, ensure that GitLab is already installed and running.
iocage fetch -P -n ./gitlab-runner.json dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept
Homebridge
iocage fetch -P -n ./homebridge.json dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept
SickChill
iocage fetch -P -n ./sickchill.json dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept
Tautulli
iocage fetch -P -n ./tautulli.json dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept
Unifi Controller
iocage fetch -P -n ./unificontroller.json dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept
Unifi Controller-LTS
iocage fetch -P -n ./unificontroller-lts.json dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept

The post February Plugin Updates and New Plugins for Testing appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

January Plugin Updates

iX Team — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 17:10:59 +0000

January has been a busy month for Plugins. Nearly a dozen Plugins were updated today to address newer versions or security fixes. We’ve also have a user-contributed plugin for OpenVPN and are actively looking for testers willing to install, use, and provide feedback for that plugin.

Updated Plugins

If you’re new to updating Plugins on the 11.2 series, read through December FreeNAS Plugins Updates first for an overview.
It’s important to always read the Changelog before updating a plugin so you are aware of any known caveats associated with updating to the new version. For this reason, we include hyperlinks to the Changelogs in this blog post.
These Plugins have updates available:

ClamAV updated from 0.100.2 to 0.101.1,1.
GitLab updated from 11.5.4 to 11.6.4. This is a major version update which introduces many new features and some deprecations. Due to the major bump, also refer to the Changelogs for 11.6.1, 11.6.2, and 11.6.3. This update also addresses CVE-2019-6240.
irssi updated from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2,1 to address CVE-2019-5882.
Jenkins updated from 2.155 to 2.161 to address a security vulnerability.
Jenkins (LTS) updated from 2.150.1 to 2.150.2 to address a security vulnerability.
Nextcloud updated from 15.0.0 to 15.0.2. If your current version is below 15.0.0, also carefully read the 15.0.0 Changelog before updating as moving to 15.0.0 is a major version bump. This month’s update also added optional Imagemagick support to allow thumbnail support.
PlexMediaServer updated from 1.14.0.5470 to 1.14.1.5488.
PlexMediaServer (PlexPass) updated from 1.14.1.5487 to 1.14.1.5488.
qbittorrent updated from 4.1.3 to 4.1.5_1.
Syncthing updated from 0.14.54 to 1.0.0.
XMRig updated from 2.8.3 to 2.9.4.

OpenVPN Plugin for Testing

Since this plugin is still in the testing stage, it must be installed from the command line of the FreeNAS system. Once installed, it will be added to the Plugins → Installed Plugins page of the UI where it can be managed like any other plugin.
To install from the FreeNAS command line:
git clone https://github.com/gitbulb/iocage-plugin-openvpn
iocage fetch -P -n ./openvpn dhcp=on bpf=yes vnet=on --accept
If you run into any issues using this plugin or have comments on how to improve this plugin, create a github pull request or issue at https://github.com/gitbulb/iocage-plugin-openvpn. That link also contains a detailed README for configuring and using this plugin.

The post January Plugin Updates appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Important Security Update for TrueNAS & FreeNAS

iX Team — Wed, 26 Dec 2018 23:00:54 +0000

NOTE: Netatalk is included in TrueNAS & FreeNAS. However, this vulnerability only impacts those who have the AFP service enabled in TrueNAS & FreeNAS.
A new version of Netatalk (3.1.12) has been released that addresses a security vulnerability (CVE-2018-1160) for users of the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP). Due to the severity of this security advisory and the possibility of unauthenticated remote code execution, iXsystems has released a patch for the stable versions of TrueNAS and FreeNAS and updated the stable install versions available for download. To ensure the version you are running is patched, look for these version names:
TrueNAS 11.1-U6.3
FreeNAS 11.1-U6.3
FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE-U1
TrueNAS Customers
TrueNAS customers can contact iXsystems Technical Support for a pre-update health check and to ask any technical questions regarding this update. You can contact Customer Support by calling 1-855-473-7449 or emailing support@ixsystems.com.
FreeNAS Users
Existing FreeNAS users are encouraged to apply the update by going to System and choosing Update. FreeNAS users who are running versions prior to FreeNAS 11.1-U6.3 or FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE-U1 are still vulnerable and should make a plan to update. Always backup your system configuration and verify the integrity of your backups before updating.
Changelog

Ticket #	Type	Target Version	Description
64602	Bug	FN 11.1-U6.3	Address Netatalk CVE-2018-1160
62620	Bug	FN 11.2-U1	Address Netatalk CVE-2018-1160
64611	Bug	TN 11.1-U6.3	Address Netatalk CVE-2018-1160

The post Important Security Update for TrueNAS & FreeNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

December FreeNAS Plugins Updates

iX Team — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:11:28 +0000

FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE introduced a new framework for Plugins and Jails. The goal of the new framework is to:

Make it easier to install, manage, and update Plugins and Jails as an end-user.
Provide an easy-to-use infrastructure for Plugins creators to create Plugins and to push security updates and new versions to existing Plugins as they become available.

Now that the framework is in place, we can concentrate on improving the process for achieving these goals. A series of blog posts is planned to address commonly asked questions and to note when Plugins are updated between FreeNAS releases.
Today’s blog post concentrates on updating Plugins and answers some common update questions. It then describes which Plugins were updated from their 11.2-RELEASE versions as of today.

Q.1 When do Plugins get updated and how will I know when a new version is available?
One of the advantages of the new Plugins system is that it is much easier for Plugins creators to update Plugins when newer versions or security patches for the underlying applications become available. This addresses a common complaint of the legacy Plugins system, where Plugins could go months or even longer without updates.
This increased nimbleness doesn’t quite fit into the FreeNAS target versions listed on the Roadmap. Going forward, official Plugins will be updated and pushed every week or so.
We’ll make a blog post for each update push, detailing which Plugins have a newer version. Plugins that have newer versions will also have an activated Update options button in the new UI.

Q.2 How can I request a newer version of a plugin or report an issue caused by an updated plugin?
If you are aware of a newer version of software for a plugin, search the issues tracker to see if anyone has reported it yet. If not, go ahead and create a ticket so it can be added to the Plugins update queue. Note that most Plugins are based on FreeBSD ports, so we may have to update the port first or wait for the port maintainer to finish doing so.
Many Plugins update issues are caused by new features introduced in the underlying application. For this reason, it is always recommended to read the new version’s Changelog before updating the plugin to determine if any changes negatively impact your configuration. To make this easier, we’ll provide hyperlinks to these Changelogs when we blog the new versions for updated Plugins.
If you encounter an issue after updating a plugin that you don’t think is related to its Changelog, check the forums to see if anyone else has seen the error or has a workaround.

Q.3 Why does pkg upgrade not work in a Plugin jail? How do I update plugins? Is it possible to update a Plugin from the CLI?
Plugins are pre-packaged jails created with the jail management utility iocage. iocage aims to combine the best features available in FreeBSD and make deployment of jails easy. However, because of all the extra functionality provided by iocage, the FreeBSD package update system (pkg upgrade) does not directly apply.
Plugins can normally be updated in the UI by using the plugin’s Update button. However, there is a known issue with the Update button which will be fixed in FreeNAS 11.2-U3. As a workaround, a plugin can be updated from the FreeNAS Shell. First, verify the name of the plugin as it appears in Plugins → Installed. Then, open Shell and type iocage update plugin but replace plugin with the name of the plugin you would like to update.
Note: Updated section Q.3 with known issue regarding GUI plugin updates – 12/20/18.

Q.4 Why should I not run an app’s updater script within a Plugin jail?
Most third-party application updater scripts do not understand FreeBSD packages or iocage plugins. The traditional recommendation was to create a jail, install the software, then use the application’s updater script to stay up-to-date. That is still a good recommendation for users who are comfortable with the command line or who have successfully used this workflow in earlier FreeNAS versions.
The new process of pushing updated Plugins every week or so is good news to Plugins users as they should be able to stay up-to-date without having to create a custom jail and run an updater script.

Updated Plugins
These plugins were updated from their 11.2-RELEASE versions to address security vulnerabilities or newer versions. Please read the hyperlinked Changelogs before updating a plugin so you are aware of any known caveats associated with the new version.

BackupPC updated from 4.2.1_1 to 4.3.0 which adds a few new features and bug fixes.
GitLab updated from 11.4.4 to 11.5.4 to address a critical security vulnerability.
Jenkins updated from 2.149 to 2.155.
Jenkins (LTS) updated from 2.138.2 to 2.150.1 which addresses some security fixes.
Madsonic updated from 6.0_6 to 6.0_7 which adds some new features and bug fixes.
Nextcloud updated from 14.0.3 to 15.0.0. Since this is a major release with a large Changelog, please read that Changelog carefully before updating.
PlexMediaServer updated from 1.13.8.5395 to 1.14.0.5470 as a bugfix release.
PlexMediaServer (PlexPass) updated from 1.13.9.5439 to 1.14.1.5487 which fixes some bugs, including a FreeBSD-specific bug.
qBittorrent updated from 4.1.3 to 4.1.4_2 which adds some new features and bug fixes.
Quasselcore updated from 0.12.5_2 to 0.13.0_1. Read this Changelog carefully before upgrading as the change in database schema prevents downgrading to the previous version.
radarr updated from 0.2.0.1120 to 0.2.0.1217. This adds quite a few new features and bug fixes.
Resilio Sync updated from 2.5.13 to 2.6.1. This is a bug fix release.
Subsonic updated from 6.0_6 to 6.0_7. This bump in the FreeBSD port updates FFmpeg to 4.1.
Syncthing updated from 0.14.51 to 0.14.54 to add a bug fix.
ZoneMinder updated from 1.30.4_5 to 1.32.3. Please read the linked Release Notes carefully before updating due to several critical changes.

The following plugins will be updated to their newest stable versions in January (and mentioned in the January blog post) as they are still waiting for the FreeBSD port to update:

Clamav
Jenkins
Resilio Sync

The post December FreeNAS Plugins Updates appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 11.2 has ARRIVED!

Ladislav Sirový — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 17:20:58 +0000

What does a 0.1 difference make? In the case of FreeNAS 11.2 – a LOT!
This is no ordinary FreeNAS release, my friends…
FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE introduces a ton of new features, including a major revamp of the web interface, support for self-encrypting drives, and new, backwards-compatible REST and WebSocket APIs. This update also introduces iocage for improved Plugins and Jails management and simplified Plugin development. Our favorite updates are detailed below, and a full list of changes is available in the Release Notes.

All New Web Interface

FreeNAS 11.2 introduces an updated web interface. Based on Angular and Javascript, the web interface has been modernized to be more user-friendly, snappier, and aesthetically pleasing.

The redundant top bar has been removed and most FreeNAS configuration menus can be accessed by clicking the appropriate item in the left column. The new design streamlines the layout with cleaner dropdown menus, while maintaining the same functionality and workflow you’ve grown familiar with while using FreeNAS.
All your favorite FreeNAS features are still available, including the same robust protocol support, snapshots, pool management, and more. If you prefer to use the legacy web interface, you can switch between the two from the login menu at any time.

We are now moving onto the next phase of development to focus on usability improvements, and we’re looking forward to your feedback.

Improved Jails and Plugins Management

The team swapped the Plugins and Jails manager from Warden to iocage to improve manageability and ZFS integration. For new users, this change will be seamless as the new web interface only displays Plugins designed, tested, and optimized for the new manager. The new framework also makes it much easier for developers to create their own iocage Plugins using the instructions for building Plugins.
The APIs between Warden and iocage are incompatible, and users with existing Plugins and Jails are encouraged to either reinstall their Plugins and Jails using the new web interface or try the migration script. To give users sufficient time to test their reinstalled or migrated Plugins and Jails, existing Plugins and Jails created before 11.2 can coexist and still be managed while logged into the legacy UI.
As for the growing Plugins collection, old favorites are still there. Here are a few:

PlexMediaServer – Popular media player which has been updated to support GPU acceleration
Nextcloud – Highly functional, private cloud for collaboration
Syncthing – Private cloud synchronization
Deluge – Light-weight cross-platform BitTorrent client
radarr – Fork of Sonarr to work with movies using BitTorrent

We also have a host of new additions to the Plugin ecosystem. Here are a few:

BackupPC – Backup system for Linux, Windows, and MacOS clients
BRU server – Backup and recovery software by TOLIS Group, Inc.
BitTorrent Sync – Resilient, fast, and scalable file sync software
ClamAV – Open source antivirus engine
GitLab – Web-based GitHub repository manager
Jenkins – Widely used open source continuous integration server
Redmine – Flexible project management web application
ZoneMinder – Open Source security video system with extensive camera support

To find out more about our complete list of Plugins, please check out the FreeNAS 11.2 User Guide.

Other Improvements

FreeNAS 11.2 also offers a large number of important updates to enhance system capabilities, stability, and performance:

Cloud Choices: Huge increase in the number of choices for cloud backup, with the ability to sync with leading storage providers such as AWS, Google, Azure, Box, Dropbox, Backblaze, and more. These backups can be encrypted for data security.
VM Management: Better management and handling of VM creation to ensure VMs have more memory during boot.
Enhanced Encryption: Support for self-encrypting drives (SEDs). SEDs are FIPS 140-2 compliant, which is useful for government use, HIPAA, PCI, and GDPR.
ZFS Improvements: Latest up-to-date version of OpenZFS with performance and feature enhancement to improve ARC performance, scrub speeds, and vdev resiliency.
Robust API: Swagger-compliant REST and WebSockets API with integrated documentation, improved usability, and backwards compatibility with the legacy API.
Mobile and Theming Support: Choose from several built-in themes or create your own custom theme. Built-in mobile support makes it easier than ever to access FreeNAS via your smartphone or tablet.

Refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes and improvements.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS keep getting better

An important change that sets this release apart from its predecessors relates to a leap forward in our overall development process. FreeNAS 11.2 demonstrates a significant increase in the amount of automated and manual testing that occurs with every commit and prior to each release. Our suite of tests, now nearing 2,000 (and growing), catches bugs earlier in the development cycle and ensures higher quality software releases.
TrueNAS 11.2 is also making progress and is expected to be released in early 2019. While it won’t include Jails, Plugins, VMs, or the new UI until version 11.3 (slated for a Q3 2019), TrueNAS 11.2 will include the many bug fixes, API improvements, and extensive testing introduced by the 11.2 series, along with the High Availability capability that TrueNAS users expect from their systems.
The FreeNAS team is really excited about this latest release and the opportunity to roll it out to the FreeNAS Community. Thank you all for your continued support of FreeNAS, and as always, we’re looking forward to your feedback!

The post FreeNAS 11.2 has ARRIVED! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Why SATA-DOMs Are Better than USB Drives for Booting Up Your FreeNAS System

iX Team — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 23:00:57 +0000

Fair warning: this is mostly a rant. This rant was mostly inspired by discussions about whether it is safe to remove a thumb drive without ejecting it from the computer, and from a wonderful article about mirroring boot devices in FreeNAS.
The non-rant version is: mirror your FreeNAS boot device, back up the configuration often, and if possible don’t use thumb drives (at least not primarily). There is some practical, non-ranty advice at the end.
You have been warned.

I have worked on filesystems, on and off, for some decades. This has also meant that I have had to deal with all sorts of storage media, and the primary lesson I’ve learned after 20 years is: ALL STORAGE MEDIA ARE HORRIBLE. They’re slow or expensive or both; they change data randomly; they stop working the moment you NEED the data on them; none of them have the lifespan of a gnat flying through an asbestos-laced cloud of chlorine gas.

Most of the advances in storage technology have been working around all of those horrors. RAID, for example, exists so that some of your hard drives can explode in a tiff, and you’ll still be able to get at your data. If you’re using FreeNAS, then you hopefully have your data pool set up with some redundancy (mirroring, for the various levels of RAID, or both).

Unfortunately for us at iXsystems, most FreeNAS users use consumer-grade thumb drives as their boot medium. And of all the horrible storage media out there, thumb drives are only better than SD and MMC cards. (Yes, some people use those. Please don’t. There is not enough beer in the world to drown our sorrows when we get bug reports from people using an MMC card as their boot device.) Thumb drives are the modern version of floppy drives. And like floppy drives, they are short-lived, slow, and prone to failure without telling you.

There are many reasons why they are so horrible. One big one is that many of them lie to you — I’ve bought name-brand thumb drives that claimed to be 4GBytes but were only 128kbytes. (This happens due to factory employees making some extra money: they’ll run the machinery after hours, using rejected parts; sometimes, they’ll throw in some firmware that treats the data as a ring buffer, so you’ll write 4Gbytes out, but in doing so will have over-written the contents many times.)

Another reason they will fail on you just when you’ve configured your system the way you like has to do with the tragic melting point of economics and NAND design. NAND, as most people know by now, has a limited lifetime — you can only write to each cell a certain number of times. Each write to it (and, to a lesser degree, each *read*) decreases the lifespan. So NAND-based storage devices have to have spare cells, and remap.

On a good SSD, for example, there might be as much as 10% in spare cells, and every write of a block gets remapped to a new one.

But thumb drives are *cheap*. So they have far fewer spare cells. (In some distressing cases, none — resulting in a thumb drive that can fail after just a couple of days.) The cheaper (and smaller) the thumb drive, the fewer spare cells it is likely to have, and the shorter lifespan.

But thumb drives are also *slow*. And this is because NAND is slow — SSDs are fast primarily because they internally use striping. Reading from one cell may be slow, but you can read from 64 of them at nearly the same time, and get a lot of data throughput. But thumb drives, being small and cheap, don’t have many NAND cells, so performance is hindered. (This is part of the reason a thumb drive may get very high read speeds, but writing may be only a trickle by comparison.)

“But how can I rest easy?” you ask plaintively. And I can help! (This is the practical advice mentioned above.)

We, at iXsystems, advise using SATA-DOMs for booting, if you can. They are a reasonable trade-off between thumb drives and a full SSD — they typically have a smaller size than an SSD, but more redundancy and parallelism than a thumb drive.

We also strongly advice mirroring your boot device. On a FreeNAS Mini, for example, you can mirror the SATA-DOM with a thumb drive. But check the periodic scrub reports for the boot pool whenever they happen — that’ll show any errors.

But you can also do more than that! For one thing, you can have a mirror with more than two devices — the SATA-DOM being the primary boot device, and two (or even more) thumb drives for mirroring.
You can also be pro-active: every month, get a new thumb drive, add it as a mirror, and then remove the previous thumb drive. (This also gives you a backup of your boot device!)

There is a big caveat with that, unfortunately: every thumb drive has a different size. Yes, sometimes even the same brand from the same manufacturer will have a different amount of bytes for a 16G thumb drive. And this can cause problems when setting up mirrors. (Some of this is my fault, and I apologize.) At this point, the best advice I have to avoid this is to manually set up the mirroring, by manually partitioning the thumb drive, and then attaching it to one of the existing boot devices from the command line.

I have one system where I installed an SSD to act as a cache device for my data pool, but I manually partitioned it so that I had a second ZFS partition on it, which I use to mirror the boot device (a SATA-DOM). This won’t help booting if the SATA-DOM dies, but it does mean that in that case, I have an up-to-date instance of my configuration, and can relatively easily get back up and running.

In conclusion: storage devices, *all of them*, are out to ruin your life. Never trust any of them, and plan for at least one failure at a critical moment.

Sean Fagan, Senior Software Engineer

The post Why SATA-DOMs Are Better than USB Drives for Booting Up Your FreeNAS System appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

LISA 2018 Recap

iX Team — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 20:42:34 +0000

USENIX held their annual Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference this year in Nashville, Tennessee. 2018 marks the 32nd consecutive year of LISA! The main event ran from Monday, October 29th to Tuesday, October 30th with additional talks for attendees on the Wednesday after the exhibit hall closed.

Both iXsystems and the FreeBSD Project attended as sponsors of the event and had booths in the main exhibit hall. A TrueNAS® M50 system was on display, complete with dual controllers, each with two Intel® Xeon® Scalable Family processors, an NVDIMM write cache, 100GbE networking, and the latest version of the award-winning TrueNAS® operating system. LISA attendees were able to get a hands-on tour of this flagship TrueNAS® system from Senior VP Morgan Littlewood, Regional Sales Manager Patrick Bullock, and Sales Engineer Jason Rose. The FreeBSD Project was represented by project committers Dru Lavigne, Warren Block, and Ed Maste.Visitors at the iXsystems booth and the neighboring FreeBSD booth were consistently enthusiastic in their support of FreeNAS, the open source NAS operating system. Some attendees who were previously unfamiliar with FreeNAS seemed very excited to get home and try the OS out for themselves. Many current TrueNAS® users also came by the booth to share their praise of the system. Blinky daemon horns provided at the iX and FreeBSD booths seemed to be en vogue in the conference hall with many of the attendees, vendors, and even some of the service staff sporting them throughout the day. A beer served by a bartender with daemon horns somehow tastes just a little bit more refreshing!

The talks at this year’s LISA event covered topics relating to security (especially around Meltdown and Spectre), system monitoring, automation of management, virtualization, and of course, high volume data storage. Attendees came from all over the world to listen to and speak with the leaders of the enterprise technology space, including Google, Amazon, Red Hat, Netflix, and Microsoft.

LISA attendees came from a wide variety of fields. As we move into 2019, the need for advanced computing and large-scale deployments is clearly growing at a rapid pace across all industries. Higher education and research institutes were especially well-represented at the conference this year. The important work these organizations do requires the latest in cutting-edge high-performance compute and high-density storage systems. Thankfully, vendors like iXsystems will be there to support them!
Thank you to everyone that stopped by the iXsystems and FreeBSD booths and we look forward to seeing you at LISA 2019 in Portland, Oregon!
Jason Rose, Sales Engineer

The post LISA 2018 Recap appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Ohio LinuxFest 2018 Recap

iX Team — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 20:01:06 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Ohio Linux Fest 2018 was held in Columbus at the Hyatt Regency. Warren Block, Dru Lavigne, and JT Pennington attended from iXsystems and staffed the FreeBSD booth in the expo area.
After driving up Thursday, Dru and I set up the booth for the Friday night welcome session from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM. The new model of daemon blinky horns was immediately very popular, and we noticed that they were a big improvement over the previous model. The failure rate was very low, the LEDs were bright, and the flash rate could be adjusted. Within an hour, blinky horns were widespread through the exhibition area.
Saturday was a full day, starting early. JT arrived and helped staff the booth. The crowds were cyclic, increasing as the talks let out. Many booth attendees were already familiar with FreeNAS and using it in their home or work environments. More than a few wanted the iX magazine for more information on TrueNAS for their employers. Several times, attendees explained how awesome FreeNAS was to other attendees. The FreeBSD and FreeNAS stickers were the first to go, followed quickly by the remainder of the blinky horns. A few malfunctioning blinky horns were recycled into a boat for a Lego Tux, and the windup Arista mascot encountered some friendly FreeNAS shark keychains.

There was great interest in what was new with FreeNAS. Dru gave a presentation to a full room on what was coming up for FreeNAS 11.2 this year and hinted at new features that would be arriving in 2019. The presentation focused on POLA, the Principal Of Least Astonishment as it applies to FreeNAS upgrades. FreeNAS 11 has a new and different user interface, but we have concentrated on POLA, making sure users will still be able to do the same things as always. At the same time, numerous new features have been added and integrated with the new user interface.
Most attendees who came through the exhibit hall at OLF 2018 were enlightened about FreeNAS, TrueNAS, and FreeBSD. The nice part was that many were already aware and stopped to tell us how happy they were to see us there again as a standard fixture at Ohio Linux Fest.
Warren Block, Technical Information Manager

The post Ohio LinuxFest 2018 Recap appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 11.2-BETA3 is here, Asigra TrueNAS revealed at VMworld, FreeNAS Backblaze B2 Cloud, Issue #61

iX Team — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 18:00:41 +0000

FreeNAS 11.2-BETA3 is now available for download!
FreeNAS 11.2 BETA3 is available for testing! Be sure to review the Release Notes before installing or upgrading to this version. You can download it. You can download it here.

Release Notes

Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance Launched at VMworld
iXsystems has partnered with Asigra to deliver the Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance, featuring enterprise-ready storage with ransomware detection. The new solution runs Asigra Cloud Backup V14 software on iXsystems‘ TrueNAS hybrid storage systems, offering high availability, superior scalability, and data integrity.

Learn more here

FreeNAS 11.1-U6 is available!
The latest update for FreeNAS 11.1 is available. FreeNAS 11.1-U6 addresses several FreeBSD Security Advisories and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) fixes. You can download it here.

Learn more here

More webinars

Set Up FreeNAS Cloud Storage on Backblaze B2
Roderick Bauer walks us through configuring FreeNAS Cloud Sync for cloud storage on a Backblaze B2 account.

Learn more here

Paul’s Hardware: Riptide 32TB FreeNAS Setup
Paul demonstrates to viewers his fantastic FreeNAS setup featuring a whopping 32TB storage, 32GB RAM, and Alphacool water cooling.

Watch here now

eBook on Open Source Storage by iXsystems and ActualTech Media
This free eBook explains how proprietary and cloud storage falls short and why Open Source is a better development model for storage systems. Learn about the advantages of NVMe/NVDIMM storage for the modern enterprise and why businesses need a unified data platform.

Download it here

On-Demand FreeNAS Training

Online training modules from iXsystems are designed to quickly get you up to speed for getting the most out of your FreeNAS system. Each training module is 30 minutes long and cuts to the core information you need to become an expert in FreeNAS and OpenZFS.

Sign up here

Tech-Tip #57
FreeNAS lets you schedule when to assign a higher resilver priority. Increase the priority after business hours and during scheduled downtime to finish the resilver faster.

Links of the Month

VMworld 2018: Asigra TrueNAS via iXsystems
Building a Better Backup Appliance via StorageSwiss
BSD Now Episode 261: FreeBSDcon Flashback
FreeNAS 11.1 U6 Update & Changelog via Lawrence Systems

Quote of the Month
“One of the challenges facing the data center is the multiplicity of storage systems it needs to manage. Even small data centers have two or three systems and enterprises are now counting more than a dozen systems. Solutions like iXsystems’ TrueNAS provide those organizations with a way to consolidate the number of storage systems they manage. The integration of Asigra as a service into the NAS makes the consolidation message even stronger.”

– George Crump, StorageSwiss Founder

The post FreeNAS 11.2-BETA3 is here, Asigra TrueNAS revealed at VMworld, FreeNAS Backblaze B2 Cloud, Issue #61 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 11.2-BETA available, Lawrence Systems interviews Kris Moore, It’s All NAS, & more, Issue #59

iX Team — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 23:00:42 +0000

FreeNAS 11.2-BETA1 is now available!
The first BETA of FreeNAS 11.2 is now available. Users, especially those who use Plugins, Jails, or VMs, are encouraged to update to this release in order to take advantage of the many improvements and bug fixes to those subsystems. You can download it here.
>> Learn more

Lawrence Systems interviews Kris Moore of iXsystems
Thomas from Lawrence Systems talks TrueNAS, Open Source, and the upcoming New User Interface of FreeNAS with Kris Moore, iXsystems Vice President of Engineering.
>> Watch here now

It’s All NAS
It’s All NAS! iXsystems Senior Analyst Michael Dexter believes it’s time to retire the NAS/SAN false dichotomy.
>> Read more here

>> More webinars

MeetBSD 2018 Registration

MeetBSD 2018 will be hosted at Intel’s campus in Santa Clara on October 19-20. We invite speakers from every corner of the BSD community to submit a topic about BSD success stories, new development, and innovative strategies. For those looking to attend, registration is now open!
>> Registration

FreeNAS 11.2-BETA: Quick Review of New UI
In this video, Lawrence Systems reviews the new graphical user interface of FreeNAS 11.2-BETA1.
>> Watch here now

How Easy is Moving FreeNAS Drives From One Server to Another?
Quite easy! As shown by Thomas in another one of his in-depth FreeNAS demonstration videos.
>> Watch here now

On-Demand FreeNAS Training

Tech-Tip #55
The first line of defense in combating ransomware with ZFS is to enable automatic snapshots. Go to Storage → Periodic Snapshot Tasks → Add Periodic Snapshot. By default, FreeNAS creates a snapshot every hour during business hours and keeps the snapshots for two weeks. Be sure to enable the “Recursive” option if you have created any datasets within datasets.

Links of the Month

Quote of the Month

“TrueNAS allowed us to virtualize everything we do in our manufacturing operations from just a single storage unit. We are running VMware instances to multiple client systems on the production floor and throughout our entire operation as fast as our network allows. TrueNAS gives us an edge.”

– John Konc, Head of Computing & Information Systems, A & C Mold

The post FreeNAS 11.2-BETA available, Lawrence Systems interviews Kris Moore, It’s All NAS, & more, Issue #59 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Open Source Storage eBook, FreeNAS 11.1-U5 available, OpenZFS Feature Flags in FreeNAS & more, Issue #58

iX Team — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 18:08:22 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

This free eBook explains how proprietary and cloud storage falls short and why Open Source is a better development model for storage systems. Learn about the advantages of NVMe/NVDIMM storage for the modern enterprise and why businesses need a unified data platform.

> Download Now

FreeNAS 11.1-U5 is now available!

FreeNAS 11.1-U5 includes various bug fixes and adds preliminary support for Self-Encrypting Drives. You can download it here.

How to Backup and Restore Configuration File

If you are switching over to new hardware or need to reinstall FreeNAS, nixCraft demonstrates how to back up and restore the configuration database using the GUI.

>Read more

FreeNAS Jails, Plugins, and Storage Permissions Explained

Lawrence Systems explains FreeBSD jails, the plugin system, and storage permissions for FreeNAS in this in-depth video tutorial.

>Watch Video Here

>> More Webinars

OpenZFS Feature Flags

User Ericloewe describes the OpenZFS feature flags available in FreeNAS and TrueNAS.
>>Learn more here

Visualizing ZFS Performance

Michael Dexter, iXsystems’ Senior Analyst, explains how to better understand ZFS performance challenges and opportunities using renowned performance engineer Brendan Gregg’s timescale.

Learn more here

On-Demand FreeNAS Training

>Sign up here

Tech Tip #54

Trying to replace a drive with the same capacity drive from another manufacturer that is slightly smaller? Temporarily reduce the swap size in System → Advanced to 1 or 0 GiB and try the drive replacement again. Once it is successful, remember to change the setting back to the default of 2.

Links of the Month

Quote of the Month

“As a user of FreeNAS, I was already aware of how well FreeNAS worked for SoHo storage. When I saw the line of supported TrueNAS solutions iXsystems was putting out there, I knew we had to look further into it. Knowing that our data is correct and protected from data corruption is very important to us, which makes TrueNAS with OpenZFS a tremendous step up from other solutions.” – Ari Orlinsky, Director of Information Systems, iostudio

The post Open Source Storage eBook, FreeNAS 11.1-U5 available, OpenZFS Feature Flags in FreeNAS & more, Issue #58 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Crypto Mining on FreeNAS, VMware Snapshots and much more, Issue #57

iX Team — Thu, 24 May 2018 18:12:46 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hello FreeNAS Users!

With the days getting longer, we hope you’re spending more time doing things you love (which includes FreeNAS, right?). In this content-packed edition of the newsletter, we’ll take a look at crypto mining, the difference between OpenZFS and XFS, various FreeNAS builds, and how to set up VMware snapshots on FreeNAS.
Sincerely,
The FreeNAS Team

EconoNAS and HTPC System Builds with Brian Moses

Three Devs and a Maybe speak with Brian Moses about some of his recent FreeNAS builds, his process for selecting the hardware, and preview his upcoming 2018 EconoNAS build.

Listen Now

Mining Monero on FreeNAS

If you’ve ever wanted to get into crypto mining, be sure to check out this tutorial from Joshua Ruehlig as he demonstrates his new XMR plugin for mining Monero on FreeNAS.

Watch now

OpenZFS vs XFS

Ranvir Singh takes a look at the pros and cons of each file system to determine which is better for storing your data.

Read more

On-Demand FreeNAS Training

iX University provides a series of free online training modules presented by Senior Analyst and FreeNAS expert Michael Dexter. These modules are designed to quickly get you up to speed on the key concepts and techniques that will help you become an expert in FreeNAS and OpenZFS.

Watch Now

TechTip #53

While FreeNAS automatically notifies you of failing disks, you can check your disk health at the command line with ‘smartctl -a /dev/ | more’. Substitute “disk name” with every disk you see with the ‘sysctl kern.disks’ command.

Links of the Month

LNFW 2018 Recap via iXsystems
Episode 244: C is a Lie via The BSD Now

The post Crypto Mining on FreeNAS, VMware Snapshots and much more, Issue #57 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Introducing the Next Generation of TrueNAS, Backups and Disaster Recovery, Issue #56

iX Team — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 20:00:26 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hello FreeNAS Users!
After many months of work, we’re excited to finally unveil the next generation of TrueNAS systems, which uses NVMe and NVDIMM flash for caching. Also in this issue, find out the results of our FreeNAS use survey from February and see how Lawrence Systems set up their backup and disaster recovery processes. Lastly, we have an article from the iXsystems CEO about how the company thrives using an open source business model.
Sincerely,
The FreeNAS Team

The Next Generation of TrueNAS
We are excited to announce the release of the new TrueNAS M Series! With twice the capacity and almost 45% more storage density than its predecessor, the TrueNAS M Series brings groundbreaking performance to enterprise storage.
Read more >>

FreeNAS User Survey Results
In the February 2018 FreeNAS newsletter, we surveyed over 1,500 FreeNAS followers to see how people use FreeNAS around the world and what interests them. Here are the results!
Read More >>

Lawrence Systems Server Backup & Disaster Recovery
Check out this video from Lawrence Systems to see how they use FreeNAS and XenServer to backup all of their virtual machines as well as their process for recovering data if the system ever fails.
Watch Now >>

Leadership Is The Secret To An Open Source Business Model
Open Source is in our blood but how do you run a business when you give away your product for free? In this Forbes article iXsystems CEO, Mike Lauth, explains why the company implements an Open Source business model and how it’s integral to the company’s success.
Read more >>

On-Demand FreeNAS Training
iX University provides a series of free online training modules presented by Senior Analyst and FreeNAS expert Michael Dexter. These modules are designed to quickly get you up to speed on the key concepts and techniques that will help you become an expert in FreeNAS and OpenZFS.
Watch now >>

TechTip #52
Need to backup your FreeNAS data? No problem! Your FreeNAS system can be configured to support these awesome backup services: OpenZFS Remote Replication, rsync, Microsoft Windows Backup, Apple Time Machine, and TrueOS Life Preserver.

Links of the Month

SCaLE 16x: Open is Still the Answer via iXsystems
Episode 240: TCP Blackbox Recording via The BSD Now
TrueNAS 11.1 – What’s New via iXsystems

The post Introducing the Next Generation of TrueNAS, Backups and Disaster Recovery, Issue #56 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS Survey Report

iX Team — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 17:33:39 +0000

How Do you FreeNAS?

In the February 2018 FreeNAS newsletter, we surveyed over 1,500 FreeNAS followers to see how people use FreeNAS around the world and what interests them. Nearly 75% of our respondents use FreeNAS for personal use and over 25% are using FreeNAS in a work environment.

We asked how many users built their own (DIY) using new hardware, recycled hardware, or purchased a pre-built system like a FreeNAS Certified Server. We found that almost 60% of FreeNAS users build a system themselves, 13.5% recycle old hardware, almost 21% did both, and 6% purchased a pre-built system.

To help determine which FreeNAS features are the most important to users, we asked respondents how they use their FreeNAS system. The number one use case is file sharing followed closely by backup, plugins, VM storage, and media streaming or editing. Since the top use cases involved backups and file sharing, we intend to provide more in-depth information for these use cases in a future post.

I hope you found this information interesting; we sure did. Keep an eye on the blog and FreeNAS newsletter for more information on the use of FreeNAS.
Gary Archer, Director of Storage Marketing

The post FreeNAS Survey Report appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

New Release Notes Library | How to Install Let’s Encrypt & Pi-Hole on FreeNAS | Issue #55

iX Team — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 20:00:51 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hello FreeNAS Users!
Spring has arrived along with new and interesting projects! From Pi-Hole to Let’s Encrypt, we love seeing all the awesome things you’re doing with FreeNAS. Keep them coming!
Sincerely,
The FreeNAS Team

FreeNAS at SCaLE 16x
FreeNAS development sponsor iXsystems will once again have two booths in the Expo area of the Southern California Linux Expo ( SCALE) to be held in Pasadena, CA on March 8-11. Drop by the FreeBSD booth to learn more about FreeNAS and its parent operating system, FreeBSD. At the iXsystems booth, learn what we’ve got planned for the upcoming year and talk to the team for a chance to win an Apple HomePod.
Read more >>

FreeNAS Release Notes Archive
Comparing the changes between each FreeNAS update has never been easier. Starting with FreeNAS 11.1, release notes are archived in a single location for your convenience.
Check it out >>

Let’s Encrypt on FreeNAS 11.1
User Danb35 from the FreeNAS forums wrote a useful guide for setting up Let’s Encrypt on FreeNAS 11.1. This tutorial shows how to use HTTPS for the Web UI. It also shows how to automate the process so it only has to be set up once.
Read more >>

Whole Home Ad Blocking with Pi-Hole on FreeNAS VM
Check out this video from Craft Computing demonstrating how to install Pi-Hole on a FreeNAS VM to block ads on all devices under a home network.
Watch now >>

TechTip #51
Cloud Sync was introduced in FreeNAS 11.1. Link your Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or Backblaze B2 account to securely synchronize your files and directories to the cloud.

Links of the Month

Samsung Unveils World’s Largest SSD with a Whopping 30TB of Storage via The Verge
Install OpenVPN in FreeNAS 11.1 Jail via Kulmosen

The post New Release Notes Library | How to Install Let’s Encrypt & Pi-Hole on FreeNAS | Issue #55 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Tell Us How You Use FreeNAS & Win a FreeNAS Mini | ZFS vs OpenZFS | Issue #54

iX Team — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 21:26:14 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hello FreeNAS Users!
We’re curious— how do you use FreeNAS? This month, we’re asking you to help us understand our community better by filling out a quick survey. We’ll even reward you for your time! Read on for more details. Also in this edition of the newsletter, we’ll take a look at the difference between ZFS & OpenZFS and how TrueNAS can be used to upgrade your media production environment.
Sincerely,
The FreeNAS Team

Take our Survey to Win a Free Starbucks Coffee
Help us understand how you use FreeNAS and get a cup of coffee on us! The first 250 people who fill out this quick survey will get a $5 Starbucks gift card and EVERYONE who fills out the survey by March 2nd will be entered into a raffle drawing for a diskless FreeNAS Mini ($1,000 value). This survey will help us tailor content for future newsletters, blogs, videos, and other documents.
How do You FreeNAS? >>

ZFS vs OpenZFS
You’ve probably heard us say a mix of “ZFS” and “OpenZFS” almost at random when talking about the amazing file system at the heart of FreeNAS. Senior Analyst Michael Dexter explains the history of ZFS and OpenZFS and how these two projects differ.
Read more >>

TrueNAS Makes the Cut for Avid Editing
IndieStor’s MIMIQ is an application that allows you to use Avid bin-locking with TrueNAS. The bin-locking feature prevents an active Avid media project from being overwritten, allowing multiple users on a network to make changes and work on the same project. Learn how you can free yourself from Avid proprietary hardware and speed up your media & entertainment editing with TrueNAS.
Read more >>

TechTip #50
Need to switch from the new UI to the old one? No problem! Go to the New UI and click the “Gear” icon in the upper-right corner of the screen. Click the “Legacy UI” option and FreeNAS will automatically log out of the New UI and navigate to the login screen for the Old UI. Alternatively, add /legacy to the end of the FreeNAS system’s IP address in your browser’s address bar. You can return to the new GUI when you log on again.

Links of the Month

ZFS is the Answer, by Allan Jude. Provided by the 2018 Free & Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) Youtube channel

The post Tell Us How You Use FreeNAS & Win a FreeNAS Mini | ZFS vs OpenZFS | Issue #54 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

StorageCrypter Ransomware| FreeNAS on VMs | How Fast Are Encrypted Volumes? | Issue #53

iX Team — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 21:06:49 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hello FreeNAS Users!
Happy new year! In this edition of the newsletter, we’re bringing you some tutorials and guides to help you stay on top of your security.
Sincerely,
The FreeNAS Team

StorageCrypter Ransomware: Security Threat or Clickbait?
There’s a new ransomware targeting NAS systems but the facts surrounding it has been confusing. Get the facts and learn why you don’t need to worry about your FreeNAS or TrueNAS system.
Read more >>

How to Install FreeNAS 11.1 on VMs
Linux Video Tutorials created video guides for installing and configuring FreeNAS 11.1 on both VMware and Virtualbox. Take a look if you’re interested in using FreeNAS in a virtual environment.

FreeNAS 11.1 ZFS Volume Encryption vs Non-Encrypted Benchmark
Check out this cool video from Lawrence Systems as he compares performance numbers between encrypted and non-encrypted volumes.
Watch now >>

Using FreeNAS for NSX FTP Backups
If you’re using FreeNAS in a VMware environment, be sure to read this step-by-step guide to set up FTP backups for NSX.
Read more>>

On-Demand FreeNAS Training
iX University provides a series of online training modules presented by FreeNAS expert Michael Dexter that are designed to quickly get you up to speed on the key concepts and techniques that will help you become an expert in FreeNAS and OpenZFS.
Watch Now>>

TechTip #49
Security Pro Tip! FreeNAS 11.1 includes the ability to host your own VMs and jails. While these are very powerful tools, precautions should always be taken. Ensure that your VMs and jails are always kept up to date with the latest security patches. These should be treated as full machines on your network and the same security “Best practices” still apply. This will ensure not only the security of your FreeNAS system but your local network as a whole as well.

Links of the Month

Best of 2017 via iXsystems
FreeBSD Response to Meltdown and Spectre via FreeBSD

The post StorageCrypter Ransomware| FreeNAS on VMs | How Fast Are Encrypted Volumes? | Issue #53 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Best of 2017

iX Team — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 02:43:10 +0000

This is the time of year that many companies publish their best of lists and we are doing the same. As 2017 draws to a close, we take a look back on some of the information that encouraged you to deploy storage based on the world’s most popular software-defined storage operating system, FreeNAS.
You watched our videos on TrueNAS and FreeNAS over 100,000 times. It is clear that some of you are interested in an earlier release of FreeNAS. If you are interested in downloading FreeNAS 11, you can find it here. Here is the list of the top five most viewed videos:

TrueNAS	FreeNAS
1. FreeNAS to TrueNAS	1. FreeNAS 11 – How To Install
2. ZFS 101 a.k.a ZFS Is Cool	2. FreeNAS 9.2.1: Plex
3. Kris Moore – Unveiling TrueOS	3. FreeNAS 11 – What’s New
4. Quick Overview of TrueNAS	4. FreeNAS 9.3 – First Time Setup
5. Setting Up Your First NAS	5. How To Replace Failed HDD

FreeNAS and TrueNAS make it simpler and more economical for both SMBs and enterprises to modernize their IT infrastructures with a cost-effective OpenZFS-based enterprise storage array. This is demonstrated by the over 60,000 3rd-party videos on FreeNAS and TrueNAS. The most watched 3rd party videos in 2017 were:

There are a lot of resources on the FreeNAS forums around building and using FreeNAS. Here are the top five that you found most helpful:

I hope that you found this list useful and that it prompted you to view information that you missed the first time around. The iXsystems Team wishes a safe and happy holiday to all of you and your families. Thank you for a great 2017, and we’re looking forward to the arrival of big things in 2018!

The post Best of 2017 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 11.1 is Here! | EconoNAS 2017 | TrueNAS X10 Torture Test | Issue #52

iX Team — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 21:05:46 +0000

Hello FreeNAS Users!
The end of the year is upon us so we’d like to give you a parting gift— the release of FreeNAS 11.1! Also in this edition of the newsletter, we have a FreeNAS EconoNAS build, a TrueNAS X10 torture test and a shares and user permissions tutorial video to share. Take care of yourself and we’ll see you in 2018!
Sincerely,
The FreeNAS Team

Upgrade to FreeNAS 11.1
Based on FreeBSD 11.1-Stable, this update brings new features including better integration with cloud providers, RAID rebuild performance improvements and significant improvements to VMs including preliminary Docker container support.
Read more >>

DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2017 by Brian Moses
Brian Moses is back with another much-anticipated budget-friendly FreeNAS build. Will he meet his goal of staying under $500? Check out his blog to find out (and maybe win a new FreeNAS system).
Read more >>

TrueNAS X10 Torture Test
In his latest video, CEO Thomas Lawrence of Lawrence Technology Services / PC Pickup torture tests the failover systems of the TrueNAS X10 with OpenZFS.
Watch now >>

Shares, Groups and User Permissions in FreeNAS 11
Thomas Lawrence of Lawrence Technology Services / PC Pickup shares a tutorial on how to set up Shares, Groups, and User Permissions in FreeNAS 11.
Watch now>>

TechTip #48
Remember that the primary read cache used by the system is system RAM, which is much faster than any SSD-based L2ARC. If your read cache requirements are satisfied with RAM, you’ll enjoy better performance over using an SSD read cache.

Links of the Month

The Last Bootstrapped Tech Company In Silicon Valley via Forbes

The post FreeNAS 11.1 is Here! | EconoNAS 2017 | TrueNAS X10 Torture Test | Issue #52 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 11.1 is Now Available for Download!

iX Team — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 23:56:26 +0000

FreeNAS 11.1 Provides Greater Performance and Cloud Integration

The FreeNAS Development Team is excited and proud to present FreeNAS 11.1! FreeNAS 11.1 adds cloud integration, OpenZFS performance improvements, including the ability to prioritize resilvering operations, and preliminary Docker support to the world’s most popular software-defined storage operating system. This release includes an updated preview of the beta version of the new administrator graphical user interface, including the ability to select display themes. This post provides a brief overview of the new features.
The base operating system has been updated to the STABLE version of FreeBSD 11.1, which adds new features, updated drivers, and the latest security fixes. Support for Intel® Xeon® Scalable Family processors, AMD Ryzen processors, and HBA 9400-91 has been added.
FreeNAS 11.1 adds a cloud sync (data import/export to the cloud) feature. This new feature lets you sync (similar to backup), move (erase from source), or copy (only changed data) data to and from public cloud providers that include Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Services), Backblaze B2 Cloud, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

OpenZFS has noticeable performance improvements for handling multiple snapshots and large files. Resilver Priority has been added to the Storage screen of the graphical user interface, allowing you to configure resilvering at a higher priority at specific times. This helps to mitigate the inherited challenges and risks associated with storage array rebuilds on very large capacity drives.
FreeNAS 11.1 adds preliminary Docker container support, delivered as a VM built from RancherOS. This provides a mechanism for automating application deployment inside containers and a graphical tool for managing Docker containers. Please report any issues you encounter when beta testing this feature to assist the development team in improving it for the next major release of FreeNAS.
Finally, there are updates to the new Angular-based administrative GUI, including the addition of several themes. The FreeNAS team expects the new administrative GUI to achieve parity with the current one for the FreeNAS 11.2 release. To see a preview of the new GUI, click the BETA link on the login screen. Here is an example of the new GUI’s main dashboard, with the available themes listed in the upper right corner.

The FreeNAS community is large and vibrant. We invite you to join us on the FreeNAS forum. To download FreeNAS 11.1 RELEASE and sign-up for the FreeNAS Newsletter, visit freenas.org/download.

The FreeNAS Development Team

The post FreeNAS 11.1 is Now Available for Download! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Cyber Monday 2017

iX Team — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 23:15:06 +0000

Howdy folks,
This is a list we have compiled for Cyber Monday for our FreeNAS users. It’s a great time to grab some replacement parts or new hardware for your next FreeNAS build. From hard drives to SSDs, motherboards, accessories, and more, we hope you find our list helpful. Happy Holidays!
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

15% off FreeNAS Mini/Mini XL

The FreeNAS Mini & Mini XL feature enterprise-class hardware specifically chosen to maximize performance with FreeNAS. No other system in its class can match the power or performance of the FreeNAS Mini.
Grab a brand new FreeNAS Mini or Mini XL for 15% off in our biggest deal ever when you use promo code ZFS15. Or buy one pre-built from Amazon for 10%.
Be sure to hurry, this deal only lasts until the end of Monday.

FreeNAS Mini

FreeNAS Mini XL

FreeNAS Upgrades

Computer Memory

FreeNAS requires at least 8GB of RAM to take advantage of all the data-protection features offered by ZFS.

Hard Drives

Your data is only as good as your hard drives. Make sure you have enough capacity and redundancy with some extra drives.

Solid State Drives

Leverage a read/write cache to boost performance and optimize memory.

Motherboards

The motherboard lies at the heart of your FreeNAS system. Choose reliable hardware to keep your data safe and online.

Power Supplies

Accessories

Networking

Upgrade your networking hardware for faster access to your files.

Computer Cases

Whether you’re building a new system or planning your next one, get some ideas from this list of computer cases.

Computer Monitor

Watch your favorite TV shows and movies with the Plex plugin on a bigger, brighter screen.

The post Cyber Monday 2017 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS Tutorials | Win a FreeNAS Mini | Updates from OpenZFS | And more… | Issue #51

iX Team — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 20:15:17 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hello FreeNAS Users!
This month’s newsletter features several tutorials, a deep dive into TrueNAS, an update from the OpenZFS summit, and the start of the #FreeNASbuildoff contest where you’ll have a chance to win a FreeNAS Mini.
Sincerely,
The FreeNAS Team

TrueNAS X-Series Hardware & TrueNAS Software Deep Dive
In his latest video, Tom of Lawrence Technology Services takes an in-depth look at the TrueNAS X10 and gives his review.
Watch now >>

Lawrence Systems Tutorials – 10GbE Networking Setup/Configure XenServer
Tom Lawrence also took the time to make a couple of tutorials for FreeNAS. Take a look to learn how to set up configure Citrix XenServer with FreeNAS and iSCSI.

OpenZFS Developer Summit 2017 Report
Check out our recap of the OpenZFS DevSummit to learn what’s ahead for the file system.
Read more >>

#FreeNASbuildoff Contest Begins
The #FreeNASbuildOFF Contest begins now! Make sure to follow the directions in each phase to be eligible for your chance to win a brand new FreeNAS Mini.
Read more >>

Geekazine Interview with Brett Davis
iXsystems’ EVP Brett Davis spoke with Geekazine at VMworld 2017 about the flexibility and capabilities of FreeNAS and TrueNAS.
Watch now >>

TechTip #46
Back up your configuration database every time you make a configuration change! You’ll thank yourself.

Links of the Month

Testing the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 with pfSense 2.4-Release and FreeNAS 11.0-U4 via ServeTheHome
How to Replace a Failing Drive via The OptionKey

The post FreeNAS Tutorials | Win a FreeNAS Mini | Updates from OpenZFS | And more… | Issue #51 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

LISA 2017 Conference Recap

iX Team — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 18:17:29 +0000

The 35th Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference was held this year at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero in San Francisco. Yes, that’s the famous hotel featured in both “The Towering Inferno” and the Mel Brooks’ classic “High Anxiety”.
iXsystems had two booths at this year’s 2-day LISA Expo. David Valencia, Ruben del Rosario, and Andrew Nguyen staffed the iXsystems booth that featured an 8-bay FreeNAS Mini and a TrueNAS X10. Dru Lavigne and Warren Block staffed the open source FreeBSD/FreeNAS booth, and were joined by Deb Goodkin and Ed Maste from the FreeBSD Foundation and Allan Jude from the FreeBSD Project on the first day of the Expo.

Both booths were kept quite busy during the Expo. We always enjoy catching up with the many familiar faces we see each year at LISA as well as meeting first-time attendees. LISA attracts system administrators from around the world from Universities, telcos, government, and large companies with familiar names. The hot topic at the FreeBSD booth this year was definitely ZFS as we had a chance to share the exciting new features discussed at the recent OpenZFS DevSummit as well as the recent Foundation press release on RAIDZ expansion.

Of note this year was chatting with Mike Ciavarella, the Tutorial Co-chair and long-time documentation advocate, via “Mike in the Box” and meeting someone who works at Lego (we are geeks, after all). Long-time FreeBSD committer wollman@ and alumni committer flz@ also stopped by to catch up on what’s happening in FreeBSD and FreeNAS.

We look forward to next year’s LISA which will be held in Nashville, the backyard of the iXsystems South office in Maryville, TN.

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OpenZFS Developer Summit 2017 Report

iX Team — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 19:09:25 +0000

This is historic content that may contain outdated information. For the newest information on FreeNAS and TrueNAS, please visit TrueNAS.com or read our latest Blogs.

This year’s OpenZFS Developer Summit featured many of the greatest minds in file systems development including Dr. Kirk McKusick of the Berkeley Fast File System, Matthew Ahrens, George Wilson and Mark Maybee of Sun Solaris ZFS, Paweł Jakub Dawidek, Brian Behlendorf and Jörgen Lundman of the FreeBSD, Linux and macOS ZFS porting efforts, plus Allan Jude of the “ZFS Books” and many other contributors to OpenZFS.

Taking place at the same venue as the original 2012 ZFS Day, the mood was one of restrained elation and confidence, rather than the cautious optimism that struggled to penetrate the uncertainty surrounding the then-recent acquisition by Oracle of Sun Microsystems, the developer of ZFS. It would be nearly a year before the OpenZFS project was announced in September of 2013 and the topics were generally ideas of how to improve ZFS such as “Channel Programs” integrated scripting, rather than reports on the status or completion of new projects. Five years in, this handful of interesting ideas have given way to a solid stream of remarkable news.

Without a doubt, the most stunning news came from Jörgen Lundman who not only announced but demonstrated OpenZFS running on Windows 10. At first, it wasn’t clear if his mention of “zpool.exe” was a joke but his live compilation of OpenZFS and use of it to copy files via Windows Explorer proved it to be real. This is, after all, the person who ported OpenZFS to macOS, for which I am eternally grateful given that I am saving this report to it as I type. Jörgen was clear about the fact that OpenZFS for Windows is far from production readiness but I for one consider his work the most promising solution yet for mitigating ransomware on the Windows platform. When I asked Jörgen if OpenZFS encryption was coming to macOS, he responded that it is already in. This comes on the heels of NetBSD developer Chuck Silvers announcing this month that he is importing FreeBSD’s OpenZFS and dtrace into NetBSD. This growth makes OpenZFS the most portable file system after FAT32, supporting all Illumos derivatives, all FreeBSD derivatives, GNU/Linux, macOS, and NetBSD.

The next most talked-about moment at the event was Mark Maybee’s keynote about Oracle ZFS, which is now significantly different from OpenZFS. In the time since the projects diverged in 2010, OpenZFS has replaced over half of the original Sun ZFS code and both projects have consistently added unique and often incompatible features. Mark made it clear that Oracle, which now considers itself a key Cloud provider, “has discussed” improved ZFS integration with GNU/Linux in support of their cloud platform. He did not reveal however what form this better support for ZFS in GNU/Linux will take, be it a binary-only solution, adoption of OpenZFS, or the unlikely but not impossible relicensing of Oracle ZFS in a Linux-compatible manner. True Linux-compatibility would come in the form of relicensing Oracle ZFS to GPLv2 or BSD/MIT/ISC, but should they go to GPLv2, the move would limit Oracle ZFS’ support to GPLv2-licensed operating systems, a limiting factor of Btrfs. Given how many Solaris developers they recently laid off, they just may push the relicensing “easy button” and their going the permissive route just may bring OpenBSD into the fold. Refactoring the two projects would be a non-trivial task but I can safely say that the participants are highly motivated.

Beyond these historic announcements about OpenZFS’ growth to new platforms, there was a steady stream of OpenZFS improvement news at the Developer Summit. Of these reports, Matt Ahrens’ “Proposal for 1,000x better dedup performance” stood out given that deduplication has long been a sensitive topic on ZFS. Because Delphix is not a heavy user of deduplication, this proposal is a perfect opportunity for collaboration the way iXsystems and the FreeBSD Foundation are working with Matt on the vdev expansion project. This work will allow you to, for example, expand a 4 disk RaidZ1 vdev to one with 5 or more disks. Faster scrubbing and rebuilding projects were also presented, plus a pool-wide “checkpoint” that would allow you to roll back all aspects of a zpool when upgrading your OS or performing a significant administrative task. Prakash Surya of Delphix gave a talk on his proposal to double OpenZFS synchronous write speed and gave what one attendee called the “best overview of the ZIL ever”. Isaac Huang from Intel gave an update on their DRAID “distributed spare” system and Allan Jude described his porting of Facebook’s Zstandard compression to OpenZFS, which promises a highly-flexible balance of performance and compression ratios. The slides from all of these talks and reports can be found at OpenZFS.org plus there are photos of the speakers in the iXsystems photo album.

Day Two of the event included project status updates and a hackathon at GitHub headquarters in San Francisco. Not only was the conversation excellent but so was the food. Of the FreeBSD attendees, Allan Jude worked on OpenZFS-native “next boot”, Nick Wolff of iXsystems worked on ztest reproducibility and I worked on a script to generate arbitrary depths and widths of directories and datasets for testing purposes. We all got countless questions answered by the respective experts on various components of OpenZFS and had quite a few laughs thanks to the like-mindedness of the audience. Events like this often serve as reunions for ex-Sun employees and I have never seen them as positive and supportive of one another. It is easy to forget how significant Sun was as an independent Unix innovator and many of my colleagues were devastated by the Oracle acquisition. Fortunately, Oracle has since made its position on Solaris pretty clear, leaving the Illumos and BSD communities as the de facto guardians of BSD Unix and I am proud to see this unprecedented collaboration between these amazing teams.

Michael Dexter, Senior Analyst

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FreeNAS & DigitalOcean | How to Replace a Failed Drive | And more..| Issue #50

iX Team — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 20:33:12 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

FreeNAS Users,
Fall is in full swing and we have a couple of tutorials to share this month. Keep reading to learn how to replace a failing drive, upgrade the network card in your FreeNAS Mini, and more.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

FreeNAS Mini & XL-Network Card Upgrade
Do you own a FreeNAS Mini or Mini XL? We’ll show you how to upgrade the network card on your system with our newest tutorial video. Watch now

How to Replace a Failing Drive in FreeNAS
At some point, a drive in your system will probably fail on you. When that happens, this guide demonstrating how to replace the drive will come in handy. Check it out! Read More

Why We Still Love ZFS (Part II) – Free Webinar
We invite you to join Michael W. Lucas and Allan Jude, the co-authors of FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and Advanced ZFS, for a free webinar about ZFS. Learn about the benefits of ZFS and how it can help keep your data safe. Watch webinar

Live Events

October 24-25, 2017 – OpenZFS Developer Summit in San Francisco, CA
October 29-November 3, 2017 – LISA 2017 in San Francisco, CA

TechTip #46
ZFS datasets are also called “file systems” for good reason: Moving data between them at the command line does not instantly move the data, but rather copies it to the destination and then deletes it from the source. NFS users may also find that they have to share datasets individually because any two datasets can have conflicting inode numbers.

Join the Team
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for talented people to join our team. Interested? The full list of available positions can be found on our website.

Links of the Month

Introduction to iXsystems: Not just #FreeNAS anymore via Truth in IT
#ServerEnvy: Drives for Days via iXsystems

The post FreeNAS & DigitalOcean | How to Replace a Failed Drive | And more..| Issue #50 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Official FreeNAS Training is Here! | Docker on FreeNAS | And More… | Issue #49

iX Team — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:33:19 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hello FreeNAS Users!
In the spirit of back to school season, we’re excited to announce the release of the full 100 and 200-level FreeNAS training modules. We listened to your feedback and launched a series of training videos to help you continue your FreeNAS education. Be sure to also keep an eye out for some of the news and guides we’ve rounded up in this issue of the newsletter.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

FreeNAS Training Modules Now Available
All of the classes for the beginner and intermediate FreeNAS Training modules are now available for registration and viewing. Presented by FreeNAS expert, Michael Dexter, these self-contained videos are designed to give you all the information you need to become an expert in FreeNAS and OpenZFS at your own pace. Register now >>

A Practical Guide to Containers on FreeNAS
Want to use Docker on FreeNAS 11? Check out this handy tutorial from Andrew Cherkashin for step-by-step instructions on setting up Docker containers on your FreeNAS system. Read more

FreeNAS at VMworld 2017
The team behind FreeNAS was out in full force at this year’s VMworld 2017. We spoke with thousands of IT professionals about FreeNAS and passed out free storage and schwag to lucky winners of our slot machine. Watch now >>

Live Events

September 21-24, 2017 – EuroBSDcon in Paris, France
September 29-30, 2017 – Ohio Linuxfest in Columbus, OH

TechTip #45
Remember that you can mirror your FreeNAS boot device. You’ll thank yourself should one device fail.

Join the Team
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for talented people to join our team. Interested? The full list of available positions can be found on our website.

Links of the Month

iXsystems is Hiring Oracle Refugees via Brett Davis
360 Drive FreeNAS System via Scott Gilliland Jr

The post Official FreeNAS Training is Here! | Docker on FreeNAS | And More… | Issue #49 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

OpenZFS vs Btrfs | How Hard is it to Crash FreeNAS? | And More… | Issue #48

Annie Zhang — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 00:10:45 +0000

Hello FreeNAS Users,
It’s hard to believe how fast the year has flown by. In this edition of the FreeNAS newsletter, we examine the impact of the recent Btrfs deprecation announcement and share a series of FreeNAS videos from Lawrence Systems. How difficult is it to crash FreeNAS? Read on to find out.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

OpenZFS vs Btrfs
Our senior analyst Michael Dexter takes a look at how the death of Btrfs affects OpenZFS and what the announcement means for the future of storage. Read more >>

How Hard is it to Crash FreeNAS?
Lawrence Systems/PC Pickup recently uploaded a series of FreeNAS tutorial and testing videos. Check them out!
How Hard is it to Crash FreeNAS?
How to Use ZFS Snapshots with Files and VM’s
FreeNAS Testing with Laptop Drives
Controller Upgrade and Moving Volumes

On-Demand FreeNAS Training
iX University provides a series of online training modules presented by FreeNAS expert Michael Dexter that are designed to quickly get you up to speed on the key concepts and techniques that will help you become an expert in FreeNAS and OpenZFS. Watch now >>

Why We Still Love ZFS (Part II) – Free Webinar
We invite you to join Michael W. Lucas and Allan Jude, the co-authors of FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and Advanced ZFS, for a free webinar about ZFS. Learn how ZFS protects your important data like no other file system can. Read more >>

Live Events
August 27-31, 2017 – VMworld 2017 (Booth #1224) in Las Vegas, NV

TechTip #44
A pfSense router makes a good OpenVPN appliance in front of FreeNAS.

Join the Team
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for talented people to join our team. Interested? The full list of available positions can be found on our website.

Links of the Month
Episode 205: FreeBSD Turning it up to 11.1 via BSD Now
FreeNAS Server Hardware via Josh Ruehlig

The post OpenZFS vs Btrfs | How Hard is it to Crash FreeNAS? | And More… | Issue #48 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 11.0 is Now Here

iX Team — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 16:00:18 +0000

After several FreeNAS Release Candidates, FreeNAS 11.0 was released today. This version brings new virtualization and object storage features to the World’s Most Popular Open Source Storage Operating System. FreeNAS 11.0 adds bhyve virtual machines to its popular SAN/NAS, jails, and plugins, letting you use host web-scale VMs on your FreeNAS box. It also gives users S3-compatible object storage services, which turns your FreeNAS box into an S3-compatible server, letting you avoid reliance on the cloud. For a quick summary of what’s new in FreeNAS 11.0, watch the video below.

FreeNAS 11.0 is based on FreeBSD 11-STABLE, which adds the latest drivers and performance improvements. Users will benefit from the overall systematic, architectural, and performance improvements.
FreeNAS 11.0 also introduces the beta version of a new administration GUI. The new GUI is based on the popular Angular framework and the FreeNAS team expects the GUI to be themeable and feature complete by 11.1. The new GUI follows the same flow as the existing GUI, but looks better. For now, the FreeNAS team has released it in beta form to get input from the FreeNAS community. The new GUI, as well as the classic GUI, are selectable from the login screen.

Also new in FreeNAS 11 is an Alert Service page which configures the system to send critical alerts from FreeNAS to other applications and services such as Slack, PagerDuty, AWS, Hipchat, InfluxDB, Mattermost, OpsGenie, and VictorOps. FreeNAS 11.0 has an improved Services menu that adds the ability to manage which services and applications are started at boot.

The FreeNAS community is large and vibrant. We invite you to join us on the FreeNAS forum and the #freenas IRC channel on Freenode. To download FreeNAS and sign-up for the FreeNAS Newsletter, visit freenas.org/download.
The FreeNAS Development Team

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FreeNAS QA – Our Processes

Ladislav Sirový — Mon, 22 May 2017 14:39:01 +0000

Do you even QA, bro?

A detailed look at FreeNAS QA Efforts and How They’ve Changed Over Time
In the seven years since iXsystems adopted the FreeNAS storage operating system, we have worked hard to strike a balance between Quality Assurance (QA) provided through the FreeNAS user community and our internal specialized QA focused on our TrueNAS enterprise hardware/software solutions. At one extreme, we have a community of hundreds of thousands of DIYers around the world who come up with hardware and configurations we would never imagine ourselves, which gives us broader QA coverage than any storage company on the planet. At the other end of the spectrum, we have both manual and automated High Availability stress tests that guarantee that TrueNAS storage arrays are ready for any customer’s use case or workload. The balance we’ve struck has worked quite well overall, but from time to time, issues of various severity would still slip through the cracks in new FreeNAS releases. So, we’ve spent the better part of the past year focused on building a continuous integration and QA process for the FreeNAS 9.x and 11.x releases in order to improve the overall quality of FreeNAS releases by catching as many issues as possible before they reach the community as well as shorten the FreeNAS -> TrueNAS release cycle.

Before joining iXsystems, I performed a “feat of strength” by writing a test suite using the available FreeNAS/TrueNAS REST API documentation. At this time, the VP of Engineering for FreeNAS/TrueNAS 9.x (Kris Moore) was just getting automated QA off the ground for FreeNAS. He was looking for someone to build upon the tests he had started and to extend the testing by writing many additional tests which he didn’t have the time to implement. His framework consisted of several shell scripts that would send commands to a FreeNAS or TrueNAS system using the REST API to do things such as create a user, provision storage, setup an NFS share, and mount the share. When the tests were executed, the framework collected the results in XML format and published them to Jenkins, the open source continuous integration software we use here at iXsystems.
Here are some examples of my pull request and what the test directory looked like at that specific point:

https://github.com/iXsystems/ixbuild/pull/2

https://github.com/iXsystems/ixbuild/tree/85ffe7cce7664bce15184cd4d5b6eb5adf868a85/freenas/9.3-tests

You can also find the publicly available documentation for the FreeNAS/TrueNAS REST API at http://api.freenas.org/

Here are what the test results looked like by the numbers in their original form:

5 AFP tests
3 Boot environment tests
1 Debugging test
1 DynDns test
1 Email test
3 FTP tests
1 iSCSI test
6 Jail tests
12 NFS tests
4 RSYNC tests
14 CIFS tests
2 SSH tests
7 Storage tests
3 User tests

The initial suite of 63 tests clearly left room for improvement. I realized that only one or two of the NFS/CIFS tests actually ran client tests to verify that a share could successfully mount and be written to. During my first 8 months at iXsystems, I expanded the framework and brought the test count to 358. This included adding support for testing all services with a number of clients, including integration with popular directory services like AD and LDAP.

Today, when an engineer commits to a repository, it triggers an incremental build of the software they have modified and runs this series of tests against our nightly builds which are publicly available at http://download.freenas.org/11/MASTER/. This allows the QA team to verify if the latest build will install as well as upgrade successfully to an existing system. If the new build installs successfully, we then initiate the test suite to determine which areas of functionality may be impacted by each commit.

As of this writing, we automate 541 tests, including the ability to test from remote clients such as Windows and macOS. These tests catch many issues long before they reach the STABLE development branches on which we base our FreeNAS releases and updates. For simple issues, we notify the developer responsible for the triggering commit. For more complex issues, the QA team becomes closely involved with a number of developers, both internal and those from upstream software projects, to determine the root cause and best fix. More often than not, we have a good match between the size of the issue detected and the effort needed to remedy it, and fixes often reach active development before the next nightly build.

We integrate or use several Open Source projects in our testing processes. These include the AngularJS user interface toolkit used in the new FreeNAS UI, the Protractor AngularJS test suite, and the Selenium browser automation tool. We have reported a number of issues with these applications to their maintainers, including those we found in the Python scripting language at the heart of FreeNAS.

In addition to automation, QA has grown in other areas such as scenario testing. Going beyond the automation to cover basic functionality testing, we extended our manual testing capabilities to cover far more complex configuration scenarios. Until recently, we only performed hands-on testing with our TrueNAS enterprise arrays, but we have since extended these tests to include FreeNAS releases. As a result, we tailor a very targeted checklist of what to test based on the commits that went in between major FreeNAS releases.

Since we are an Open Source company, our test framework is open source as well. We welcome suggestions for additional tests and your code contributions. Testing is a great way to get familiar with the FreeNAS development process and who knows, you might even want to join the team as I have!

The FreeNAS REST API Tests:
https://github.com/iXsystems/ixbuild/tree/master/freenas

The FreeNAS UI Tests:
https://github.com/iXsystems/ixbuild/tree/feature-ui-tests/freenas/ui-tests

The test suite repo where you can report issues and make suggestions:
https://github.com/iXsystems/ixbuild/issues

Joe Maloney, QA Supervisor, iXsystems

The post FreeNAS QA – Our Processes appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Combating WannaCry and Other Ransomware with OpenZFS Snapshots

iX Team — Thu, 18 May 2017 18:25:32 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Ransomware attacks that hold your data hostage using unauthorized data encryption are spreading rapidly and are particularly nefarious because they do not require any special access privileges to your data. A ransomware attack may be launched via a sophisticated software exploit as was the case with the recent “WannaCry” ransomware, but there is nothing stopping you from downloading and executing a malicious program that encrypts every file you have access to. If you fail to pay the ransom, the result will be indistinguishable from your simply deleting every file on your system. To make matters worse, ransomware authors are expanding their attacks to include just about any storage you have access to. The list is long, but includes network shares, Cloud services like DropBox, and even “shadow copies” of data that allow you to open previous versions of files.To make matters even worse, there is little that your operating system can do to prevent you or a program you run from encrypting files with ransomware just as it can’t prevent you from deleting the files you own. Frequent backups are touted as one of the few effective strategies for recovering from ransomware attacks but it is critical that any backup be isolated from the attack to be immune from the same attack. Simply copying your files to a mounted disk on your computer or in the Cloud makes the backup vulnerable to infection by virtue of the fact that you are backing up using your regular permissions. If you can write to it, the ransomware can encrypt it. Like medical workers wearing hazmat suits for isolation when combating an epidemic, you need to isolate your backups from ransomware.

OpenZFS snapshots to the rescue
OpenZFS is the powerful file system at the heart of every storage system that iXsystems sells and of its many features, snapshots can provide fast and effective recovery from ransomware attacks at both the individual user and enterprise level as I talked about in 2015. As a copy-on-write file system, OpenZFS provides efficient and consistent snapshots of your data at any given point in time. Each snapshot only includes the precise delta of changes between any two points in time and can be cloned to provide writable copies of any previous state without losing the original copy. Snapshots also provide the basis of OpenZFS replication or backing up of your data to local and remote systems. Because an OpenZFS snapshot takes place at the block level of the file system, it is immune to any file-level encryption by ransomware that occurs over it. A carefully-planned snapshot, replication, retention, and restoration strategy can provide the low-level isolation you need to enable your storage infrastructure to quickly recover from ransomware attacks.

OpenZFS snapshots in practice
While OpenZFS is available on a number of desktop operating systems such as TrueOS and macOS, the most effective way to bring the benefits of OpenZFS snapshots to the largest number of users is with a network of iXsystems TrueNAS, FreeNAS Certified and FreeNAS Mini unified NAS and SAN storage systems. All of these can provide OpenZFS-backed SMB, NFS, AFP, and iSCSI file and block storage to the smallest workgroups up through the largest enterprises and TrueNAS offers available Fibre Channel for enterprise deployments. By sharing your data to your users using these file and block protocols, you can provide them with a storage infrastructure that can quickly recover from any ransomware attack thrown at it. To mitigate ransomware attacks against individual workstations, TrueNAS and FreeNAS can provide snapshotted storage to your VDI or virtualization solution of choice. Best of all, every iXsystems TrueNAS, FreeNAS Certified, and FreeNAS Mini system includes a consistent user interface and the ability to replicate between one another. This means that any topology of individual offices and campuses can exchange backup data to quickly mitigate ransomware attacks on your organization at all levels.
You can email us at info@ixsystems.com or call 1-855-473-7449, or 1-408-493-4100 (outside the US) to discuss your storage needs with one of our solutions architects.

Michael Dexter, Senior Analyst

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Kansas Linux Fest: Conference Report

iX Team — Wed, 17 May 2017 21:41:12 +0000

Last weekend, we were excited to attend Kansas Linux Fest for the first time, even though it was projected to be a small conference. As the only expo table at the event, we had the opportunity to speak in depth with those that approached our table. Due to the numbers attending, we thought we would have more down-time but this was not the case. There were typically three to four people around our booth at any given time asking questions or listening in on us talking about FreeBSD/FreeNAS/TrueOS with others. For being a small conference, it was extremely busy but it was rewarding being able to speak with people who were deeply interested in FreeNAS and TrueOS. Below, we have Joe Maloney and Ken Moore’s personal blog posts detailing their individual experiences at the event.

Ken Moore: I had a great time in Wichita this last weekend when Joe Maloney and myself attended Kansas Linux Fest. While the event itself was a fair bit smaller than we initially expected, the level of interaction we were able to have with others at the conference was incredible. We were able to sit and talk with attendees almost nonstop the entire time of the conference, and that was only interrupted when it was time to listen to one of the amazing talks/sessions that the conference had scheduled. In fact, there were so many people talking to us about the BSD family of operating systems that some attendees requested (and the organizers agreed to) an impromptu session called “BSD Q&A” to fill in a slot where the presenter canceled the day before. We got to talk about the four main BSD operating systems and how they all had distinct areas of interest/development, as well as go into a lot more detail about FreeBSD (since that is primarily what we use) and help to compare/contrast it with the Linux distributions that people were using.
I also gave my scheduled talk about the Lumina desktop on Sunday, and basically dove into the foundational elements that make up a desktop environment and how they are designed/implemented to interact with particular operating systems. This session spurred a lot of conversation afterward about TrueOS and led to questions such as future plans for commercial application support which is very difficult to obtain within the fragmented “Linux” ecosystem.
Joe Maloney: On Saturday, I gave a talk about OpenRC integration into TrueOS. As expected, a lot of the folks understood why we made the change away from FreeBSD’s RC system. While explaining some of the additional functionality of OpenRC, and what we could do with it in TrueOS, it seemed to trigger the most engagement during the talk. In particular, users were very interested in our ideas for network profiles, recovery options for system mis-configurations, and so on. There was also quite a bit of interest in how FreeBSD’s current RC system worked, and I was able to provide a lot of education on that topic.
Ken and I had many lengthy conversations with visitors at the booth which inspired a lot of new ideas for the TrueOS project. As usual, we are seeing that more and more users are aware of FreeNAS. I believe we made a lot of good inroads to introducing people to our hardware offerings as well. Also on Saturday, I joined in on an impromptu talk given by Ken to answer additional questions about FreeBSD to a wider audience.

For a new conference, we were impressed at how well things were organized, how smoothly the event went, and how accommodating the volunteers were to our needs. iXsystems had a fantastic time at Kansas Linux Fest and we would highly recommend it to anybody who lives in the general vicinity (or even a couple hours away) of Wichita, Kansas.

The post Kansas Linux Fest: Conference Report appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 11.0-RC now Available

Ladislav Sirový — Fri, 05 May 2017 00:58:59 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

I’m pleased to provide a quick update on the status of FreeNAS 11.0. The RC1 update was released this morning, and can be installed via ISO or updated to by switching to the FreeNAS-11-STABLE train in the System -> Update tab. We decided to start this series off with a Release Candidate (RC) version, because it is rebased on a newer version of FreeBSD (11-STABLE). This version has been tested in the nightlies for several months now, but just to play it safe we are asking for users to test out this release and let us know immediately if anything regresses. Or, if you want to let us know that it improves specific things, that’s cool as well.

Now, for the stats. Your loyal, dedicated, and attractive FreeNAS development team has been hard at work on this release. As of this morning, 11.0-RC includes 111 bug fixes and 23 new features. In addition the user-guide has been updated for 11 as well. As usual, if you find bugs please report them ASAP, since we can only fix things that we know about.
This release also includes the first “official” look at the experimental new Angular-based UI. You’ll be given an option to try this out on the Login screen. I just wanted to give you a couple of quick tidbits about this new UI:

It is NOT feature complete, as we have only been working on this for a few short weeks. While you can use it to do some things, keep this in mind as you “test-drive” it around. The feature complete version is targeted for later this year, most likely the 11.1 or 11.2 time-frame.

It follows (mostly) the same workflow as the legacy UI. This is intentional for now. In order to get us rapidly ported to the new Angular framework, we’ve decided to try and keep most of the workflow similar for the time being and focus purely on getting the functionality brought in. Once we have reached the point where all major features are usable in this UI, we will have a chance to do some navel-gazing and re-think workflows of specific sections one at a time. That being said, you are welcome to send in tickets about the new UI and we will be happy to discuss and get to them all in due course.The current theme will be changing down the road. We are planning to offer multiple themes, allowing you to pick between dark/light or perhaps even user-submitted themes.

Lastly, I wanted to mention support for virtualization. 11.0 now has a VM page, allowing you to spin up your own operating systems on FreeNAS. We are actively working on this functionality, so please give it a whirl and report issues to the tracker.

Thanks everybody! We look forward to making the 11.X series better than ever!

Kris Moore
Director of Engineering
iXsystems

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FreeNAS Corral Status: From “RELEASE” to “TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW” Status

Ladislav Sirový — Sun, 23 Apr 2017 20:13:57 +0000

Advance tl;dr:
Due to flaws discovered in its architecture, FreeNAS Corral has been downgraded to “TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW” status while we instead rebase its features upon the rock solid FreeNAS 9.10 base system, soon to be released as “FreeNAS 11”.
As many diehard FreeNAS users know, FreeNAS Corral was released on March 15th. It was a ground-up rewrite of FreeNAS with a new CLI, middleware, GUI, and several rewritten services. This product was in development for nearly three years and the initial Community response was largely positive. There was lots of excitement around the updated UI and the VM/Docker support, especially. However, within two weeks of release, nearly half of the initial users reverted back to FreeNAS 9.10 and over 500 bugs were reported. User feedback was clear: general system instability, challenges upgrading from 9.10, lack of feature parity with 9.10 Jails and iSCSI, GUI usability issues, and lower performance than expected, given the increased demands FreeNAS Corral placed on system hardware resources. With the myriad issues and the subsequent departure of the FreeNAS Corral Project Lead shortly after its release, we were forced to take a hard look at Corral’s feasibility as a product. Subsequently, we decided to revise our plan for its future.
Before we communicate this new plan of record, a little background is in order. The FreeNAS Corral GUI was built on the MontageJS framework, originally working alongside the team at Montage Studios. Unfortunately, during the development of the product, the Montage Studio team disbanded and the development of the MontageJS framework slowed to a crawl. This explains some of the browser incompatibility we’ve seen. So, our first goal following the release was to begin remaking the FreeNAS Corral UI (yes, yet again! …. /sigh) by basing the same UX on a more common framework. Not a huge deal, really, just some extra UI work for the team, but this time with a more common framework in place, allowing for faster development and more opportunity for contributions from the community. Once that new framework was in place for the UI, the next phase was to begin merging the FreeNAS 9 and FreeNAS Corral Engineering Teams to focus on one product.
However, that plan had to be reevaluated in the wake of mixed community feedback and the departure of the Corral leadership. The remaining team underwent a thorough engineering review of the product, specifically delving deeper into the middleware, some of the rewritten services such as DHCP and NFS, and the Plan 9 filesystem code used by VMs to access the host’s filesystem. In doing so, we discovered some holes in the architecture which make enterprise-quality file access impossible without a lot more effort and soak time, prompting us to also re-think how to more safely enable things like virtualization and Docker.
After weighing community feedback, and much internal deliberation at iX, we decided that the amount of work still required to bring FreeNAS Corral, as currently architected, up to an acceptable standard for quality, reliability, and data integrity will take an unreasonable amount of time. The quicker path to a properly stable and mature system is to rebase upon the FreeNAS 9.10 code, bringing some of the new features that FreeNAS Corral offers into a more mature and solid platform. This process has begun with the inclusion of VM container support and a brand new Angular-based UI which is already available in the 9.10 nightlies.
FreeNAS Corral will be treated as an experimental branch and repositioned from “RELEASE” to “TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW” status, available for download and experimentation, but not for use in production environments. This means it is unlikely you will be able to migrate configuration settings from Corral to the next FreeNAS version, however, your data will always be importable.
This new direction allows us to focus our efforts on our next release which will merge the legendary stability of FreeNAS 9 with the whiz-bang features of FreeNAS Corral, while also swapping the GUI with the new Typescript framework. This provides the best of both worlds (stability + features) and has the added benefit of being a far faster path to a rock solid and stable FreeNAS release. In fact, many of the original team behind FreeNAS had already begun the process of taking the 9 series and merging it with some of the new features introduced in FreeNAS Corral, for the next stable and soon-to-be-released FreeNAS 11 (yes, ours will go to 11)
The FreeNAS 11.0 release is currently slated for May/June. Here is a look at the current roadmap (subject to change as we move further along, of course):

New Angular-based web UI: You can test-drive the early work now in our nightlies. It will also be included in the upcoming 11.0 release as an experimental demo, with feature completion scheduled for later this year.
Expand and improve support for jails and jail-based plugins: For maximum compatibility with lighter system requirements.
VM Support: We have added a new “VM” menu which allows you to host your own Virtual Machines on FreeNAS, landing in 11.0.
Docker support: As a Virtual Machine-driven service, slated for 11.1
Improve support for DevOps-class alerting, PagerDuty, AWS Alerts, OpsGenie, and Slack (coming in 11.0).
Local and distributed S3 bucket support: Initial work landing in 11.0.
FreeBSD 11-stable base: Landing in 11.0.

Most of these items are already under active development, and we at iX look forward to sharing more details as they become available. As usual, we ask our beta-testing community to test drive these features in the nightlies and provide feedback and bug reports on the official tracker: https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas
We understand that some of you may be disappointed by this reversion, and we wholeheartedly sympathize. This decision was incredibly difficult for us as we knew that we would have some unhappy users on our hands, on top of all the work we’d done collectively that would now be shelved. Much time was spent by the community wrangling with FreeNAS Corral issues, testing the multiple BETAs, reporting bugs, etc, and unfortunately that’s not time we can give back to you. However, we do offer our sincere thanks and assure you that this decision was made with the community and users in mind, aiming to bring software of the highest quality that you can trust without a second thought. The short term user and community pain we’re all feeling is ultimately worth the knowledge that we won’t be jeopardizing your data. We’d rather have you be mildly frustrated with us now than furious with us later 🙂
Thank you for your continued support, contributions, and usage of FreeNAS. We appreciate all the users and fans who make this product better on a daily basis.
On behalf of your loyal FreeNAS Engineering Team,
Kris Moore
Director of Engineering
iXsystems

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What I Wish Everyone Knew About iXsystems’ White-Glove Support

iX Team — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:45:04 +0000

The iXsystems Customer Service Team is committed to ensuring our customers attain the best value from our products. We are organized to assist with iXsystems’ TrueNAS and server product lines, ensuring maximum productivity is achieved, while also providing aid during those tough situations.
The TrueNAS Storage Array is based on the same underlying technology as FreeNAS, the world’s most popular Open Source Software-Defined Storage operating system. There are many benefits that come along with TrueNAS. One of the most important is the white-glove support experience for the TrueNAS Storage Array software and hardware which directly contributes to the accolades we have received. While FreeNAS is supported by the community, TrueNAS solutions are designed for 24/7 enterprise support from iXsystems.
We leverage a three-tiered approach in delivering the white-glove experience, which allows us to focus our collective skills accordingly in the most efficient manner. A support issue begins with our triage staff carefully evaluating each situation and assigning the issue to the appropriate support resources. We are dedicated to ensuring the best possible problem resolution, leveraging the entire team’s experiences and perspectives as warranted. By taking on this approach as a team, we start the white-glove experience right from first contact, ensuring the proper attention is brought to bear.
Tier 1: Our Tier 1 support engineers are well versed in basic TrueNAS troubleshooting (including storage infrastructure), and typically handle front line assignments from Triage. Tier 1’s will bring in our Tier 2 or Tier 3 engineers should the customer need help with the integration of other systems to the TrueNAS.
Tier 2: These are our storage experts who can assist with application integration situations, to include virtualization and backup. If the situation involves integration with a specialized application, then Triage can fast track the situation to a Tier 2 Support Engineer. These engineers are versed in applications like virtualization and backup to work with you in ensuring your integration needs are met.
Tier 3: Our Tier 3 Support Engineers work closely with our engineering organization with a primary focus on support. In cases where the issue requires engineering assistance, the Tier 3 Engineer with experience in the area being supported will be involved. Tier 1 and Tier 2 Support Engineers will consult with Tier 3 engineers on issues such as performance tuning, code investigation, and network infrastructure situations.

Customers rated the support they got from iXsystems’ Support Team 4.6 stars out of 5 stars in the areas of Response Time, Quality of Communication, Knowledgeability, and Overall Satisfaction. Whether it is identifying failed components to working through issues with other manufacturers or infrastructure/integration challenges, the iXsystems Support Team is committed to assisting our customers with iXsystems products. We are proud of providing customers with a white-glove support experience and will continue to work diligently towards our goal of consistently helping our customers with their unique needs.
Chiu Szeto, Director of Customer Service

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FreeNAS Certified All-Flash Array: the ideal balance of capacity, durability, and price

iX Team — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 19:19:21 +0000

Many of you may have seen iXsystems’ recent announcement on the availability of a FreeNAS Certified 10TB all-flash, enterprise-class storage array for under $10,000. This should be welcome news for many small and medium-sized enterprises that would like to deploy flash storage arrays to support their performance-driven use cases but are unable to because of budgetary constraints.
As compelling as the price point is, it is also important to note that it was not the only thing we focused on as there were also other considerations taken throughout the design of this platform. Let me dive deeper into one of these considerations. It is well-known that solid state storage (SSD) delivers substantially higher IOPS and better latency than traditional hard disk drives. But there is also a downside; SSDs have a finite number of write/erase cycles.
There is an SSD endurance metric known as drive writes per day (DWPD). This rating indicates how many times the entire capacity of the SSD can be overwritten before it no longer is reliable. SSDs with low DWPD ratings are not designed for frequent write/erase but are well-suited for read intensive workloads. On the other hand, SSDs with high DWPD ratings can sustain high numbers of write/erase cycles; thus they are ideal for certain write intensive workloads.
SSDs with a high DWPD rating also come at a higher cost, but you should not use SSDs with low DWPD ratings with write intensive workloads. There is a very high probability that these SSDs will fail early in their deployment life. Similarly, applications that are highly read intensive would not require the high endurance and higher price of SSDs with a high DWPD rating.
During the design of the FreeNAS Certified All-Flash Array (AFA), our engineering team identified four common workloads. As a result, we can specify a number of different SSDs at different price points and different endurance levels for use in the AFA.

USE CASE

WORKLOAD TYPE

Big Data analytics and crunching only without write-back to storage

Read Intensive
>90% reads

VDI and some server-class VMs

More Balanced
60-90% reads

Most server-class VMs

Write Intensive
30-60% reads

Server Vms

Very Write Intensive
< 30% reads

When one of our customers engages with us on the AFA, our sales engineering team works closely with the customer to understand and identify their use case; we then customize a FreeNAS Certified AFA configuration option with the ideal balance of capacity, durability and pricing.
Talk to us today to find out more about how we can engineer a system perfectly suited for your data storage environment and your budget. Email us at info@ixsystems.com or call 1-855-473-7449, or 1-408-493-4100 outside the US) to discuss your storage needs with one of our solution architects.
Steve Wong, Director of Product Management

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TrueNAS Storage Primer on ZFS for Data Storage Professionals

iX Team — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 20:35:17 +0000

If you are a storage professional but new to TrueNAS and OpenZFS, their operations and terms may be a little different for you. The purpose of this blog post is to provide a basic guide on how OpenZFS works for storage and to review some of the terms and definitions used to describe storage activities on OpenZFS. A quick dictionary of OpenZFS terms can be found here.
The TrueNAS data storage system from iXsystems, uses OpenZFS as the underlying file system and volume manager. TrueNAS is based on the Open Source software-defined storage operating system, FreeNAS, which is based on the FreeBSD Open Source operating system.

Major Advantages of OpenZFS
OpenZFS is both a file system and a volume manager. Combining these two items allows OpenZFS to know exactly where data is going on every storage device and how much data each storage device manages. OpenZFS provides several built-in RAID implementations as well. These features allow OpenZFS to dramatically reduce the amount of rebuild times in the case of a storage device failure. OpenZFS only rebuilds the used blocks on each storage device instead of having to scan the entire storage device for potential data. This is a huge advantage as storage devices get bigger and bigger.
One of the most important features in OpenZFS is that it is designed to ensure data integrity. Since OpenZFS computes a checksum for every used block on a storage device, it can identify when the storage media has experienced an error, like bit rot, that has damaged the data. OpenZFS performs the same cryptographic signatures on all of the metadata. If the underlying hardware has a problem, OpenZFS realizes that the data it has retrieved does not match its records and can take action. OpenZFS automatically corrects any discovered data errors on a storage device from a redundant copy.
OpenZFS continues this data protection design by using a copy-on-write block management system. OpenZFS never overwrites existing blocks. When writing data, OpenZFS identifies the blocks that must change and writes them to a new location on the storage device. The old blocks remain untouched. This copy-on-write process not only protects data from partial writes and corruption, it provides for additional features like snapshots and data cloning, which is the creation of a new file system from a snapshot.

Storage Pools and Datasets
The highest level of storage abstraction on TrueNAS is the storage pool. A storage pool is a collection of storage devices such as HDDs, SSDs, and NVDIMMs, NVMe, that enables the administrator to easily manage storage utilization and access on the system.
A storage pool is where data is written or read by the various protocols that access the system. Once created, the storage pool allows you to access the storage resources by either creating and sharing file-based datasets (NAS) or block-based zvols (SAN).
A dataset is a named chunk of storage within a storage pool used for file-based access to the storage pool. A dataset may resemble a traditional filesystem for Windows, UNIX, or Mac. In OpenZFS, a raw block device, or LUN, is known as a zvol. A zvol is also a named chunk of storage with slightly different characteristics than a dataset.
Once created, a dataset can be shared using NFS, SMB, AFP, or WebDAV, and accessed by any system supporting those protocols. Zvols are accessed using either iSCSI or Fibre Channel (FC) protocols.
The tremendous flexibility offered by storage pools allows you to efficiently and effectively use all the storage on the system. You do not need to dedicate certain HDDs, or other storage devices, to certain tasks or protocols which tend to create underutilized wasted space in other legacy storage architectures.
TrueNAS supports more than one storage pool per system and a storage pool can grow at anytime by adding more storage to the system.

vdevs
The next level of storage abstraction in OpenZFS, the vdev or virtual device, is one of the more unique concepts around OpenZFS storage.
A vdev is the logical storage unit of OpenZFS storage pools. Each vdev is composed of one or more HDDs, SSDs, NVDIMMs, NVMe, or SATA DOMs.
Data redundancy, or software RAID implementation, is defined at the vdev level. The vdev manages the storage devices within it freeing higher level ZFS functions from this task.
A storage pool is a collection of vdevs which, in turn, are an individual collection of storage devices. When you create a storage pool in TrueNAS, you create a collection of vdevs with a certain redundancy or protection level defined.
When data is written to the storage pool, the data is striped across all the vdevs in the storage pool. You can think of a collection of vdevs in a storage pool as a RAID 0 stripe of virtual storage devices. Much of OpenZFS performance comes from this striping of data across the vdevs in a storage pool.
In general, the more vdevs in a storage pool, the better the performance. Similar to the general concept of RAID 0, the more storage devices in a RAID 0 stripe, the better the read and write performance.

RAID
Since OpenZFS is also a RAID manager, TrueNAS does not require a hardware RAID controller which makes TrueNAS a more efficient data storage system. OpenZFS provides software RAID and offers configurations that you are most likely familiar with on your legacy storage system. Here are some of the OpenZFS storage device redundancy terms and definitions.
In OpenZFS, the concept of a RAID group is similar to other implementations in that data is striped across a grouping of storage devices with a parity calculation or devices can be mirrored. The vdevs manage the RAID protection of data with OpenZFS and you can generally equate the term RAID group with the term vdev.

Mirrors – Similar to RAID 1 mirroring in that data written to one device is written to another device. OpenZFS supports multiple device mirrors. You can put two, three, even four storage devices into a mirror and all data written to one device is written to all the devices in the mirror. A mirror will ensure the vdev is operable even if all devices but one have failed within the vdev. A typical configuration will define multiple two-device mirror vdevs for superior random I/O performance. The trade off is storage capacity due to the amount of capacity reserved for redundancy.

RAIDZ1 – Similar to RAID 5, RAIDZ1 spreads data and parity information across all of the storage devices in the vdev protecting against a single device failure in the vdev. This is the most efficient configuration from a capacity perspective and a good performing configuration for large sequential write applications like data backups.

RAIDZ2 – Similar to RAID 6, RAIDZ2 spreads data and parity information across all of the storage devices in the vdev protecting against the potential of two storage device failures in the vdev. This is the most typical configuration for general use applications storing primary data on the TrueNAS system as it provides a great balance between available capacity, data protection, and performance.

RAIDZ3 – Triple parity protection. RAIDZ3 spreads data and parity information across all of the storage devices in the vdev protecting against the potential of three storage devices failing in a vdev.
TrueNAS using OpenZFS protects data on multiple levels and goes to great lengths to provide the performance and capacity you need for your applications.
Let’s summarize the storage hierarchy just discussed.

Individual storage devices (HDDs, SSDs, NVDIMMS, NVMe, Sata DOMS) are collected into vdevs.
Mirroring or RAID is implemented at the vdev level.
vdevs are collected together to create storage pools.
Data is striped across all the vdevs in a storage pool.
Datasets (NAS) or zvols (SAN) are created in the storage pools to allow data access
Datasets are shared via NFS, SMB, AFP, or WebDAV file protocols and zvols are accessed via either iSCSI or FC block protocols.

Here are some general rules around storage devices, RAID, vdevs, datasets, and storage pools.

With TrueNAS, use only storage devices provided by iXsystems.
Once a RAIDZ level or mirror has been created in a vdev, additional devices cannot be added to that vdev.
To add more storage in a storage pool, add more vdevs.
Do not mix different RAID levels inside the same storage pool.
You can mix SAN and NAS in the same storage pool.
You can have multiple storage pools in a system.
You can add, but cannot remove, vdevs from a storage pool.
All vdevs in a storage pool should be the same size.
Best practice is no more than 12 storage devices per vdev.
You can lose drives in a vdev but cannot lose a complete vdev.

Special vdevs
Storage pools can use special-purpose vdevs to improve performance. These special vdev types are not used to persistently store data, but instead temporarily cache data on faster devices.

SLOG: OpenZFS maintains a ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) as part of the storage pool. Similar to the journal in some other file systems, this write log is where OpenZFS writes in-progress operations so they can be completed or rolled back in the event of a system crash or power failure. One way to boost write performance is to separate the ZIL from normal storage pool operations by adding a dedicated device as a Separate Log, or SLOG. The dedicated device is usually a small but very fast device, such as a high-endurance flash device like a SSD or NVDIMM. Sometimes this SLOG device is known as a write cache. The SLOG can improve synchronous write performance for a file protocol like NFS, where an application waits for an acknowledgement from the storage destination that the data is actually written. The SLOG will have little effect on applications with asynchronous writes. The SMB and iSCSI protocols tend to use asynchronous writes so will not benefit from using a SLOG device.
L2ARC: In OpenZFS, a portion of system RAM is set aside as an Adaptive Replacement Cache, or ARC, to cache reads from the system and provide better performance for read-intensive applications. If a piece of data is read constantly, it will typically find its way to the ARC. When a piece of data is used frequently enough to benefit from caching but not frequently enough to rate being stored in RAM, OpenZFS can store it on a cache device, called a Level 2 ARC, or L2ARC. The L2ARC is typically a very fast and high-endurance flash storage like a SSD or NVDIMM. As with any read cache, the L2ARC can improve performance over time. The more data that is read, the more the data is potentially cached in either the ARC or L2ARC. Over time, the read cache will “heat up” and improve read performance.
Performance and vdevs
There are always trade-offs when you want to balance performance with capacity on a storage system. Generally speaking, a mirror can provide better IOPS and read bandwidth, but RAIDZ can provide better write bandwidth and much better space efficiency. However, the more vdevs in a pool, the better the pool performs.
For IOPS/read-intensive applications, multiple mirrored vdevs perform the best. However, this is not the most space efficient configuration as it trades performance for space.
General performance best practices around creating vdevs include:

Use two-disk mirrored vdevs for more random workloads like virtualization.
Use longer RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2 vdevs for backup storage or general storage workloads.
For write intensive applications, it’s typically better to have RAIDZ vdevs which provide longer stripes per vdev.
Mirrored (RAID 10) vdevs have the fastest rebuild time.

iXsystems Sales Engineers can work with you and your specific needs for performance and capacity to design a TrueNAS configuration to ensure you get the best of both worlds.
Call iXsystems toll free at 1-855-473-7449 or send an email to info@ixsystems.com and we will answer all your questions about TrueNAS, OpenZFS, and iXsystems.

Some of the material for this blog was taken from “FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS” by Michael W. Lucas and Allan Jude, published by Tilted Windmill Press. There are many other books by these authors so be sure to check them out if you need more in-depth information. I also suggest you read the many articles that Allan Jude has written for the FreeBSD Journal.

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FreeNAS: An Ideal Storage Platform for Network Administration Education

iX Team — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 23:30:30 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Guest Author Marc Matthes
I’ve been an educator for almost 30 years, starting off in the electronics field. Over time I moved to the computing field, working with Linux, BSD, SuSE, Novell, and other systems. The online communities and documentation for Open Source projects provided a wealth of resources, which translated well to what I was doing as a Professor.

About eight years ago, I discovered FreeNAS. After working with it for a while, I realized how powerful of a tool it is, on par with other storage offerings I have used, and that it would work well within our curriculum at Iowa Central Community College.

How FreeNAS became a central part of our program
About a decade ago, we developed an online education program. We found that many of the students struggled to learn everything there was to teach in our two-year program. We would give our more advanced students side projects with various storage technologies, but only a handful of students would come out of the program with the skills they needed to enter the field.
As I became more familiar with FreeNAS, I saw it as a powerful tool to teach our students. I showed another professor in our Computer Networking Program who I had an overlapping curriculum with and we both recognized the potential of FreeNAS in the classroom. So, around five years ago, we started to work together to integrate a storage curriculum into the program by utilizing FreeNAS.
Our program introduces FreeNAS in the second year. We use a GNU/Linux hypervisor with our server rack to give each student their own FreeNAS virtual server that they maintain throughout the program. This means they don’t have to compete for lab time or start from scratch with each new course. Instead of using a common FreeNAS image, each student has their own FreeNAS environment that they use throughout their program. Over the course of the program, students set up their virtual servers to work within both Windows and GNU/Linux environments, establishing the proper protocols and configurations for each. They also build and use Xen and VMware environments for FreeNAS and have to make sure that it stays functional as their network environment grows in complexity.

A valuable tool for educators and students
Because of the availability of quality documentation, the existence of online communities, and the simple fact that I can look at the code directly, Open Source projects can be great resources for educators to utilize. When those projects are in active development and have enterprise features, they are of great value for students entering a professional field. FreeNAS has all of these things. It also happens to be very easy to use, and, consequently, easy to teach.
In our program, we start off by having our students read online documentation, enter the FreeNAS forums, and use the FreeNAS community as a resource. We also spend some time going through some of the available how-tos up front. Once they get acclimated, students find FreeNAS to be straightforward and pick it up quickly. Even those that are only familiar with Windows or Apple get it intuitively.
FreeNAS works very well straight out of the box and doesn’t need tinkering to get things up and running. We have a NetApp system that we also use in our coursework, and I don’t feel as comfortable letting students use it as any change they make could have college-wide ramifications. This would require me to fix it, and take time away from my role as an educator. FreeNAS, on the other hand, is difficult to corrupt, especially with its snapshot capabilities that allow you to roll back the file system to previous states.
The students just get FreeNAS. It is instinctively understandable. This means they spend less time drilling down on all the particulars of administering a storage solution like NetApp and more time learning the language and fundamental concepts of storage. This means that, in the course of our two year program, our students walk away with a strong foundation in storage administration.
FreeNAS ensures that our students are prepared for the workforce. Even if the organization they go to work for uses some other storage platform, working directly with FreeNAS gives them the ability to adapt with little difficulty.
We had one student in our program who was recently hired full-time for a position. The customer was a NetApp shop, but FreeNAS gave him the knowledge and confidence to be conversant in storage concepts. He is not alone in his success. Students overall have done extremely well and have around an 85% placement within six months after participating in our two-year program. Right now we have regional employers calling and asking us for more graduates and they even send their own people for us to train.
Conclusion
As an educator, it’s my job to ensure that students have the skills they need to succeed. FreeNAS is a powerful tool in teaching those skills within the limited time frame of a two-year program. The success we’ve had with our students entering the workforce, and even in intercollegiate competitions, demonstrates the effectiveness of FreeNAS as an educational tool. Also, the simple fact that our students enjoy working with FreeNAS makes it an ideal solution for educating students in the growing field of storage. I am happy to have such a well-designed platform in FreeNAS to prepare my students for their careers.

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NetApp Amazes (but iXsystems Disrupts)

iX Team — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 20:15:18 +0000

NetApp is Amazing! Yes, you heard me correctly. NetApp is indeed an amazing company. They were pioneers in networked file storage, made many great products over the years, and did a fantastic job of hiring great people to build the company’s culture. These were the ingredients of the secret sauce that made NetApp special. So why would I ever leave NetApp to join iXsystems?

How do you leave giant, proprietary Disneyland to test the waters with a comparatively smaller, Open Source “upstart” (of 20 years and counting, by the way)? While this might puzzle some, the answer for me was pretty simple. Disruption. And yes, I know what you’re thinking right now, ‘Disruption? That’s original.’ Like you, I understand every company on the market is claiming they are disrupting the storage, network, or compute industry on a daily basis. The onslaught of press releases promising ‘The next great thing!’ is so common we’ve nearly become desensitized to the mere thought of ‘disruption.’ Only in the ego-driven tech industry could companies ever believe that they’re changing the world with each dot release. Well, I can offer some relief here because the beautiful thing about the disruption I’m speaking of is not necessarily a technological breakthrough but a way of doing business with iXsystems.

iXsystems is gaining customers, some of whom are parting ways with NetApp and EMC (now Dell EMC), at such a rapid pace because we offer a highly flexible enterprise solution that meets complex storage requirements without breaking the bank, giving up features, or sacrificing enterprise support. We do this by being the first storage company in the world that Open Sourced our storage operating system, FreeNAS, and it is now the world’s leading Open Source Software Defined Storage OS with almost 9 million downloads worldwide. This model breeds open collaboration and feedback from a strong community of users and contributors to help develop business-ready storage software. Releasing FreeNAS into the wild allows us to also provide you with a battle-tested enterprise product in TrueNAS that provides more features and performance per dollar and continues to surpass expectations year after year.

The best part is we dare you to try FreeNAS because we know that once you do, you too will be asking why am I paying six or seven figures for a logo on a bezel? I left NetApp because I get it. Look, if you are in the 5% of storage projects that require a billion IOPS and limitless scale-out capability we have no problem letting you know you probably need to speak with NetApp or EMC. But more than likely, you probably fit within the majority of IT projects that could benefit from a fully unified hybrid storage system that gives you the flexibility to handle today’s workload and the unforeseen requirements of the future.

The Open Source business model makes sense to me. Growing up near the birthplace of RedHat in Raleigh, North Carolina showed me how Open Source collaboration can change an industry firsthand and the tide is turning as more and more Open Source solutions enter production environments. Does this mean everyone is going to jump ship today? No, not at all, but I saw how iXsystems was still growing in a mostly flat storage market and realized that it was doing something special. iXsystems is disrupting how people acquire and use storage. That’s why I left NetApp, and if you think I’m crazy why don’t you give FreeNAS a try?

Patrick Bullock, Channel Account Manager

The post NetApp Amazes (but iXsystems Disrupts) appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Cyber Monday 2016 Tech Roundup

Annie Zhang — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 03:30:49 +0000

Happy Cyber Monday!
We’ve rounded up a list of hardware and tech components you may find useful to check out. Cyber Monday is a great day to grab some hard drives, replacement components, or new hardware for your next FreeNAS build and we hope you find this guidance helpful.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

10% off FreeNAS Mini/Mini XL

Built by the company that sponsors the development of FreeNAS, the FreeNAS Mini & Mini XL use enterprise-class hardware specifically chosen to maximize performance with FreeNAS. No other system in its class can match the power offered by these systems. And with a 10% discount until the end of Monday, it’s an even better deal than before. Use promo code ZFS on our website to custom build your Mini or buy one pre-built from Amazon!

FreeNAS Mini

FreeNAS Mini XL

FreeNAS Upgrades

DIY FreeNAS

ECC Memory

FreeNAS requires at least 8GB of RAM to take advantage of all the great features offered by ZFS. We also strongly recommend using ECC RAM to help prevent errors.

Hard Drives

Your data is only as good as your hard drives. Disk failures can and do happen so make sure you have enough redundancy and a spare drive to swap in.

Solid State Drives

By leveraging a read/write cache to optimize memory, you can achieve a significant performance boost for your storage.

Motherboards

The motherboard lies at the heart of your FreeNAS system. Choose reliable hardware to keep your data safe and online.

Networking

Upgrade your networking hardware for more bandwidth & faster access to your files.

Computer Cases

Whether you’re building a new system or planning your next one, get some ideas from this list of computer cases.

MiniITX

Corsair Obsidian 250D Mini ITX Case

MicroATX

Medium ATX

Supermicro SuperChassis CSE-732I-500B 500W Mid-Tower Workstation Chassis (Black)

Power Supplies

An energy-efficient power supply can save you money on electricity and reduce cooling costs over time.

USB Drives

These portable drives are great for everything from installing FreeNAS to storing and transferring files on an easy-to-carry device.

Computer Monitor

Watch your favorite TV shows or movies from the Plex plugin on a bigger, brighter screen.

Accessories

A miscellaneous collection of useful tech gadgets

Thanks for reading! We hope you found these links useful to check out and think about as you come up with your next FreeNAS build.

The post Cyber Monday 2016 Tech Roundup appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Save $150 on the FreeNAS Mini XL | FreeNAS How-To Guides | And More… | Issue #36

Annie Zhang — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 01:14:01 +0000

Hello FreeNAS Users,
With summer winding down, here’s your chance to save $150 on a brand new FreeNAS Mini XL. Read on for more details. We also have a new tutorial video about updating FreeNAS 9.10 in this issue as well as some user-created content from the community, including a few builds and a guide for setting up the Minio object server.

Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

The XL Deal of the Summer
Packed with unbeatable performance and high storage capacity in a small footprint, the Mini XL is perfect for streaming all your movies and TV shows during the long summer days, and now it’s an even BETTER deal! We are reducing the price of FreeNAS Mini XL by $150 so take advantage while you can! Check it out >>

How to Update FreeNAS 9.10
Is your FreeNAS system up to date? Our newest tutorial video demonstrates how to update FreeNAS 9.10 and helps explain the different options available. Watch now >>

FreeNAS Build by Stephen Foskett
Stephen Foskett, a tech writer and the organizer of Tech Field Day, decided to replace his older Drobo and Iomega systems with a new FreeNAS server. His new system features a Supermicro motherboard, an Intel Xeon CPU, and 16GB of ECC RAM. Read More >>

How to Run Minio on FreeNAS
Thanks to Ben Agricola for writing a guide detailing how to run Minio on FreeNAS. Minio is an object storage server built for cloud application developers and is compatible with Amazon S3.
Read More >>

6 Reasons Why TrueNAS is replacing NetApp and EMC – Free Webinar
We invite you to join Matt Olander, Co-Founder and CSO of iXsystems, in a free webinar about TrueNAS. Find out why people are making the switch from big-name, legacy storage vendors to TrueNAS. Read more >>

Live Events

August 28-Sept. 1, 2016 – VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, NV
September 19-22, 2016 – SNIA SDC in Santa Clara, CA
September 22-25, 2016 – EuroBSDcon in Belgrade, Serbia
November 11-12, 2016 – MeetBSD CA in Berkeley, CA

TechTip #32
A flash Separate LOG device (SLOG) accelerates synchronous writes. This can make a huge different in VM, database and NFS performance.

Join the Team
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for talented people to join our team. Interested? The full list of available positions can be found on our website.

Links of the Month

Episode 153: Big int trouble via BSD Now
#ServerEnvy: Hellaport via iXsystems
A Grand Experiment via Leo Laporte
FreeNAS Build for Work via @willrun4fun

The post Save $150 on the FreeNAS Mini XL | FreeNAS How-To Guides | And More… | Issue #36 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Clearly-Defined Storage

Joshua Smith — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 18:41:01 +0000

The storage industry was once dominated by Direct-Attached Storage or DAS for short, which is little more than a given number of disks attached to a computer. By contrast, modern storage includes key software and network layers that all contribute to the definition of “Software-Defined Storage”. These layers of software and networking reside between the raw storage devices and users, providing any number of features from standard sharing protocols and powerful management features. Where we hear “SDS” most used, however, is in regards to something rather specific: Hardware-Agnostic Storage
Hardware-agnostic or hardware-decoupled storage refers to the isolation of all these new software and network layers from the hardware they run on. Take for example our FreeNAS storage operating system: It combines the FreeBSD Operating System, the OpenZFS enterprise file system, industry-standard file and block sharing protocols and a web management interface to create an easy-to-use storage solution that runs on nearly any Intel-based system. With over 8.5 million FreeNAS downloads, we are more than happy to accept the title for the “World’s #1 Software-Defined Storage” solution, but doing so does not clear up all the confusion around “SDS”. FreeNAS is free of charge and you are indeed free to run it on whatever hardware you like, but that’s not actually what the “Free” in its name refers to: The “Free” refers to the freedom that a fully Open Source storage solution provides you, from the available source code to its freedom from artificial constraints like a maximum capacity. People can, and do build multi-Petabyte FreeNAS systems and we would never prevent them from doing so.
But that’s not the point.
Our success with FreeNAS continuously reminds us of one simple fact: Software is only one piece of a storage solution. The quality of the system that runs your storage software and the storage hardware devices that perform the actual heavy lifting can be just as critical, if not more critical, than the storage software itself. The same is true, if not more so in virtualized environments where the communication of the OpenZFS file system we use with the underlying disks is critical to verifiable data integrity. You are free to run FreeNAS on whatever hardware you like but we have engineered hardware to precisely meet the requirements of the FreeNAS software, as represented by the FreeNAS Mini and FreeNAS Certified lines.
But even that’s not the point.
FreeNAS on FreeNAS Certified hardware is something we take great pride in but great software on great hardware does not necessarily unlock the full potential of one another. We could have stopped here, as many “SDS” vendors do, but we recognized the potential for creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts. The result is TrueNAS, our Enterprise-class, Highly Available storage platform. TrueNAS employs a tightly-integrated, hot-swappable modular design with the features needed to help guarantee the integrity and availability of mission-critical data. Unlike FreeNAS on FreeNAS Certified hardware, or most SDS solutions for that matter, TrueNAS offers:

Toolless/Modular 3U Rack Mount
Hot-Swappable Storage Controllers with no single point of failure
Global Fault Notification Indicator Light
Enclosure Management Services, Hardware Alerts, and Drive Fault Notification
VMware, Citrix and Microsoft certifications and integration
Racking and Deployment Services
Performance Tuning by our Engineers
Up to 24/7 Hardware and Software Support
Integrated Proactive Support, Support Portal and Monitoring
Optional High Availability Failover with Zero-Downtime Software Upgrades
Optional Zero-Downtime Controller Upgrades
Optional Expansion Cabinets for up to 4PB of RAW Capacity
Optional Fiber Channel Connectivity

Of these TrueNAS-only features, Support probably doesn’t stand out, but we encourage you to contemplate the “Support” you receive with a Hardware-Agnostic Storage solution. Which of the two or more vendors do you turn to first? How can you guarantee that your separate hardware and software vendors will not engage in finger pointing or a circular blame game? With TrueNAS, the buck stops here, and that’s even true before it reaches you: TrueNAS is designed and built by our US-based engineering team at our Silicon Valley-based headquarters. Our engineering, manufacturing, sales and support staff all work closely to guarantee you a one-stop, authoritative answer to any question you have at any stage in the relationship.

The à la carte Storage Pitfalls

We won the hardware-agnostic SDS game with FreeNAS but if you are procuring a storage system for your mission-critical data, ask the competition these simple questions:

Am I truly free to run your “SDS” solution on any hardware I want, or only select pre-certified systems?
Must I be concerned with minute hardware details like firmware versions of individual components?
How will you guarantee that my performance requirements are met?
Will I actually save money by paying a separate software license fee on top of my hardware costs?
Will I need to pay additional license fees to unlock features?
Will the software notify me of and locate hardware faults?
Can I upgrade my software and hardware together as my needs grow?
Can I replace the hardware or software vendor as my needs change?
Who do I turn to first if I have a question or issue?
Can you guarantee that you will take full responsibility for my issue?
Can you guarantee me a fast, coordinated resolution while I could be losing money due to downtime?

Before considering Software-Defined Storage, consider iXsystems TrueNAS Clearly-Defined Storage and learn just how important tight hardware integration is in enterprise-class storage.
Michael Dexter
Senior Analyst

The post Clearly-Defined Storage appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Badlock (CVE-2016-2118) and TrueNAS and FreeNAS

iX Team — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 23:26:34 +0000

Just a general heads-up and JFYI on the case of the “Badlock” security vulnerability in Samba, the tool used by FreeNAS and TrueNAS to provide SMB networking.

First, the press has been quick to clarify that this issue is nowhere near as severe as it was initially made out to be in the weeks leading up to the release of the fix from the Samba team yesterday, as some of the cited articles describe. While the issues reported are certainly important, and will be addressed, there is no significant danger to a TrueNAS 9.3/FreeNAS 9.3 (or 9.10) system operating in a secure environment.

Though the promised apocalypse did not arrive, the bug has also attracted enough attention from our customers that we need to fix it in a special Security Software Update (SSU) for both FreeNAS (9.3 and 9.10) and TrueNAS (9.3) that contains ONLY the fix for Badlock – no other tickets will be addressed in the forthcoming SSU.

We are planning to release this as a “rebootless update” – one which can be applied while the system is running and all it will do is restart the SMB service afterwards. Users should not have to reboot their systems or otherwise take down services in order to apply this SSU.

Because of the complexity of the fixes to Samba and the difficulty in back-porting them to Samba 4.1, we also decided to upgrade all TrueNAS/FreeNAS 9.3 users to Samba 4.3.6 – a newer and more capable version of Samba that is already in use by FreeNAS 9.10 – at the same time. FreeNAS 9.10 users will only see a fix for Badlock, not a Samba upgrade as well.

Once the changes have been fully vetted by the FreeNAS community as well as our QA and engineering teams, a security software update for TrueNAS 9.3 will also be released.

— Jordan Hubbard

The post Badlock (CVE-2016-2118) and TrueNAS and FreeNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

OpenZFS vs. the Competition

Joshua Smith — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 13:00:03 +0000

What’s in your file system?

“My data” is a reasonable answer but if you take that data seriously, you should take a moment to think about the actual underlying file system that you are trusting to keep your data safe. After all, the file system is the most critical component in doing so. The countless storage products on the market use a myriad of different “production ready” file systems, and these file systems vary dramatically in the precautions they take to guarantee the integrity of your data. From “bit rot” to machine and human error, you can assume that the majority of storage solutions are not taking any data integrity precautions beyond some form of simple redundancy. Let’s examine what the most popular file systems do and don’t do to protect your data, and why every storage solution available from iXsystems uses the OpenZFS file system.

Storage solutions broadly fall into four categories: SoHo NAS systems, Cloud-based solutions, Enterprise NAS and SAN solutions, and Microsoft Storage Server solutions. Of these, the SoHo NAS and Cloud-based solutions can have quite a bit in common because they’re both focused on delivering commodity products and services. To keep costs down, these budget-conscious “black box” solutions typically employ GNU/Linux file systems such as Ext3, Ext4, XFS and Btrfs, and hardware or software RAID for redundancy. With the exception of Btrfs, none of these components are taking any precautions against bit rot or the damage that can be done by an interrupted write to disk. They also offer primitive at best snapshotting and rollback options to mitigate human error, and do not facilitate the verifiable importing and exporting of your data. Btrfs does aim to deliver many of the features found in OpenZFS but in its current state, Btrfs suffers from space accounting issues, a limited volume manager, and general administrative complexity. A search for “Btrfs petabyte” will show that few, if any users are deploying Btrfs at scale, let alone in production.

By contrast, traditional NAS and SAN vendors like EMC and NetApp do make concerted efforts to provide data integrity guarantees but they do so using proprietary file systems that lock you into their platforms which become quite costly as they scale. The de facto IT vendor Microsoft offers ReFS as a modern alternative to the ubiquitous NTFS file system, but ReFS appears to share a fate similar to Btrfs: Not yet ready for production and not yet the default file system for Microsoft’s own storage products.

Enter OpenZFS

All of the above storage solutions represent de facto standards in one way or another and there comes a time when such standards need to be thrown out and replaced with something new. The OpenZFS project is exactly that decision and is easily the greatest achievement of Sun Microsystems’ Open Source push a decade ago. OpenZFS is a modern, Open Source file system for modern architectures, and takes more data integrity precautions than any file system before it or since. OpenZFS uses the power of modern CPUs to checksum and validate data at every step to detect data integrity errors A.K.A. “bit rot”, before they reach your application.

OpenZFS can also:

Repair detected bit rot with sophisticated distributed parity and mirror-based redundancy strategies
Alleviate machine errors with a copy-on-write architecture
Mitigate human error with snapshots, cloning, and rollback
Accelerate arrays with a hybrid flash logging and caching architecture
Replicate verifiably to other LAN and WAN-based OpenZFS systems
Scale by design beyond the capacity of contemporary hardware
Advance relentlessly thanks to a strong Open Source community
Deliver high-availability with the TrueNAS enterprise storage platform

OpenZFS is the most complete and battle-tested file system available, especially when it comes to protecting your data from corruption or loss. From the FreeNAS Mini through the multi-petabyte TrueNAS Z35, iXsystems has a storage solution powered by OpenZFS that is ready to meet your file sharing, backup, virtualization, and media needs. Visit us or call 855-473-7449 to learn more about iXsystems storage solutions.

Michael Dexter
Senior Analyst

The post OpenZFS vs. the Competition appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.10 Released

Joshua Smith — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 17:14:25 +0000

2016 will bring revolutionary changes to the world’s number one software-defined storage solution, FreeNAS. It all starts with this week’s FreeNAS 9.10 release which unveils the operating system that will power the next generation of FreeNAS.
Based on FreeBSD 10.3, FreeNAS 9.10 combines hundreds of FreeBSD improvements with dozens of bug fixes and feature requests, while retaining the familiar user interface. Topping the list of FreeNAS 9.10 features are greater speed and scalability, dozens of new hardware drivers, USB 3.0 support, and the addition of the bhyve hypervisor.
Intel Skylake CPU and I219-V & I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet controller support stand out from a platform perspective and users can now use USB 3.0 storage and network controllers. FreeNAS plugin jails have been upgraded to FreeBSD 10.3 templates, which are binary compatible with existing jails. For the more adventuresome, FreeNAS 9.10 also includes FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor, opening the door to hosting virtual machines on FreeNAS with operating systems such as GNU/Linux and SmartOS.
For more information about FreeNAS 9.10, please see the forum announcement, release notes and change log. Current FreeNAS 9.3 users are encouraged to upgrade to FreeNAS 9.10 to stay current with the latest bug fixes and feature requests. Thank you for using FreeNAS, and we welcome your feedback!
Michael Dexter
Senior Analyst

The post FreeNAS 9.10 Released appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS CLI Preview

Joshua Smith — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 09:47:22 +0000

The evolution of FreeNAS has been both subtle and revolutionary over its decade-long history, and the next generation of FreeNAS is poised to introduce the biggest changes yet to the world’s most popular software-defined storage OS. This clean-slate rewrite adds something unheard of in open source storage: An intuitive command-line interface or CLI for short that allows you to control every aspect of FreeNAS, including exciting new features like object storage and virtualization. Enterprise users familiar with the Cisco and Vyatta CLIs will feel right at home with the FreeNAS CLI, but new users should have no trouble navigating it thanks to its purpose-built design and built-in help. Beyond simply being intuitive, the FreeNAS CLI is also highly-scriptable, allowing you to configure a local or remote FreeNAS system in seconds.

Getting Started

The FreeNAS CLI is only available in FreeNAS 10 ALPHA nightly builds which can be downloaded from download.freenas.org/10/MASTER/.
While FreeNAS 9.3 and 10 ALPHA differ in countless ways, they do share the same installation procedures that use a hybrid CD-ROM/USB key bootable installer image. The FreeNAS 9.3 Documentation will walk you through the process on real or virtual hardware. Upgrades from FreeNAS 9.3 are not supported at this time and understand that FreeNAS 10 ALPHA is not yet ready for production use with critical data.

Orientation

On first boot, you will be greeted by Suraj’s sacred cow who advises you to “Type 'help' to get started.” You should also see a DHCP-acquired IP address that you can ssh to as root and type ‘cli‘.
The CLI prompt will look like this, with “unix” indicating that you are connected via the local unix-domain socket:

 _________________________________________

/ Welcome to the FreeNAS CLI! Type 'help' \

\ to get started.                         /

 -----------------------------------------

        \   ^__^

         \  (**)\_______

            (__)\       )\/\

             U  ||----w |

                ||     ||

You may try the following URLs to access the web user interface:

          URLs (url)

http://192.168.1.4

http://fe80::3e97:eff:fe77:a435

unix::>

A question mark “?” will show you the available items in any given namespace and from there “help” and “show” are your primary discovery commands:

unix::>?

Global commands:

-   ?      dump  help     pending   setenv   showurls  unalias  whoami

..  alias  echo  history  printenv  shell    source    vars

/   clear  exit  login    saveenv   showips  top       wait

Filtering commands:

exclude  less  limit  more  newer_than  older_than  search  select  sort

Current namespace items:

account  calendar          log          service    statistic  update

alert    directoryservice  network      share      system     vm

boot     disk              replication  simulator  task       volume

unix::>help disk

Command   Description

show      Lists disks

The disk namespace lists the disks recognized by the system.

Type 'show' for more details about the disks.

Type the disk's name to manage that disk and type

'help properties' for help on the available properties.

unix::>disk show

Path      Name       Size       Online   Empty   Allocation

/dev/da0    da0    7.22 GiB       yes      no      boot device

/dev/ada0   ada0   223.57 GiB     yes      no      unallocated

/dev/ada1   ada1   223.57 GiB     yes      no      unallocated

Knowing that we have disks ada0 and ada1 available for use, using them to create a mirrored volume is simply a matter of providing a volume name plus the disks:

unix::>volume create myvolume disks=ada0,ada1

Task #5 submitted

unix::>

unix::>volume show

Volume name   Encrypted   Providers   Status    Mount point

myvolume      no          none        ONLINE   /mnt/myvolume

The [1] before the prompt indicated that a task, in this case “volume create” is pending execution. You can display pending and executing tasks and subtasks with “pending”:

[1] unix::>pending

ID   Description     Started at    Finished at     State          Status

Task ID      Task description         Task status

10       Create volume myvolume   50% (Executing...)

Sharing Setup

With your volume configured, you can now follow the familiar FreeNAS steps of creating a user and an SMB share, enabling the SMB service, and assigning ownership of the share to the user:

unix::>account user create myuser password=123

unix::>share smb create myshare parent=myvolume

Task #15 submitted

Share 'myshare' has been created but the service 'smb' is not currently running,

please enable the service with '/ service smb config set enable=yes'

unix::>/ service smb config set enable=yes

Task #20 submitted

unix::>service smb show

Property   Description     Value    Editable

name       Service name   smb       no

state      State          RUNNING   no

pid        Process ID     1389      no

unix::>share smb myshare set owner=myuser

New to FreeNAS 10 is the ability to manually start and stop services, rather than only enabling and disabling them: “/ service smb start”
With the share configured, you can test it over the LAN or at the FreeBSD command line invoked with “shell” and the included “smbclient” utility:

unix::>shell

# smbclient -U myuser \\\\localhost\\myshare

...

Enter myuser’s password:

Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Windows 6.1] Server=[Samba 4.3.4-UNKNOWN]

smb: \> dir

.                                   D        0  Tue Feb 16 00:14:59 2016

..                                  D        0  Tue Feb 16 00:13:36 2016

.config-smb-myshare.json            H     1801  Tue Feb 16 00:14:59 2016

223477658 blocks of size 1024. 223477638 blocks available

smb: \> exit

# exit

unix::>

Success!

Five commands are all it takes to create a volume and share it to a dedicated user. The power of this approach becomes clear when you consider that the same five commands can reside in a script. Rather than executing the commands one by one, you can type “shell” and create the following script “/root/create_share” with your editor of choice:

volume create myvolume disks=ada0,ada1; wait

account user create myuser password=123; wait

share smb create myshare parent=myvolume; wait

service smb config set enable=yes

share smb myshare set owner=myuser

FreeNAS CLI Scripting

From the CLI you can type “source create_share” to run the script to have your volume, user and share created in seconds. This opens the door for remotely configuring multiple FreeNAS systems from either one another, or from any computer with the FreeNAS CLI installed. Here are two examples of locally and remotely running our script in the FreeBSD shell:

cli -f /root/create_share

cli -f /root/create_share ssh://root@192.168.1.4

This crash course only scratches the surface of the FreeNAS CLI and its potential to change the way you look at storage and system management. New scripting features are arriving every week and the FreeNAS CLI promises to become a standard tool in your administrative toolkit.
Michael Dexter
Senior Analyst

The post FreeNAS CLI Preview appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

To SLOG or not to SLOG: How to best configure your ZFS Intent Log

iX Team — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 21:27:11 +0000

In the world of storage, caching can play a big role in improving performance. OpenZFS offers some very powerful tools to improve read & write performance. To improve read performance, ZFS utilizes system memory as an Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), which stores your file system’s most frequently and recently used data in your system memory. You can then add a Level 2 Adaptive Replacement Cache (L2ARC) to extend the ARC to a dedicated disk (or disks) to dramatically improve read speeds, effectively giving the user all-flash performance.
OpenZFS also includes something called the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL). The ZIL can be set up on a dedicated disk called a Separate Intent Log (SLOG) similar to the L2ARC, but it is not simply a performance boosting technology. This article aims to provide the information needed to understand what the ZIL does and how it works to help you determine when SLOG will help and how to optimize write performance in general.
Isn’t the ZIL just the ZFS name for a write cache?
Many people think of the ZFS Intent Log like they would a write cache. This causes some confusion in understanding how it works and how to best configure it. First of all, the ZIL is more accurately referred to as a “log” whose main purpose is actually for data integrity. It exists to keep track of in-progress, synchronous write operations so they can be completed or rolled back after a system crash or power failure. Standard caching generally utilizes system memory and data is lost in those scenarios. The ZIL prevents that.
Second, the ZIL does not handle asynchronous writes by default. Those simply go through system memory like they would on any standard caching system. This means that the ZIL only works out of the box in select use cases, like database storage or virtualization over NFS. OpenZFS does allow a workaround if you decide to opt for the extra level of data integrity in your asynchronous writes, by switching from “sync=standard” to “sync=always” mode, but that must be manually configured.
Third, the ZIL, in and of itself, does not improve performance. The ZIL sits in your existing data pool by default, usually comprised of spinning disks, to log synchronous writes before being periodically flushed to their final location in storage. This means that your synchronous writes are not only operating at the speed of your storage pool, but have to be written to pool twice, sometimes more depending on your level of disk redundancy.
How should you configure your ZIL?
As stated above, the ZIL’s primary purpose is to protect data in the case of a system crash or power failure and comes with performance penalties because it must be written to the ZIL before making it to your storage pool. What is needed for performance improvement is a dedicated SLOG, like a low-latency SSD or other similar device (ZeusRAM, etc), so your ZIL-based writes will not be limited by your pool IOPS or subject to RAID penalties you face with additional parity disk writes. And even with a dedicated SLOG, you will not enjoy performance improvements out of the box on asynchronous writes, as they do not utilize the ZIL by default.
To optimize your ZIL performance, the following things should be considered:

Use case: If your use case involves synchronous writes, utilizing a SLOG for your ZIL will provide benefit. Database applications, NFS environments, particularly for virtualization, as well as backups are known use cases with heavy synchronous writes.

Storage pool protection (RAID): When your ZIL is in-pool, you run a standard performance overhead of 2 writes + your write penalty for your RAID configuration, which comes to 4 writes total per transaction with RAID-Z1 (and mirroring), 6 with RAID-Z2, and 8 with RAID-Z3. RAID-10 provides no additional performance penalty over raw disks.

“sync=standard” vs. “sync=always”: Asynchronous writes are not protected by the ZIL in the default “sync=standard” configuration under OpenZFS. If losing the couple seconds worth of write data in a power loss or system crash would be harmful to your operations, setting ZFS to “sync=always” will force all writes through the ZIL. This will make all your writes perform at the speed of the device your ZIL is set to, so you will want a dedicated SLOG under this configuration or writes will be painfully slow.

Choosing a SLOG device: OpenZFS aggregates your writes into “transaction groups” which are flushed to their final location periodically (every 5 seconds in FreeNAS & TrueNAS). This means that your SLOG device only needs to be able to store as much data as your system throughput can provide over those 5 seconds. Under a 1GB connection, this would be about 0.625GB. Correspondingly a 10GB connection would require 6.25GB and 4x10GB would require 25GB. This means latency, rather than size is your main consideration in choosing a device.

Performance requirements: If you have a use case that utilizes the ZIL, purchasing a dedicated SLOG device is a good way to improve performance. You can even use multiple SLOG devices, which OpenZFS will stripe across for improved performance. OpenZFS also allows for the SLOG to be mirrored, which can protect against performance degradation and avoid any data loss during a device failure. This means you can scale up your ZIL performance to handle high storage volumes with more availability for a relatively low cost.

Conclusion
OpenZFS provides powerful tools to give your FreeNAS & TrueNAS storage blazing performance with the cost of spinning disk storage. It allows you to add multiple levels of protection and disk redundancy to keep your data safe from corruption and loss. The ZFS Intent Log, or ZIL, is frequently discussed in vague terms that don’t provide a full picture of the benefits it provides or how to implement it properly. With the above information, you will have a better idea of how to get maximum performance with write protection for your storage environment.
Additional ZIL Related Resources
ZFS:
http://www.freenas.org/whats-new/2015/11/zfs-zil-and-slog-demystified.html
https://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/2015/02/04/why-zil-size-matters-or-doesnt/
Choosing a SLOG device:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-benchmark,3269.html
http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Explore/Fastest-SSD/8

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Aaron Pierson

Václav Navrátil — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 02:25:30 +0000

Cloud Computing and Backup Administrator

FreeNAS is the best thing to happen to my house since linux. Creating NFS/CIFS mounts – done. Uploading my music, pictures, videos, and documents – done. Sharing my uploads with my PS3, smart TV, and tablet – done. And that’s just with my 32 bit box. Using deduplication to reduce the required space for my files – done. Using ZFS to snapshot, dedupe, and provide software RAID – done. I have barely scratched the surface of what FreeNAS can do because it has been doing everything I want it to do.

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Matt Flaming

Václav Navrátil — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 02:24:26 +0000

System Admin and Instrumentation Engineer

I find FreeNAS easy to implement, easy to manage with its beautiful web interface, and an overall feature-set that cannot be beat by an off-the-shelf unit. Ease of expansion in DIY projects is a must and I don’t know if I have seen the limit to what FreeNAS can provide thus far. The team has provided extensive documentation and any questions beyond the documentation have probably already been answered by the community in the forums. ZFS is integral and you are hard-pressed to find another product that can perform like FreeNAS given its featureset. I have tried all the options available out there for a home-built NAS device and to me, FreeNAS is the most polished and easy to use system available. It will take a lot to get me to look at anything else ever again.

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Robert Buggy

Václav Navrátil — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 02:23:44 +0000

Technology Integration Engineer

I have been using FreeNAS for over four years now and have had nothing but love for it. I started off using it as a way to have a 24/7 box to host all my music video and pictures. Then built out larger boxes with multiple drives to raid as a backup for all my PCs. I even built one such box for my parents which has run faithfully for 3 years now. I have recently expanded into using it at work both the FreeNAS and TrueNAS versions to host user data and virtual machines for our development network. Now I’m building a virtualized test environment at home and used 10g and ZFS L2ARC on a ssd to create a powerful and fast home test bed. The flexibility of FreeNAS is incredible and allows for a wide array of personal and professional use.
Keep up the great work!

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Alan McKinnon

Václav Navrátil — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 02:21:48 +0000

System Administrator

In the grand free and open source tradition, I get the very best feature set I could hope for (everything) at the best possible price (nothing) 🙂
I’m a sysadmin by trade and have two FreeNAS boxes at home – one for general storage, one for permanent backups. Both just run day in and day out, never give issues and never need handholding. I’ve tried various solutions over the years, usually some combination of a customized Linux install with NFS and Samba; now this works OK, but it gets to be labour-intensive. With FreeNAS, I can stop doing the following:
* Eternally fiddling with the system, running apt-get/emerge or whatever
* Trying to figure out almost daily what update broke things today
* Worrying about reaching the limits of the filesystem
* Dealing with the complexity of disk storage and all the layers that make it up (thanks to ZFS)
* FreeNAS is an appliance, I treat it like my DSL router and media player, and that’s exactly the way I want it. It’s trouble free, it just works, it does what it says on the box and does it well.
The cherry on the cake has got to be ZFS. For too long I’ve had to deal with disks, disk system drivers, partitions, volume managers, assembling RAID arrays, mkfs and finally mount. Let’s rather not talk about resizing an fs and what that entails. With ZFS, all that complexity goes away and becomes a non-issue. Storage is now just storage – I added 12TB of disks a chassis and told ZFS to just deal with it properly and give me a mount point. And that’s exactly what it did. And it did it in about 5 minutes!
How I ever managed before ZFS is a bit of a mystery to me now – all that unnecessary complexity just goes away.
Great job guys!

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Arno H

Václav Navrátil — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 02:20:33 +0000

Software Engineer

I found my way to FreeNAS long after I should have and would have liked.
I follow tech news enough that I knew about ZFS, understood its benefits, and held some minor resentment that Apple had stopped pursuing it as a filesystem. Requirement number one: reliable data storage. ZFS had it locked up.
I was lucky to next come across FreeNAS. Luckier further to find it right as the provided ZFS was getting a major update. I realized that I didn’t need another system running a workstation focused OS. I just needed a NAS. Something to store and serve files. FreeNAS has turned out to be even more.
So I assembled my components, with some help from the FreeNAS forums to select parts, and built the system. I had one minor hiccup where my first USB drive wasn’t recognized, but re-flashing it got everything working. Copying data from the Drobo to spare drives, checksumming, installing the Drobo drives to the new FreeNAS box, copying data back, and checksumming again took almost a week, but it felt so good to be free.
These days “tardis” still serves data and takes on more and more data. I have an automatic scrub every other week, tasks that backup and synchronize data on a reliable schedule, and even jailed plugins serving media handling a reverse proxy for a variety of web interfaces running on my home network. I’ve upgraded the capacity in the pool and even though each disk took around eight hours, dual disk redundancy left me not worrying one bit about my data. I use this FreeNAS box as the backup destination for TimeMachine on two Macs and each backup completes faster than ever. I’ve had a backup go corrupt (a Mac problem, not due to FreeNAS) twice and all I had to do was roll back the snapshot of the backup to the last good version and TimeMachine started right backup up again like normal. I enabled higher compression on just the datasets that would see benefit and I have one with a ratio over five. I am staying as far from dedup as I can. The discussion board is helpful, interesting, and represents a huge wealth of knowledge.
The power, flexibility, and simplicity of FreeNAS is at once exciting and also provides peace of mind. I feel like my data is safe while I’m free to experiment with new features and tasks to make the rest of my life easier. There isn’t much that would make me happier with using FreeNAS and it just keeps getting better.

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January #MissionComplete Best Story

Joshua Smith — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 20:27:17 +0000

Our #MissionComplete project continues with users telling their stories about how TrueNAS, FreeNAS, FreeBSD, OpenZFS and iXsystems Servers and Support helped them complete a challenging technical mission.
The best #MissionComplete story for January was sent in by Ben Dailey who deployed a 36TB FreeNAS system at a public school as a backup solution. We would like to thank Ben with a $50 Amazon Gift Card and a FreeNAS T-shirt!

“FreeNAS with FreeBSD as its base helped save our local taxpayers $36,000”

I worked for a small public school district.

We were in need of a backup solution for our Hyper-V cluster, Windows, Mac and Linux servers. We engaged two consultants to provide solutions. The most inexpensive option we were presented with cost $48,000. I was able to build us a brand new FreeNAS server with twice the usable capacity for $12,000. The server was only half populated with disks and RAM, so we had room to grow. The server had dual Intel Xeon E5-2630 v2 2.6GHz processors, 192GB of Registered ECC DDR3 1600 RAM and 16 x 4TB Seagate Enterprise SAS 6Gb/s HDDs, configured in a single pool with 2, 7-disk RaidZ2 vdevs with 1 hot spare and 1 shelved cold spare, for about 36TB of usable capacity. I used 2 mirrored 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs as a SLOG for the ZIL., 2 striped 512GB 850 Pro SSDs for the L2ARC and, 2 mirrored 128GB 850 pro SSDs for FreeNAS.

FreeNAS with FreeBSD as its base helped save our local taxpayers $36,000, not to mention the savings on support and maintenance. Thanks for helping make that possible.

Good luck on your next mission and keep your #MissionComplete stories coming!
iXsystems Marketing Team

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December #MissionComplete Best Stories

Annie Zhang — Thu, 14 Jan 2016 23:49:37 +0000

The best #MissionComplete story for December was sent in by David Genton at CDW who regularly uses FreeNAS to take on legacy storage solutions. David will receive a $100 Amazon Gift Card and FreeNAS T-shirt.
“I can safely say that FreeNAS is the #1 OS for SAN and Storage bar none!”
As a data center engineer a.k.a. “Solutions Architect” for one of the world’s largest IT companies, FreeNAS has become a staple in my toolbox and lab. I design solutions for companies whom want the best performing network based upon best practices with focus on the data center. Data center virtualization and consolidation of storage fabric onto network Ethernet requires strict design practices and validation. In comes FreeNAS as the all in one validation tool. First off, FreeNAS itself stores my virtual machines, templates, and all data required for day to day consulting projects. Using FreeNAS as a test server once the network is in place allows testing of not only both file and block access methods but all major file access protocols like AFP, SMB/CIFS, and NFS. Validation of iSCSI (block access) can be done on the very same FreeNAS whether using physical or virtual appliance.
Once I am convinced my network and storage fabric meets best practices and performs to my standards and beyond that of my customers, FreeNAS is often critical as a tool to quickly deploy compute and virtualization environments on top of the new network. Using both block and file access protocols in a single box I can deploy dozens to hundreds of server blades per day from my FreeNAS appliance, the same FreeNAS appliance that tested, validated, and proved the new network design I just deployed.
It’s quite common after deploying a large data center with the newest technologies that despite whomever won the storage portion of the design, NetApp, EMC, or one of the smaller guys for once, the customer always calls me back to ask about my “personal SAN Server” used during deployment. Introducing customers to FreeNAS after completing a $7M SAN upgrade gives me goosebumps when I see the look on their faces. “All those file sharing protocols, PLUS iSCSI!?!” is the common reaction then it comes, “and the software’s free!” I can often get FreeNAS inside via their lab at that point and know of several customers whom have graduated their FreeNAS system from the lab into the data center, and it’s out pacing the EMC arrays.
I have been a Network Consulting Engineer for over 23 years with all major certifications from Cisco (CCIE), VMware, EMC, NetAPP, etc. I can safely say that FreeNAS is the #1 OS for SAN and Storage bar none! While I know for a fact both NetApp and EMC use FreeBSD for their array’s OS, having both block and file access simultaneously is only now becoming available with those platforms with “Unified Access” being the buzzword. FreeNAS has been doing it all along.
Dave Genton
Thank you David for your story!
Good luck on your next mission and keep your stories coming!

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November #MissionComplete Best Stories

Joshua Smith — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 03:14:29 +0000

We once again received so many great #MissionComplete stories that we had no choice but to declare a tie for November’s best! Congratulations to Chris and Stephen who will receive Amazon Gift Cards and FreeNAS T-shirts for their accounts of their successful missions.
The first $50 Amazon Gift Card and FreeNAS T-shirt goes to Chris Amos:
“FreeNAS had become so integral to my home network, and I enjoyed the technology so much that I enrolled in the FreeNAS certification courses”
Begin Mission 1
I have been an avid listener of the Jupiter Broadcasting Podcast network, where I first learned about FreeNAS and ZFS from the TechSNAP show. That is what I wanted to be the backbone of my home network.
I originally tried to piece together a FreeNAS box out of what I had in spare parts. This gave me a few good test installs and something to play with, but it would have been sub-optimal in performance had I used it.
I went out and bought some new budget pieces, and found that I should have read the Hardware Compatibility Lists before I did. There was no piece that wouldn’t work, but nothing was the best it could be. With this built, I started learning how to create CIFS/NFS shares to allow my Windows machine to push the information to the FreeNAS box. Anonymous access was hit and miss for me, so I learned how to mount the Windows shares on to the FreeNAS box, and pull the information instead. This setup worked much more consistently. I used this build as my base for using the Plex plugin as the media centre of the house instead of the Windows shares.
I was still worried about the hardware build quality, so I purchased an iXsystems FreeNAS Mini from Amazon. Knowing the hardware would be solid would allow me to focus on getting the system configuration correct without worrying that my hardware choices were creating additional problems.
The Mini performed flawlessly and still does. I filled it with 4 x 4TB WD Red drives to start. I have since removed the PCI-E cover plate on the back, and ran 4 more SATA cables from the extra ports on the motherboard to an external chassis. Power for the external drives is taken from an extra Power supply I had on hand. That system is stable with 6x4TB WD Red drives in a RaidZ2, 8 datasets holding backups of all my information, the Plex plugin serving up my media, and now a small Minecraft server for my kids using the Mineos plugin.
Mission 1 Complete
Begin Mission 2
I still have a small fear of a power surge or something breaking the FreeNAS Mini, and I’d lose our family pictures and movies. So I have built a second small FreeNAS box with just a pair of HDs which gets replication of the pictures datashare from the Mini, and located it in my basement. This is going to be moved off-site sometime in the future.
Mission 2 Complete
Begin Mission 3
Since my Mini was now working, I began to forget all the troubleshooting info I learned as I went along. FreeNAS had become so integral to my home network, and I enjoyed the technology so much that I enrolled in the FreeNAS certification courses. I happily took the classes and passed the Certification Exam.
Mission 3 Complete
Begin Mission 4
Lately, the hard drives on my Windows 7 computer have started to die with 5+ years of use on most of them. They would either cause the machine to boot poorly, or just not show up. I managed to move the data around enough to alleviate some of the problems, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before everything went. I had been planning and experimenting with a FreeNAS iSCSI build at work for our VMware infrastructure, and combined with the information I learned from the FreeNAS course (and I think an off hand comment from Allan Jude about his gaming drive not being local), I thought why can’t I do that at home? I was able to scrounge up 8 1TB Western Digital drives of different types, and a motherboard/ram/case/PS to hold them, and spent 3 days crafting up a new storage server. I broke the drives down into pairs of similar types, so I could replace them and gain the extra space easier as time went on. I then used a zvol and created an iSCSI target for the Windows 7 PC to access. So now the PC has a “local” drive that is ZFS-backed, and I’ve been copying information over as I can. I’ve already replaced 2 of the 1TB drives with 4TB ones, and was still amazed by how instantaneously the size increase happens after the second replace drive command completed. I just have to replace the rest as needed.
Mission 4 Complete

The second $50 Amazon Gift Card and FreeNAS t-shirt goes to Stephen with Spin The Yarn Productions in the United Kingdom:
“We’d like to give a huge thanks to everyone that makes FreeNAS what it is”
I am a motion graphics artist by trade. After years of freelancing, just over a year ago, I started up a production company with a documentary filmmaker. Our skills complimented each others’, allowing our films to have an added graphics gloss and our animations to have a strong core of a good story. We called our company Spin The Yarn.
Up until this point, we’d both been using external hard drives to save project files. Files for film and animation can get very big and quickly eat up a 1TB drive in no time. This worked well when working as an individual, but with the two of us working on a project simultaneously, this wasn’t an ideal setup. We first tried having the disks connected to one mac, turning on disk sharing. This worked quite poorly as file sharing between the macs was very hit and miss. We’d constantly be hassling each other to restart file sharing and, if that didn’t work, restart the computer sharing the disks. A lot of wasted time, on top of having to have several disks plugged in, making things a lot more difficult to simply find a file.
I’d heard about FreeNAS before, so I started to look into it further. Not only would it allow us to have a network storage device, it would give us logins (quite useful for having private storage for each user) and, probably most importantly, ZFS. ZFS would allow us to have an array of disks, creating one single pool of storage space that could be split up into different disk shares. Not only that, but we can throw in more disks when needed to expand the pool. Excellent.
I set about building a FreeNAS server, after reading recommendations for suitable hardware, in the end going for an Intel i5 processor, 16GB of RAM and two 4TB WD Red drives. The operating system is running off of two USB mirrored thumb drives for redundancy. To make the NAS a proper member of the Spin The Yarn family, we’ve named him Nigel (N for NAS). The two 4TB drives are running in a mirrored layout and Nigel’s pinging me emails to let me know that he’s getting full (another very useful feature), so we’ll soon be opening him up to add another 2 4TB drives. With the experience we’ve had with FreeNAS so far, I’m not apprehensive about this at all, as from what I’ve read online, the process is pretty simple and painless.
Since working with Nigel all these months, we’re happy to say that it’s one of the most important investments we’ve made in the business so far (and that’s saying something for a company that produces film and animation. There’s always a new camera or graphics card we need to get). This is because Nigel gives us peace of mind, knowing that our data is secure, while also giving us an easy to access storage space that literally always works (there must be some kind of voodoo going on here somewhere, how can a computer not crash after running for a whole year?).
We’d like to give a huge thanks to everyone that makes FreeNAS what it is, from the developers beavering away to squash bugs and add new features, to iXsystems for maintaining this open platform while also ensuring it’s properly funded. Keep up the good work 🙂
Thank you Chris and Stephen for your stories!
Good luck on your next mission and keep your stories coming!

The post November #MissionComplete Best Stories appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Mission Complete: Spin The Yarn Productions

Joshua Smith — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 21:42:24 +0000

Stephen with Spin The Yarn Productions wrote:
I am a motion graphics artist by trade. After years of freelancing, just over a year ago, I started up a production company with a documentary filmmaker. Our skills complimented each others’, allowing our films to have an added graphics gloss and our animations to have a strong core of a good story. We called our company Spin The Yarn.
Up until this point, we’d both been using external hard drives to save project files. Files for film and animation can get very big and quickly eat up a 1TB drive in no time. This worked well when working as an individual, but with the two of us working on a project simultaneously, this wasn’t an ideal setup. We first tried having the disks connected to one mac, turning on disk sharing. This worked quite poorly as file sharing between the macs was very hit and miss. We’d constantly be hassling each other to restart file sharing and, if that didn’t work, restart the computer sharing the disks. A lot of wasted time, on top of having to have several disks plugged in, making things a lot more difficult to simply find a file.
I’d heard about FreeNAS before, so I started to look into it further. Not only would it allow us to have a network storage device, it would give us logins (quite useful for having private storage for each user) and, probably most importantly, ZFS. ZFS would allow us to have an array of disks, creating one single pool of storage space that could be split up into different disk shares. Not only that, but we can throw in more disks when needed to expand the pool. Excellent.
I set about building a FreeNAS server, after reading recommendations for suitable hardware, in the end going for an Intel i5 processor, 16GB of RAM and two 4TB WD Red drives. The operating system is running off of two USB mirrored thumb drives for redundancy. To make the NAS a proper member of the Spin The Yarn family, we’ve named him Nigel (N for NAS). The two 4TB drives are running in a mirrored layout and Nigel’s pinging me emails to let me know that he’s getting full (another very useful feature), so we’ll soon be opening him up to add another 2 4TB drives. With the experience we’ve had with FreeNAS so far, I’m not apprehensive about this at all, as from what I’ve read online, the process is pretty simple and painless.
Since working with Nigel all these months, we’re happy to say that it’s one of the most important investments we’ve made in the business so far (and that’s saying something for a company that produces film and animation. There’s always a new camera or graphics card we need to get). This is because Nigel gives us peace of mind, knowing that our data is secure, while also giving us an easy to access storage space that literally always works (there must be some kind of voodoo going on here somewhere, how can a computer not crash after running for a whole year?).
We’d like to give a huge thanks to everyone that makes FreeNAS what it is, from the developers beavering away to squash bugs and add new features, to iXsystems for maintaining this open platform while also ensuring it’s properly funded. Keep up the good work 🙂

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#MissionComplete Best Stories | The ZFS ZIL/SLOG Demystified | Issue #27

iX Team — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 22:39:32 +0000

Hello FreeNAS Users,
The best October #MissionComplete stories are in! Also in this month’s issue, find out everything you need to know about ZFS ZIL and SLOG, the latest industry accolades received by TrueFlash, and a trip report from SeaGL.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

October #MissionComplete Best Stories
We received so many great #MissionComplete stories that we had no choice but to declare a tie for October’s best! Congratulations to Justin V. and Todd R. who will receive Amazon Gift Cards and FreeNAS schwag packages for their accounts of their successful missions.Read their full stories on the iXsystems blog and tell us how you have used FreeNAS, FreeBSD, TrueNAS, OpenZFS or iXsystems hardware to complete your mission!

ZFS ZIL and SLOG Demystified
As you surely know by now, ZFS is taking extensive measures to safeguard your data and it should be no surprise that these two buzzwords represent key data safeguards. What is not obvious however is that they only come into play under very specific circumstances. Read more >>

TrueFlash Continues Trend of Excellence
The all-flash TrueNAS Z50, aka TrueFlash, was ranked “Excellent” in DCIG’s 2015-2016 All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide. This news comes just months after DCIG awarded the TrueNAS Z20 with an “Excellent” rating in their 2015-2016 Small/Midsize Enterprise (SME) Hybrid Storage Buyer’s Guide. Read more >>

Why I Chose FreeNAS for My Business
” I did not have a lot of experience in [computer hardware] at first and found it much less approachable. That all changed about a year and a half before I started my own firm.“Mary Moore Wallinger shares why she went with FreeNAS when she started her own landscape architecture firm. Read more >>

SeaGL 2015 Recap
The third SeaGL Seattle GNU/Linux Conference took place October 23rd and 24th at Seattle Central College in Washington State. Michael Dexter made the trek to the show on behalf of our team and reported back. Don’t forget to check out our photos from the event on Facebook and Google+.

FreeNAS Certification Classes
We offer a free Intro to FreeNAS class that runs every day. For those of you interested in learning more about advanced topics, we also offer paid, fully interactive classes. Read more >>

Live Events

November 19-21 – Fossetcon in Lake Buena Vista, FL
January 21-24, 2016 – SCALE 14x in Pasadena, CA

TechTip #23
From the CLI, you can type: # zfs set copies=2 poolname/dataset name to have two copies of important data in a specific dataset. This will protect the dataset from silent data corruption as if it were mirrored to another disk.

Join the Team
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good people to join our team. Interested? The full list of available positions can be found on our website.

Links of the Month

Episode 114: BSD-Schooling via BSD Now
WhatsApp Built Using Erlang and FreeBSD via Business Insider
How To Install FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi 2 Model B via nixCraft

The post #MissionComplete Best Stories | The ZFS ZIL/SLOG Demystified | Issue #27 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The ZFS ZIL and SLOG Demystified

iX Team — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 18:36:08 +0000

This is historic content that may contain outdated information. For the newest information on FreeNAS and TrueNAS, please visit TrueNAS.com or read our latest Blogs.

The ZIL and SLOG are two of the most misunderstood concepts in ZFS and hopefully, this will clear things up
As you surely know by now, ZFS is taking extensive measures to safeguard your data and it should be no surprise that these two buzzwords represent key data safeguards. What is not obvious however is that they only come into play under very specific circumstances.

The first thing to understand is that ZFS behaves like any other file system with regard to asynchronous and synchronous writes: When data is written to disk, it can either be buffered in RAM by the operating system’s kernel prior to being written to disk, or it can be immediately written to disk. The buffered asynchronous behavior is often used because of the perceived speed that it provides the user, while synchronous behavior is used for the integrity it guarantees. A synchronous write is only reported as successful to the application that requested it when the underlying disk has confirmed completion of it. Synchronous write behavior is determined by either the file being opened with the O_SYNC flag set by the application, or the underlying file systems being explicitly mounted in “synchronous” mode. Synchronous writes are desired for consistency-critical applications such as databases and some network protocols such as NFS but come at the cost of slower write performance. In the case of ZFS, the “sync=standard” property of a pool or dataset will provide POSIX-compatible “synchronous only if requested” write behavior while “sync=always” will force synchronous write behavior akin to a traditional file system being mounted in synchronous mode.
“Asynchronous unless requested otherwise” write behavior is taken for granted in modern computing with the caveat that buffered writes are simply lost in the case of a kernel panic or power loss.

Applications and file systems vary in how they handle such interruptions and ZFS fortunately guarantees that you can only lose the few seconds worth of writes that came after the last successful transaction group. Given the choice between the performance of asynchronous writes with the integrity of synchronous writes, a compromise is achieved with the ZFS Intent Log or “ZIL”. Think of the ZIL as the streetside mailbox of a large office: it is fast to use from the postal carrier’s perspective and is secure from the office’s perspective, but the mail in the mailbox is by no means sorted for its final destinations yet. When synchronous writes are requested, the ZIL is the short-term place on disk where the data lands prior to being formally spread across the pool for long-term storage at the configured level of redundancy. There are however two special cases when the ZIL is not used despite being requested: If large blocks are used or the “logbias=throughput” property is set.

By default, the short-term ZIL storage exists on the same hard disks as the long-term pool storage at the expense of all data being written to disk twice: once to the short-term ZIL and again across the long-term pool. Because each disk can only perform one operation at a time, the performance penalty of this duplicated effort can be alleviated by sending the ZIL writes to a Separate ZFS Intent Log or “SLOG”, or simply “log”. While using a spinning hard disk as SLOG will yield performance benefits by reducing the duplicate writes to the same disks, it is a poor use of a hard drive given a small size but high frequency of the incoming data.

The optimal SLOG device is a small, flash-based device such an SSD or NVMe card, thanks to their inherent high-performance, low latency and of course persistence in case of power loss. You can mirror your SLOG devices as an additional precaution and will be surprised what speed improvements can be gained from only a few gigabytes of separate log storage. Your storage pool will have the write performance of an all-flash array with the capacity of a traditional spinning disk array. This is why we ship every spinning-disk TrueNAS system with a high-performance flash SLOG and make them a standard option on our FreeNAS Certified line.

Thank you Matthew Ahrens of the OpenZFS project for reviewing this article.
To learn more about iXsystems storage solutions, visit www.ixsystems.com, call one of our consultative advisors at 1-855-473-7449 or email us at sales@ixsystems.com.

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Why I Chose FreeNAS When I Started My Own Landscape Architecture Firm

iX Team — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 18:16:58 +0000

After fourteen years of working in the field of landscape architecture, I decided to start my own firm. I have always considered myself a quick learner when it comes to software programs and enjoy the challenge of learning new ones. Knowing my way around computer hardware, on the other hand, was another matter. I did not have a lot of experience in this area at first and found it much less approachable. That all changed about a year and a half before I started my own firm when I had an opportunity to help start and run a small branch of another landscape architecture firm. The main office of the firm purchased and/or built all of the computers, software and related computer equipment. They also purchased and built a server using FreeNAS software. I was given a quick 30 minute tutorial and showed how it worked and how to oversee it. Not long after, using screen sharing, I was instructed in how to set up separate volumes, how to control permissions, and how to add new users. I found the interface easy to use and soon had a much better understanding of network servers.
A year and half later, when I started my own firm, I decided to buy and set up a server right away so that it would be easy to grow the firm when the time came. Based on my experience with the FreeNAS software, I chose to go with the FreeNAS Mini, a server from iXsystems that comes with FreeNAS already installed. It came at a good price and was easy to set up. In fact, I had it up and running in just a few hours despite no real training in information technology. The machine came with a quick setup guide that was clear and easy to follow. Within no time, I had set up my volumes, users and access. It has been up and running now for eight months and I have had only one issue, which I was able to quickly resolve by calling a person recommended by iXsystems who specialized in FreeNAS software.
As a new business owner, it is nice to know that my data is stored on a secure and reliable system whereby I don’t have to worry about it and can instead spend my time focusing on growing my business.
Mary Moore Wallinger, RLA, ASLA
Principal
LandArt Studio

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October #MissionComplete Best Stories

Annie Zhang — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:27:19 +0000

We received so many great #MissionComplete stories that we had no choice but to declare a tie for October’s best! Congratulations to Justin and Todd who will receive Amazon Gift Cards and FreeNAS t-shirts for their accounts of their successful missions.
The first $50 Amazon Gift Card and FreeNAS T-shirt goes to Justin Vare:
“When it comes to data integrity, security, and dependability in storage, FreeNAS has no competition”
Well first off I’ve been a FreeNAS user since version 0.6 Beta which was by now many years ago. The company at which I employed my first and many subsequent FreeNAS servers is a Compact Disc manufacturer, so data integrity and reliability are the foremost consideration, and in close to 10 years I’ve never found a FreeNAS Server to be the cause of a data error. This feat is really impressive when you consider that we’re talking about nearly half a million orders with data sets anywhere from 700 Megabytes to 50 Gigabytes in size for CD’s, DVD’s, and Blu-Ray’s. All of our data is verified to the original source for a given order at bit-level, and not once has FreeNAS ever been the cause of a data verification failure.
FreeNAS is so rock solid that if I had to go on a mission to Mars, all vital systems better be backed-up, running from, or both from a FreeNAS server before I’ll put my stock in it. My first attempt with FreeNAS was brought on by the failure of a Windows server appliance and that coincidentally was also the last time I’ve ever deployed a Windows-based data storage appliance. Sure I still use Windows servers for terminal sessions, SQL, DNS, domain servers and many other uses but when it comes to data integrity, security, and dependability in storage, FreeNAS has no competition.
I’ve seen some servers working for close to 800 days of up-time without any hiccups at all, and then just kept on working until a power outage finally stopped the system. Frankly I’ve never seen that kind of performance out of any other system software ever. FreeNAS is definitely built to last.

The second $50 Amazon Gift Card and FreeNAS T-shirt goes to Todd Russell:
“Thanks for not holding anything back in giving it away free so that people like me can use it at home and to help others.”
FreeNAS all the things!
That’s basically our story here at Saint Joseph Abbey and Seminary College. We are a small college, with just under 140 students, and are attached to a monastery with less than 30 monks on site. After you add staff and faculty, we still end up with a fair number of machines to support, but we remain small enough that we can function as a small business. That gives us the flexibility to use the solutions we want to use in a lot of situations rather than always being stuck with “industry standards” a.k.a. millstones around our necks.
Over the past year or so, I have migrated all our file sharing, backups, and internal web hosting to four FreeNAS servers, one of which was newly purchased from iXsystems. All of this was previously hosted on Debian Linux systems and a lowly Western Digital MyDrive.
I am a big fan of rsync, and our needs are simple, so we use the following for all our backups on campus:
Each client and server rsync important files to both our primary and secondary FreeNAS servers each night. Anything running a real operating system uses its native rsync client. The Windows machines use DeltaCopy. They all run with the –delete option to be sure the backups are a mirror of current state. In the morning, the primary FreeNAS then rsyncs its backup collection to the third FreeNAS server using the backup-dir option to create date-separated archives of every file that got deleted from the primary backups overnight. This makes it really easy for us to go back and grab deleted copies of files if someone realizes they made a mistake after they have already backed up a bad file or deleted one accidentally. And yes, we do have snapshots on both backup servers, but those are last resort since this method is fastest for us.
Our primary FreeNAS server also hosts all of our CIFS shares for faculty and staff. The fourth FreeNAS server hosts CIFS shares for the students to keep them isolated from our primary server. Our internal website is hosted on the second FreeNAS server inside a jail that runs Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
This setup has been great for us and turned me into a promoter of FreeNAS to others. I am also using it at home and at my local church for file sharing and, you guessed it, rsync backups.
The best part of using FreeNAS is that my coworker, who is primarily a Windows guy with limited experience supporting Linux or Unix, can now create and manage shares and rsync profiles without having to ask me to do it for him every time. This also creates a lot of peace of mind for the old “hit by a bus” scenario, as I know that he would be able to keep the place running if something happened to me.
Thanks for all the work you do maintaining this amazing project, and for not holding anything back in giving it away free so that people like me can use it at home and to help others that can’t afford enterprise storage solutions.
Todd Russell
Saint Joseph Abbey and Seminary College
Thank you Justin and Todd for your stories!
Good luck on your next mission and keep your stories coming!

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FreeNAS: A Worst Practices Guide

iX Team — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:05:30 +0000

There are many best practices guides for managing storage solutions out there, but a lot of how you administer your storage depends on your specific use case and what you’re trying to accomplish. While we have created a best practices for FreeNAS, we also decided to take a look at what you don’t want to do; things that will leave you hurting either immediately or down the road.
In that spirit, we’ve put together a worst practices guide for FreeNAS based on years of experience with systems in the field. The easiest way to avoid these pitfalls is to simply purchase a TrueNAS system from the experts at iXsystems, who can help set up your systems for optimal performance and functionality. For those who prefer the DIY approach, here are some things to look out for when setting up and managing your own FreeNAS system.

Using Hardware RAID with ZFS
When setting up a RAID array, common knowledge says that hardware RAID is preferable to software RAID. This is something of a misconception as all RAID is software RAID. If you’re using a hardware RAID controller, it has its own independent operating system that communicates with your disks and often has caches to improve read and write performance. This was a good idea in the distant past, and improved RAID performance substantially, but operating systems and the hardware they run on have come a long way since those days.
FreeNAS uses the ZFS file system and is designed to communicate directly with your disks using its own volume manager. ZFS includes a sophisticated yet efficient strategy for providing various levels of data redundancy, including the mirroring of disk and the “ZFS” equivalents of hardware RAID 5 and higher with the ability of losing up to three disks in an array. If a given set of disks is provided to ZFS using a hardware RAID card, ZFS will not be able to efficiently balance its reads and writes between them or rebuild only the data used by any given disk. Hardware RAID cards typically rebuild disks in a linear manner from beginning to end without any regard for their actual contents.
The “one big disk” that hardware RAID cards provide limits some of ZFS’s advantages, and the read and write caches found on many hardware RAID cards are how risk gets introduced. ZFS works carefully to guarantee that every write it receives from the operating systems is on disk and checksummed before reporting success. This strategy relies on each disk reporting that data has been successfully written, but if the data is written to a hardware cache on the RAID card, ZFS is constantly misinformed of write success. This can work fine for some time but in the case of a power outage, catastrophic damage can be done to the ZFS “pool” if key metadata was lost in transit. Such failures have been known to carry five-figure price tags for data recovery services. Unlike hardware RAID, you will not suffer from data loss that can occur from interrupted writes or corrupt data returned from a hardware cache with ZFS.
Finally, most hardware RAID cards will mask the S.M.A.R.T. disk health status information that each disk provides. Very simply, each disk is connected to the hardware RAID controller card and the disks become invisible to the standard S.M.A.R.T. monitoring utility “smartctl”. Without access to this information, the user is left unaware of classic warning signs of impending disk failure, like reallocated sector count or unusually high temperature. Even the time it takes to run smartctl can be indicative of an impending problem.
While some hardware RAID cards may have a “pass-through” or “JBOD” mode that simply presents each disk to ZFS, the combination of the potential masking of S.M.A.R.T. information, high controller cost, and anecdotal evidence that any RAID mode is about 5% slower than non-RAID “target” mode results in zero reasons for using a hardware RAID card with ZFS.
Long story short, using hardware RAID on FreeNAS can lead to anything from corrupted writes to fatal errors that require you to invest in costly data recovery services.

Setting up Deduplication without Adequate Planning
Deduplication is a much-desired feature for storage solutions. On any given system, more than half your data may be duplicates of data elsewhere in your storage pool, causing a greater storage consumption. Deduplication reduces capacity requirements significantly and improves performance by tracking duplicate data with a ‘deduplication table’, eliminating the need to write and store duplicate information. ZFS stores this table on disk, which means that, if the host has to refer to the on-disk tables regularly, performance will be substantially reduced because of the slower speeds of standard spinning disks.
This means you need to plan to fit your entire deduplication table in memory to avoid major performance and, potentially, data loss. This generally isn’t a problem when first setting up deduplication, but as the table grow over time, you may unexpectedly find its size exceeds memory. This splits the deduplication table between memory and hard disk, turning every write into multiple reads & writes, slowing your performance down to a crawl. In an enterprise environment, this can cause significant productivity decreases and angry staff workers. If this happens, the best solution is to add more system memory so that the pool will be able to import back to memory. Unfortunately, this can sometime take days to perform, and, if your hardware already has maxed out its memory capabilities, would require migrating the disks to a whole new system to access the data.
The general rule of thumb here is to have 5 GB of memory for every 1TB of deduplicated data. That said, there may be instances where more is required, but you will need to plan to meet the maximum potential memory requirements to avoid problems down the road. To get a more precise estimate of the required memory for deduplication do the following: run the ‘zdb -b (pool name)’ command for the desired pool to get an idea of the number of blocks required, then multiply the ‘bp count’ by 320 bytes to get your required memory. If it’s less than 5GB, still use the 5GB per terabyte of storage rule. If it’s higher, go with that number per terabyte.
For must use cases, it is recommended to just utilize lz4 compression for data consumption savings, as there’s no real processing cost. In fact, due to of the advances in CPU speeds, compression actually improves disk performance because writing uncompressed data to disk takes longer than compressed data. To be safe, always use compression instead of deduplication unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Striping Without Redundancy
ZFS offers all the typical forms of RAID redundancy and more, including ZFS striping (RAID 0), ZFS mirroring (RAID 1), RAID 10, and RAID-Z levels that allow for 1, 2 or 3 disk failures without affecting your storage pool. ZFS striping can speed up your performance by spreading out writes across multiple disks and combining all your disks into one large pool. This can seem appealing to the new user because of its maximum speed and capacity, but if any of your disks has a failure, your entire pool will be lost. While, with secondary storage or non-critical data, this may not prove to be a catastrophic loss, losing your storage pool is always a big deal and it’s always recommended to configure your storage pool with some level of redundancy.

Using a SLOG for asynchronous write scenarios
The ZFS filesystem can tier cached data to help achieve sizable performance increases over spinning disks. Users can set up flash-based L2ARC read cache and SLOG (Separate ZFS Intent Log, sometimes called a ZIL) ‘write cache’ devices. While an L2ARC read cache will speed up reads in most use cases, the SLOG only speeds up synchronous writes.
The ZIL caches writes to guarantee their completion in the case of a power failure or system crash. The ZIL normally exists as part of the ZFS pool, but with a SLOG, it resides on a separate, dedicated device. This speeds up performance by batching data together for synchronous writes for more efficiency. These performance gains help with database operations, NFS operations such as virtualization where the operating system explicitly requests synchronous writes. If you aren’t using something that is known to use synchronous writes like NFS or databases, chances are your SLOG will not help performance. A potential solution here is to set your pool to “sync=always”. This ensures that every write goes to the write cache, improving write performance.

Too Many Snapshots.
Snapshots give users the ability to rollback to previous system states to retrieve lost files or go back to a configuration that worked properly, while only saving the file system’s blocks that have changed since the last snapshot. This results in near instant snapshot tasks. Snapshot tasks can be set for regular intervals and stay stored as long as desired.
While ZFS generally boasts that you can save unlimited snapshots, there are some practical limits to this. Some users may decide to have periodic updates every few minutes for multiple datasets and make their lifetime indefinite. Taking one snapshot every five minutes will require over 100,000 snapshots each year, creating some substantial performance loss. If you have thousands of snapshots, this means you will have thousands of blocks accumulating. Depending on the capacity of the disk, this can cause slowdowns when you list snapshots, possibly across the entire ZFS pool.

Upgrading your FreeNAS version with a full boot device
FreeNAS makes upgrading to the latest version, switching between nightly and release versions and rolling back to earlier versions very easy by storing snapshots of the OS on your boot device. However, if you fill your boot device beyond its capacity, updating your OS version may result in the upgrade process mysteriously failing. Fortunately, FreeNAS will give you an alert when your boot device exceeds 80% capacity, so you should know when your boot drive is getting full and deleting version snapshots is easy to do.
Just go into your System>>Boot tab and select the image you would like to delete and click on the delete button on the bottom of the page.

Rebuilding your ZFS array incorrectly
FreeNAS gives users the ability to set up ZFS arrays and resilver disks in the case of a drive failure. If you remove the wrong disk and try to rebuild, you can end up losing your entire pool. It is important to remember that the physical arrangement of the drives on your hardware may not correspond to your device numbers (ada0, ada1, ada2, etc). To counter this, we recommend writing down the serial numbers for each disk along with which slot they’re in, as the GUI will give you associated serial numbers in the case of a drive failure.
In addition, if you try to rebuild a ZFS array with a disk that is too small, your rebuild will fail. This can happen if you use a smaller capacity drive, say a 2TB instead of a 3TB, but it can also happen between different drives of the same listed capacity. Different drive manufacturers may create each drive with a slightly different total capacity, making the effective capacity of your replacement drive slightly higher or lower than the disk you replaced. If the capacity is slightly higher, your rebuild will succeed, but if it is slightly lower, it will not.
If a failure occurs on drives with the same listed capacities, there is a workaround available from the FreeNAS web user interface. Just access your system>>advanced menu and temporarily change your Swap Size to 0 before rebuilding. Once your rebuild is complete, make sure to change it back though (usually the default of 2GiB). The extra 2GiB should accommodate any small difference in drive capacity but do try to use identical drives whenever possible.

Other Issues to Watch For
There are a couple of common issues with Active Directory that can cause problems. The first is if the system clock is out of sync. Make sure you’re using a time server as AD/CIFS is very time sensitive. Second, having the domain name entered incorrectly can cause your Active Directory to have big problems. Ideally, your domain should have a reverse DNS entry, which you can determine easily enough:
https://www.google.com/search?q=dns+reverse+lookup&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=reverse+dns
Also, whenever possible, try not to mix sharing services on the same dataset. Differences in permissions between Unix (NFS) and Windows (CIFS) sharing formats can create some conflicts, so try and avoid this when you can. If you need users from multiple operating systems to have access to the same datasets, CIFS/SMB is your best choice. If you need to have multiple sharing protocols, you will want to separate your datasets between NFS & CIFS/SMB.
Finally, filling your storage pool over 80% of capacity will cause degraded performance. Try to plan your storage pool size to accommodate for this.
Conclusion
When deploying any server or storage system, setting up your system properly can help prevent headaches and even catastrophes down the road. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. While there are many aspects to setting up any given use case, this guide should avoid most of the major pitfalls people run into while setting up their FreeNAS storage. And if you’re looking for even greater assurance, visit www.ixsystems.com/truenas, call us at 1-855-473-7449 or email us at sales@ixsystems.com, for information on our qualified, professionally supported TrueNAS appliances. We look forward to hearing from you!

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Defeating CryptoLocker Attacks with ZFS

iX Team — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 21:59:03 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Plextec is a Canadian managed services provider that uses FreeNAS exclusively to provide Windows and GNU/Linux virtual servers to over 200 companies using XenServer. I spoke with Plextec CTO Todd Ladouceur about how Plextec routinely defeats CryptoLocker ransomware attacks with ZFS and FreeNAS.

Michael: Todd, what are CryptoLocker attacks?

Todd: CryptoLocker attacks are a category of clever yet nefarious personal computer malware that infects a PC via a tantalizing email message or link and silently encrypts your local disks and any network shares you are connected to. When finished encrypting, the malware holds your data for ransom, giving you on average three days to make a decision between paying the ransom or having your data destroyed forever. Organizations of all sizes have been hit by these “ransomware” attacks including police departments and hospitals and an early estimate put the damages at $30 million. The worst situation we have seen was when a user got infected on a Friday afternoon while catching up on email and dreaming about the weekend. The CryptoLocker malware took hold and had all weekend to encrypt every network share their system was connected to plus their local drive, wreaking havoc across the organization.

Michael: Can you stop CryptoLocker attacks with antivirus software?
Just about every antivirus vendor has a fix for the various CryptoLocker attacks but they simply can’t keep up with how quickly CryptoLocker attacks evolve. The organizations behind them are obviously well-funded and because the malware uses encryption, removing it does nothing to restore your data. In fact, to remove the malware could result in the instant loss of all your data because it is the one known tool that can decrypt it. Unfortunately, many CryptoLocker attacks attempt to destroy your backups on services like DropBox or in Windows Shadow Copies.

Michael: What role does ZFS play in combating CryptoLocker attacks?

Todd: We share FreeNAS-backed virtual machine images to our XenServer hosts over NFS and snapshot each VM’s dataset on a 30 minute and hourly basis with a retention of one week for the 30 minute ones and one month for the hourly ones. We then replicate these snapshots to one or two additional FreeNAS servers. When a virtual machine is hit with CryptoLocker, we step through the snapshots on one of the replica systems until we find a point in time just before the attack. We clone the known-good snapshot and share it back to XenServer. We make sure the VM passes all of our quality checks and performs as expected, and then copy it back to the primary server through the XenCenter. We could just roll back the primary system but this strategy allows us to preserve the compromised VM for a few days for forensic purposes.
Michael: How long does the restoration process take?

Todd: On average we can get a Windows server back in production with full validation in under two hours. In a pinch we could simply roll back the primary server but we prefer maintain that extra layer of accountability. With ZFS we know our replicas are bit-for-bit identical to the originals so we do not hesitate in relying on them. A recovery from tape or an online provider would cost a fortune in time, money or both, and would not provide the assurances that ZFS gives us.

Michael: Are CryptoLocker attacks common?

Todd: They are way too common. We have had over ten clients hit with CryptoLocker malware and some of them multiple times. Some would easily be out of business because of it and I hate to think what would happen to us as their IT provider. The threat is real and ever evolving. We constantly revise how we can recover from CryptoLocker attacks more quickly and also educate our clients about how to protect themselves from these and other attacks. We have read about blocking CryptoLocker attacks with group policies and administrative controls but there is no way these steps can keep up with the ever-evolving threat.\

Michael: Do you think FreeNAS and TrueNAS are safe from CryptoLocker attacks?

Todd: Absolutely. CryptoLocker attacks work on the file level rather than the block level, keeping our virtual machine images immune as long as you snapshot them regularly and retain enough snapshots to return to a point in time before the attack. To be vulnerable you would have to share your whole VM store over NFS to a compromised Windows client but even then the snapshots would still bring you back to safety because they are at the block level.
Basically, CryptoLocker is a joke with ZFS.

Todd Ladouceur
CTO, Plextec
For more information on FreeNAS Certified and TrueNAS storage systems, visit www.ixsystems.com/truenas or call 1-855-473-7449.

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FreeNAS 9.3.1 Release | CryptoLocker vs FreeNAS | FreeNAS 9.3 Permissions Tutorial | Issue #25

iX Team — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 18:59:39 +0000

Hello FreeNAS Users,
We have a small update to FreeNAS this month. We’re also taking a closer look at how one company uses FreeNAS and ZFS to circumvent CryptoLocker attacks and we see what the team has to say about their trip to VMworld 2015.

Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

FreeNAS 9.3.1 is Available
It’s not a full RELEASE but as Jordan Hubbard, FreeNAS Project Lead and iXsystems CTO, notes, “…Enough stuff has changed that we thought it time to increment the minor version in order to denote that we’ve now reached a point of stability and bug fix quality that merits a small permutation of the naming.” Read More>>

Defeating Cryptolocker Attacks with ZFS
“CryptoLocker is a joke with ZFS.” Todd Ladouceur, the CTO of Plextec, shares how his company combats CryptoLocker attacks by using FreeNAS and ZFS. Read more >>

FreeNAS 9.3 Permissions Overview
By popular request, our newest tutorial video covers permissions properties for Windows, Mac, and Unix on FreeNAS 9.3. Watch it here>>

VMworld 2015
The team is back from VMworld. Our iXsystems booth was mobbed by many attendees who were familiar with FreeNAS and TrueNAS. During the show, we raffled off a 8TB FreeNAS Mini and held a Street Fighter II tournament. Check out our final show recap and the photos from the expo (Days 1 & 2 and Day 3).

6 Reasons Why TrueNAS is replacing NetApp and EMC – Free Webinar
We invite you to join Matt Olander, Co-Founder of iXsystems, in a free webinar about TrueNAS. Find out why people are making the switch from big-name, legacy storage vendors to TrueNAS. Read more >>

Live Events

September 11 – 13 – vBSDcon 2015 in Reston, VA
October 1 – 4 – EuroBSDCon in Stockholm, Sweden
October 2 – 3 – Ohio Linuxfest in Columbus, Ohio

TechTip #20
Active Directory acting abnormally? Double check that your FreeNAS systems is synchronizing its clock with an NTP server.

Join the Team
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good people to join our team. Interested? The full list of available positions can be found on our website.

Links of the Month

Episode 105: Virginia BSD Assembly via BSD Now
PC-BSD Team Announces Availability of PC-BSD Version 10.2 via iXsystems

The post FreeNAS 9.3.1 Release | CryptoLocker vs FreeNAS | FreeNAS 9.3 Permissions Tutorial | Issue #25 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Solving Storage Challenges with Root on ZFS

iX Team — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 00:24:05 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

The ZFS file system provides data integrity features for storage drives using its Copy On Write (CoW) technology and improved RAID, but these features have been limited to storage drives previously. If you have a drive failure, utilizing RAID or mirroring will protect your volumes, but what happens if your boot drive fails? In the past, if you used FreeNAS, you had no option other than having your storage go offline and remain unusable until it was repaired, and the ability to mirror was only available in TrueNAS, which utilized the underlying FreeBSD code.
In older versions, the FreeNAS and TrueNAS boot drives used the UFS (Unix File System), an older file system that does not include the advanced data integrity features found in ZFS. This has recently changed on current versions of TrueNAS and FreeNAS, and now ZFS can be installed on boot drives using the menu-driven installer via a simple interface.

The addition of Root on ZFS to FreeNAS and TrueNAS brings those data integrity features to the boot drives, providing users the ability to improve their storage units’ reliability, and improve availability (meaning less downtime) by setting up their operating system drives in a mirror configuration.

Another improvement is the bootloader, which root on ZFS takes advantage of. The previous bootloader did not work well with multiple boot environments. As of the FreeNAS 9.3 release, FreeNAS and TrueNAS have moved over to the GRUB bootloader, which is much better equipped for this functionality.

This update works hand in hand with the FreeNAS upgrade system, allowing users to switch between nightly and stable builds, as well as rollback to previous versions, with ease.

Conclusion

By incorporating Root on ZFS technology for boot drives TrueNAS and FreeNAS gain an improvement over previous boot technology by incorporating ZFS-based data integrity protections. Incorporating those protections into the boot drives improves reliability by detecting and repairing drive and volume errors. It improves storage availability by eliminating downtime in the case of an OS drive failure and takes advantage of ZFS’s self-healing capabilities to decrease downtime by detecting and, if mirrored, fixing errors. In addition, this change utilizes an improved bootloader, making operating system version upgrades and rollbacks run smoothly.
To learn more about TrueNAS storage solutions, visit https://www.ixsystems.com/truenas/, call one of our consultative advisors at 1-855-473-7449 or email us at sales@ixsystems.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
To learn about the difference between FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault, click here.

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Cutting Edge Features with OpenZFS on TrueNAS

iX Team — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:16:21 +0000

OpenZFS: A Brief Background

When ZFS, the “Zettabyte File System”, was first developed by Sun Microsystems for the OpenSolaris project, a standard development path of creating a new version number with each new on-disk format change was the optimal way to go. After Oracle acquired Sun, the development of the OpenSolaris distribution and further Open Source releases of ZFS ceased. The final Open Source release was ZFS version 5 and ZFS pool version 28. At that point, several groups outside of Sun were already using ZFS in their operating systems, including FreeBSD and OpenIndiana, and would be joined by Mac OS X and Linux further down the road.
It soon became necessary to differentiate Open Source distributions of ZFS from Oracle’s proprietary version, resulting in the eventual creation of the OpenZFS project in 2013. With this branch of the project being developed for multiple operating systems with no official lead, keeping up with versions in the standard format no longer made as much sense. To handle this, the OpenZFS project introduced the “feature flags” system, which allows completely independent format changes to be developed without having to resolve every change to the on-disk format across platforms.

This means that development moves along more quickly and, as long as the OS supports the feature flags being used, a ZFS pool can be imported and exported across implementations without losing functionality.

Keeping up to Speed with FreeNAS & TrueNAS

Among the projects that utilize OpenZFS, FreeBSD is one of the leaders in supporting feature flag compatibility and has made significant code contributions. As FreeNAS and TrueNAS are based on FreeBSD, this means that both operating systems can incorporate new feature flags as soon as they are introduced. The iXsystems team has been working with the FreeBSD community for nearly two decades now, and with OpenZFS since its formation. Consequently, the FreeNAS project is able to review and support new feature flags in its Web Interface very quickly once they are available, making some features the default where beneficial.
A good example of this is the lz4 compression feature flag. The lz4 compression algorithm is designed for today’s multi-core CPUs. It analyzes files and automatically determines whether compression is worthwhile without any noticeable performance reduction. It also is able to uncompress data very quickly as well, which sets it apart from other compression formats. Because of this, the FreeNAS Team was able to quickly determine this should be made the default compression standard in FreeNAS.

It also gives users up to 2.5 times the original space without slowing down storage performance. In fact, it actually speeds up performance since it is working on the CPU level, rather than the disks themselves.

Additionally, the FreeNAS Team added a large block size feature into the FreeNAS Web Interface as soon as it became available. This means that users can tune their block size to their use case on a dataset level without having to go into the command line, giving them greater ease-of-use for advanced features than other OpenZFS-based Storage operating systems.

Extensive Testing Within the FreeNAS Community

FreeNAS is the world’s most widely used storage operating system, with over 7 million downloads in its lifetime. Since it is an open source project, this means that new features are tested across a wider variety of use cases and hardware environments than closed source projects. FreeNAS is deployed in home, academic, governmental, and enterprise settings, allowing for features to be thoroughly vetted before making it into release versions and, subsequently, TrueNAS.

FreeNAS makes using feature flags easier than any other storage operating system. In FreeNAS you never have to resort to the CLI or having to build a custom kernel. It has a full-featured Web Interface, supporting virtually any configuration or administrative operation you need to perform. Also, FreeNAS’s upgrade system allows for you to switch between stable release & nightly builds with just a click of the mouse. This means that you can try new features on the nightly builds and rollback to previous versions at will.

Fully Vetted Features for the Commercial Environment with TrueNAS

Because of the extensive testing by the FreeNAS user base during Alpha, Beta and Release versions, the FreeNAS development team is able to bring new features to maturity in the OS environment more quickly and for a greater variety of use cases. This means that features will be fully vetted and stable by the time they’re put into commercial grade TrueNAS appliances, bringing you added peace of mind in all aspects of TrueNAS.

Conclusion

OpenZFS offers the world’s most advanced open source file system capabilities. Its feature flags offer a quick and easy way for new features to be introduced and makes those features portable across operating systems. Due to FreeNAS’s great popularity and the rollback capability of its version updating system, new features can be quickly exposed to a large user base in a wide variety of storage environments. This translates into a more mature and stable storage operating system with more features.
To learn more about TrueNAS storage solutions, visit web.ixsystems.com/truenas, call 1-855-473-7449 or email sales@ixsystems.com.

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Docker Done Right

iX Team — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 16:34:01 +0000

Yes, that is a bold statement. The Docker application containment architecture is all the rage right now and FreeBSD just may prove to be the ultimate Docker platform thanks to its 15+ years of containment experience and the unrivaled OpenZFS file system.
As one Twitter user put it, “#docker has now had more security issues within a year than
#freebsd #jails has had since 2000. Good job #techbros.”
Indeed, Docker has never been pitched as a security technology but rest assured, Docker on FreeBSD institutionally imprisons and secures Docker images using FreeBSD’s proven Jail infrastructure. FreeBSD Jails have been used in production since their inception to contain applications and full systems and are exactly what Docker needs. Docker itself has migrated away from Linux LXC containers in favor of the cross-platform libcontainer and of all the pluggable choices, FreeBSD’s Jail stands out as one of the best. FreeBSD also offers the bhyve and Xen hypervisors to provide you yet more options for containing your Linux-native and FreeBSD-native Docker deployments.
Then comes storage. Docker images are designed to be read-only and disposable until instructed otherwise. If only there were a file system that institutionalized lightning-fast snapshotting and cloning…
That file system exists! It’s called OpenZFS and FreeBSD has supported it since FreeBSD 7.0. This not only means you get the institutionalized snapshotting and cloning that suit Docker so well, but also the unrivaled data integrity protection that OpenZFS offers. If you care about your data, you care about OpenZFS.
Hands-on Docker
To try Docker on FreeBSD, you will need a recent snapshot such as 10.2 BETA or 11-CURRENT. Note that you should change “zroot” to match your system’s zpool.

# pkg install docker-freebsd ca_root_nss
# zfs create -o mountpoint=/usr/docker zroot/docker
# service docker onestart
Starting docker…
# docker pull centos
…
# docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED VIRTUAL SIZE
centos latest 7322fbe74aa5 4 weeks ago 172.2 MB
# docker run -t -i centos /bin/bash
[root@ /]# uname -a
Linux 2.6.32 FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #5 r285594: Tue Jul 14 23:30:11 EDT 2015
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Suddenly… CentOS!
Where the wheels really hit the pavement is with a peek under the hood at the Jail and ZFS output of our Docker Jail and OpenZFS dataset:

# jls
JID IP Address Hostname Path
3 172.17.0.3 /usr/docker/zfs/graph/920bc5fbb45c
# zfs list
…
zroot/docker
119M 107G 6.02M /usr/docker
zroot/docker/03a7a57df9197f242484375c4bc2149248ded5aaafc4feb8e472d6774d495530
8K 107G 112M legacy
zroot/docker/03a7a57df9197f242484375c4bc2149248ded5aaafc4feb8e472d6774d495530-
init 128K 107G 112M legacy
…

This output should be familiar to FreeBSD users and is becoming familiar to more and more GNU/Linux users every day.
For an expanded example of Docker on FreeBSD, consult the FreeBSD Wiki:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker
FreeBSD is poised to be go-to Docker platform thanks to FreeBSD’s proven Jail and OpenZFS features and iXsystems has shipped over ten thousand systems with the best support for these features available anywhere. We can also build out your GNU/Linux-based Docker deployment and ship thousands of GNU/Linux systems every year. Give us a call to learn how we can take your Docker deployment to the next level and beyond.
Michael Dexter

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How OpenZFS Provides Data Integrity Where Other File Systems Don’t

iX Team — Sat, 18 Jul 2015 01:06:06 +0000

The most important feature customers expect from a storage array is data integrity protection. This is why we base TrueNAS and FreeNAS on the OpenZFS enterprise, open source file system. Unfortunately, the file systems used by other vendors and projects rarely take the same precautions as OpenZFS and can blindly store and return you corrupt data. The root causes of on-disk data corruption range from interrupted or “shorn” writes with and without hardware RAID devices, to interference from cosmic radiation.

By checksumming data blocks upon write and verifying data checksums upon read, OpenZFS will never return you corrupt data as if it were good data. In addition to extensive checksumming, OpenZFS is a “Copy on Write” file system that includes various redundancy strategies to guarantee the integrity of your data.

Addressing the Infamous “Write Hole”

When writing, modifying or reading files to or from disk, most traditional file systems and hardware RAID controllers assume the success, rather than failure of these operations. This can lead to a number of problems including a false sense of security. To begin with, if a write operation is interrupted by something like a power failure and a write operation to a file is interrupted mid-write, the remaining data is simply lost and an incomplete file is left on disk. The file is available to users but is effectively corrupt.
To accommodate this scenario, OpenZFS checksums every new data block upon completion of each write operation and will verify each checksum when a read operation is performed. If the checksum verification fails, the read operation will fail and the user is presented an error or the previous version of the file, rather than corrupt data. This strategy has the added benefit of revealing silent data corruption which is critical for archive and backup storage arrays.
A CERN study showed that hard disks can exhibit a bit error or bad sector in as little as every eight terabytes of data that is stored. Active storage arrays can transfer eight terabytes in a matter of weeks or even days, making this a common occurrence we simply never notice until it is too late.

By verifying data block checksums with every read operation, OpenZFS will only return valid data. Should a duplicate block of the same data exist elsewhere such as on a RaidZ array, OpenZFS will not only return the valid copy but will also correct the invalid one.

Furthermore, while a hardware RAID card may take precautions such as generating parity data for the data it stores, the write operation for that parity data could be interrupted even though the data blocks it represents were successfully written to disk. The result will be either immediately corrupt data or parity data that cannot successfully rebuild a failed member disk of the array. This scenario is most closely associated with RAID 5 storage arrays as the “RAID 5 Write Hole”. It is important to note that this can also occur in RAID 4 and RAID 6 arrays, and even RAID 1 mirrors thanks to the data caching that takes place at various levels.

How OpenZFS eliminates the Write Hole problem with Copy on Write

To provide this unprecedented level of data integrity protection while maintaining a high level of performance, OpenZFS organizes its on-disk data blocks in a special hash tree called a “Merkle tree” consisting of parent and child data blocks. Each parent block contains the metadata and checksums information of its child blocks. When a data block is modified, the original data always stays in place and the modified data is written to a new location. Only when the new block is successfully written are the related parent blocks notified of the change up through to the top level of the tree.

Conclusion

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what steps OpenZFS takes to guarantee the integrity of your data and why you will never want to use a legacy file system or hardware RAID card again. Data corruption caused by shorn writes, the Write Hole or silent data corruption occurs far more often than we realize and most file systems simply take no measures to tell us that we have lost data. We base TrueNAS and FreeNAS on OpenZFS because it provides these unprecedented data integrity protection strategies. For more information on TrueNAS, visit staging-www.ixsystems.com:8084/truenas or call 1-855-473-7449.

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Why We Use ZFS

iX Team — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 22:41:30 +0000

One of the key pieces of technology underlying TrueNAS and FreeNAS is the ZFS filesystem. In 2001, developers at Sun Microsystems began work on ZFS and officially released it as part of OpenSolaris in 2005. Three years later, a port of ZFS was released as part of FreeBSD 7. When we took the helm of the FreeNAS project in 2009, we realized it would be a fundamental part of the OS. So what makes ZFS so great?

Data Integrity

The main reason TrueNAS and FreeNAS use ZFS is to ensure data integrity. One of the main ways ZFS protects your data is by putting volume management on the filesystem level. This makes Copy-on-Write (CoW) technology possible. Normally when a block of data is modified, it will change its current location on the disk before the new write is completed. If your system crashes or loses power in the process, that data will be lost.

With CoW, ZFS does not change the location of the data until the write is completed and verified, keeping your data safe in case your system has any problems.

To verify that data, ZFS utilizes checksum metadata to ensure that the data remains the same from write to write. Individual blocks of data exist in a ‘tree’ of data where each ‘parent’ block adds up the checksum data of its ‘children’, meaning that every new write is tested, eliminating bitrot. This eliminates what is known as the RAID write hole which allows for silent data corruption in standard RAID levels.

In addition to CoW, ZFS offers additional RAID protections over standard levels. The first RAID configuration is RAID-Z3, which allows for up to 3 disk failures in a data volume. Standard RAID only allows for 2 disk failures per volume. In addition, ZFS offers the ability to set up a multi-disk mirror (nRAID). Typically, your mirrors are composed of a single disk and its copy. With a multi-disk mirror, you can have multiple copies. It has a high cost in disk space, but it can add levels of data integrity not found in typical RAID and is great for read speeds.

Highly Scalable

ZFS is a 128 bit file that can handle enormous data pools of up to 1.84 × 10^19 times more data than 64-bit systems. This means that the data limitations of ZFS surpass other operating systems, making it scalable and relevant for the foreseeable future. ZFS also eliminates unnecessary limitations to file size along with the number of filesystems and directories, which can make system design difficult.

Intelligent Features

As mentioned previously, ZFS puts volume management on the filesystem level. This means that you don’t need an additional storage controller to set up and manage your RAID without losing performance. It also means you won’t need to manage your disks from another interface, simplifying administration.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS make setting up volumes a snap from its graphical Web Interface, keeping all your storage controls in one place.

ZFS’s transactional processing model also allows for ZFS to send writes to individual physical disks, rather than just the RAID volume. Because of this, ZFS can stripe writes across RAID volumes and place synchronous writes together in a physical disk location, speeding up write performance. The transactional model also means that there are no long waits for file system checking. In the case you need to sync mirrors with only a bit of information, you don’t have to wait for it to sync any of the empty disk space, which can take a good deal of time.

ZFS incorporates algorithms to make sure your Most Recently Used (MRU) and Most Frequently Used (MSU) data are stored in your fastest system storage media. Spinning disks are notoriously slow and all flash solutions drive up your dollar per gigabyte cost significantly. By utilizing these algorithms in combination with flash-based ZFS Intent Log write cache and L2ARC read cache devices, you can speed up your performance by orders of magnitude at minimal cost.

Built-In Snapshots and Replication

Another reason we use ZFS is for the intelligently designed Snapshot, Clone, and Replication features. ZFS allows for snapshots to be taken on a singular or periodic basis and allows you to backup individual datasets as often as needed. Snapshots allow for a simple rollback to prior states in case of file deletion or system instability. ZFS Snapshots save disk pointers for data that would be discarded and only update based on what has changed since the last snapshot.

This translates into speedy clone and replication tasks and saves substantial time over traditional replication technology since ZFS replicates what has changed. And because of the way ZFS manages snapshots and replication, you can have varying levels of compression between source and target servers.

Open Source

At iXsystems Open Source is in our veins.

We support and develop multiple open source projects as a company and implement it in our internal infrastructure. Because TrueNAS is based on FreeNAS, an Open Source project, it’s important that the file system it uses is Open as well. OpenZFS also enjoys a good deal of feature development and collaboration, is included in multiple products, and is a robust and mature filesystem. Features are also incorporated on a modular basis known as feature flags. This means that when there’s an update to something like Samba, it is added like a package rather than some sort of firmware.

Conclusion

ZFS is a mature, flexible file system that will be scalable well into the future. It is based on Open technology with many individuals and commercial products contributing to development and testing. It has many intelligently designed features that improve the performance and ease of use of TrueNAS and FreeNAS. Its volume management also comes with data integrity features not found in most file systems, ensuring that you have a safe place to store your data. To learn more about TrueNAS visit https://www.ixsystems.com/TrueNAS, call 1.855.GREP.4.IX or email sales@ixsystems.com.

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FreeNAS in Production

iX Team — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 23:24:42 +0000

I work as a Network Administrator in a shop where we deploy 60+ ESXi VMs on a half dozen host servers. We heard about FreeNAS from my predecessor who implemented it where he is now employed. My boss asked me to evaluate FreeNAS as it is time to replace one of our existing SANs. I installed FreeNAS 9.3 on an old IBM server and took the four 3-hour FreeNAS classes from Linda Kateley. I then dove in head first with a new 4U SuperMicro SAN with dual Intel CPUs, 128GB EEC RAM, twenty 4TB SAS HDDs and a handful of consumer grade SSDs. The important lessons learned are:

Buy big RAM chips so you have available slots if you need more RAM.
eMLC SSDs cost more but they are definitely better than off the shelf SSDs.
There is a 4X & 5X FreeNAS rule that states you want 4 or 5 times as many gigabytes of SSD capacity for cache as you have gigabytes of RAM. I always go big so we deployed the 8X rule.
Download FreeNAS and install it on a test platform and then take Linda Kateley’s four paid and one free interactive online class to get started. The FreeNAS forum is wonderful as long as you research your questions before posting.
RAID cards are not needed but if you want an LSI RAID card make sure you flash it to IT (pass through mode). LSI support & the FreeNAS forum were great in guiding me to the correct utilities I needed for my LSI SAS 9211-8i Host Bus Adapter.
If you want the lights to work correctly on the front of a SuperMicro SAN use only SAS HDDs.

A very knowledgeable admin on the FreeNAS forum sent me a quote that is quite appropriate: “It’s like a learning cliff. We know.” That said, Linda’s class made it much more like a steep hill and very manageable.
Currently I have the fastest SAN I have ever had the pleasure of working with and all the hard work pays off when you see you have maxed out your state of the art fiber gigabit network.
Dale Josephson
Network Administrator
Karuk Tribe

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FreeNAS 10 Hackathon

iX Team — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 23:27:24 +0000

Last week, FreeNAS developers from around the globe arrived for 2 weeks of face-to-face discussions and coding sessions for FreeNAS 10. Yes, Virginia, there will be a FreeNAS 10, divided into a series of planned milestone releases (M2-M5) for those who would like to assist in testing and development, or merely just to follow along as we progress
Hackathon participants came from Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Ukraine, several US states, as well as those local to the Bay area. The non-locals stayed at a historic ranch in the Livermore hills with enough seclusion, Internet access, and food that time could be spent coding, doc’ing, and ramping up on tools, architecture, and design elements. In case you ever wondered what it takes to fuel a hackathon, Jordan has a good idea regarding how many shopping carts are needed:

Days were spent using a whiteboard, reviewing design mockups, and nailing down timelines, blockers, and assigning features. Over the next few weeks, we’ll have more blog posts detailing the various milestones, how you can check out the developers’ progress, where you can get more information about the new architecture, where you can get developer previews in order to test new features and help find bugs, and how you can setup a development environment and contribute to the development process.

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We’re Expanding!

iX Team — Fri, 29 May 2015 00:35:35 +0000

As you may know, last year saw an increase in demand for our storage and server products and that demand continues to grow. When we started out, we were just a small group of close-knit people. Over the years, we steadily added more and more talent to our company and before we knew it, we had grown to over 100 employees.
Of course, with that growth comes challenges. To put it simply, we don’t have enough space for employees to sit.

We had this problem about a year ago, so we renovated the software engineering area to add more desks. But here we are, out of space again. Some suggested using a double-tiered desk, but clearer heads prevailed with the solution of acquiring a second building.

Meet our second office. It will be the new home of FreeNAS as well as house TrueNAS software engineering and support. It’s down the same road from our current office. We’re not moving, just expanding. The iXsystems headquarters office is unchanged, as is our contact information.

The obvious benefit of this expansion is that people will have their own work spaces again and as we hire new employees, they will have a place to sit. The expansion will also allow us to cluster departments together.

It will be finished shortly. We expect to finish it in the next few months. When we’re all settled in, we’ll let you know, so feel free to drop by and check it out.

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Welcome to the iXsystems dev blog

iX Team — Thu, 21 May 2015 23:08:57 +0000

Prepare for regular developer awesomeness!

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks

iX Team — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 17:22:34 +0000

If you’ve noticed, we aren’t big on publishing generic IOPS or latency numbers for TrueNAS or FreeNAS storage. Now, we realize if you’re comparing storage solutions by looking at brochures and data sheets, this might be a little frustrating at first, but I assure you we haven’t done this because we’re hiding something. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We do it because it’s in your best interest.

Benchmarks, by nature, produce generalized numbers, which means they can be misleading at best, and at worst, meaningless. They can be valuable in very specific scenarios but are less useful than generic numbers in the real world. A Technical Marketing person can typically cherry-pick a benchmark result to make their product look good and other vendors look bad. The only way to truly gauge your performance requirements and whether or not a solution is adequate is to test it in your own environment with your own specific workloads. This is why we offer our Storage No-Risk Guarantee (SNRG) program for TrueNAS that allows you to do just that.

Really, there are two types of benchmarks commonly seen in the world of storage. The first type is what we refer to internally as “hero” benchmarks. These are benchmarks like fio with synthetic workloads that are designed to test raw I/O performance, almost always at 4K block size (an IO size seldomly used by modern applications, by the way). Whenever you see “performance over 1 million IOPs!” on a website or piece of marketing, these numbers were almost certainly derived with this type of benchmark. These are the benchmarks the Marketing Team wants.

The second type of benchmark is what we call a “pathological” benchmark, which attempts to approximate “worst case” real world application scenarios by being as resource intensive as possible, therefore testing the limits of storage performance and stability. These are the benchmarks Engineering and QA Teams use, since they tend to help identify design flaws or regressions. SPC-1/SPC-2 are good examples of this type of “pathological” benchmark. Marketing Teams will typically only allow these results to be published if they’ve brought their Formula 1 cars to the race, however. What I mean by this is that they will create massive storage rigs with seven or eight figure price tags, which might produce impressive SPC numbers, but aren’t at all representative of a typical array the average customer could afford.

The simple truth is that storage performance is dependent on many factors. Random I/O is not the same as sequential I/O. Block size matters and must match the application. Furthermore, the same size may not be used by multiple applications in your workload. Storage topology is important. RAID layout must be considered. Cache matters and must be sized appropriately to the workload. If you’ve come to iXsystems looking for hyperbole like “Blazing Performance” or heavily caveated claims like “Up to One Million IOPS!”, then you’re in the wrong place. We are careful to not use the fuzzy math that will ultimately leave you disappointed. What we do, however, is work with you to create the best solution for your needs.

We’ve built storage and servers for thousands of companies. We have clients in every major industry, including education, high-tech, entertainment, manufacturing, finance, government, and healthcare, and the one common thread is that TrueNAS performed significantly better than the existing vendor’s solution.

We’re proud of the fact that we aren’t a VC-funded startup under immense pressure to outpace “burn rate” or exceed a marketing-driven IOPS target. We also aren’t a household name that can simply rely on the reputation of our brand. We are building our reputation on satisfying our customers, and we believe that starts with honest and realistic marketing, especially when it comes to performance.

TrueNAS provides flexible performance and can be configured and tuned in a number of ways to suit most storage applications. If we don’t think our storage or servers are a good fit for you, our engineers will gladly tell you up-front. If you’re wondering if TrueNAS will meet your performance targets, let’s work together to assess your needs and design a right-sized solution to fit them. Contact us today to find out more about our SNRG program so that you can test TrueNAS in your environment and base your performance decisions on real-world results.

iXsystems

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A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Part IV: Network Notes & Conclusion

iX Team — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 18:52:12 +0000

Network

FreeNAS is a NAS and/or IP-SAN (via iSCSI)…which means everything happens over the network. If you are after performance, you are going to want good switches and server grade network cards. If you are building a home media setup, everything might be happening over wireless, in which case network performance becomes far less critical (there really is a difference in performance between a Cisco 2960G or Juniper EX4200 and a Netgear or Dlink! This difference becomes more pronounced if you are doing vlans, spanning tree, jumbo frames, L3 routing, etc).

In the current landscape, gigE networking is nearly ubiquitous and 10Gbe networking is expensive enough to keep it out of the hands of many home and small business setups. If you have a number of users and appropriate switch gear, you can benefit from aggregating multiple gigE network connections to your FreeNAS box. Modern hard drives approach, and oftentimes exceed, the performance of gigE networking when doing sequential reads or writes. Modern SSDs exceed gigE networking for sequential or random read/write workloads. This means that — on the low end — a FreeNAS system with a 3 drive RAIDZ pool and a single gigE network connection can hit a bottleneck at the network for performance, since the volume will be able to read or write sequentially at 200+ MB/sec and the network will be limited to ~115MB/sec. If your application is IOPs bound instead of bandwidth bound (such as a database or virtualization platform), and your storage is comprised of spinning disks, you might find that a single gigE connection is sufficient for a dozen or more disks.
Intel NICs are the best game in town for Gigabit networking with FreeNAS. The desktop parts are fine for home or SOHO use. If your system is under-provisioned for CPU or sees heavy usage, the server parts will have better offload capabilities and correspondingly lower CPU utilization. Stay away from Broadcom and Realtek interfaces if and when possible.
In the Ten Gigabit arena, Chelsio NICs are hands down the best choice for FreeNAS. There’s a significant premium for these cards over some alternatives, so second and third choice would be Emulex and Intel (In that order). FreeNAS includes drivers for a number of other 10Gbe cards but these are largely untested by the FreeNAS developers.

Fibre Channel

Options here are very limited. Qlogic is pretty much the only game in town. The 16Gb parts do not have a driver yet and the 1Gb parts are no longer supported, so you’ll be limited to the 8Gb, 4Gb and 2Gb parts. Fiber initiator mode works out of the box, and the “easter egg” to enable Target mode is well documented and tested.

Boot Devices

FreeNAS was originally designed to run as a read-only image on a small boot device. The latest versions now run read/write using ZFS. A SATA DOM or small SSD is a great boot device for the latest versions. Since ZFS is used, the boot device itself can be mirrored. As an alternative to a SATA DOM or SSD, one or more high quality USB sticks can be used. As an absolute minimum, the boot device must be 4GB, however 8GB is a more comfortable and recommended minimum. Beyond 16GB in size, the space will be mostly unused. Since the boot device can’t be used for sharing data, installing FreeNAS to a high capacity hard drive is not recommended.

Conclusion

Hardware configuration is one of the most prominent and active categories in the FreeNAS forum. I have attempted to share some best practices that we at iXsystems have seen over the years and I hope that I have not missed anything big. With so many options and use cases, it’s difficult to come up with a set of one-size-fits-all instructions. Some other tips if you get stuck:

Search the FreeNAS Manual for your version of FreeNAS. Most questions are already answered in the documentation.
Before you ask for help on a specific issue, always search the forums first. Your specific issue may have already been resolved.
If using a web search engine, include the term “FreeNAS” and your version number.

As an open source community, FreeNAS relies on the input and expertise of its users to help improve it. Take some time to assist the community; your contributions benefit everyone who uses FreeNAS.
To sum up: FreeNAS is great—I’ve used it for many years and we have several instances running at iXsystems. I attempted to provide accurate and helpful advice in this post and as long as you follow my guidance, your system should work fine. If not, feel free to let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
Josh Paetzel
iXsystems Director of IT
<< Part 3/4 of A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Pools, Performance, and Cache

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A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Part III: Pools, Performance, and Cache

iX Team — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 19:53:43 +0000

ZFS Pool Configuration

ZFS storage pools are comprised of vdevs which are striped together. vdevs can be single disks, N-way mirrors, RAIDZ (Similar to RAID5), RAIDZ2 (Similar to RAID6), or RAIDZ3 (there is no hardware RAID analog to this, but it’s a triple parity stripe essentially). A key thing to know here is a ZFS vdev gives the IOPs performance of one device in the vdev. That means that if you create a RAIDZ2 of ten drives, it will have the capacity of 8 drives but it will have the IOPs performance of a single drive. The need for IOPs becomes important when providing storage to things like database servers or virtualization platforms. These use cases rarely utilize sequential transfers. In these scenarios, you’ll find larger numbers of mirrors or very small RAIDZ groups are appropriate choices. At the other end of the scale, a single user trying to do a sequential read or write will benefit from a larger RAIDZ[1|2|3] vdev. Many home media server applications do quite well with a pool comprising a single 3-8 drive RAIDZ[1|2|3] vdev.

RAIDZ1 gets a special note here. When a RAIDZ1 loses a drive, all the other drives in the vdev become single points of failure. A ZFS storage pool will not operate if a vdev fails. This means if you have a pool made up of a single 10 drive RAIDZ vdev and one drive fails, pool operation depends on none of the remaining 9 drives failing. In addition, with modern drives being as large as they are, rebuild times are not trivial. During the rebuild period, all of the drives are doing increased I/O as the array rebuilds. This additional stress can cause additional drives in the array to fail. Since a degraded RAIDZ1 can withstand no additional failures, you are very close to “game over” there. Powers of 2 pool configuration: there is much wisdom out there on the internet about the value of configuring ZFS vdevs in a power of two. This made some sense when building ZFS pools that did not utilize compression. Since FreeNAS utilizes compression by default (and there are 0 cases where it makes sense to change the default!), any attempts to optimize ZFS with the vdev configuration are foiled by the compressor. Pick your vdev configuration based on the IOPs needed, space required, and desired resilience. In most cases, your performance will be limited by your networking anyway.

ZIL Devices

ZFS can use dedicated devices for its ZIL (ZFS intent log). This is essentially the write cache for synchronous writes. Some workflows generate very little traffic that would benefit from a dedicated ZIL, others use synchronous writes exclusively and, for all practical purposes, require a dedicated ZIL device. The key thing to remember here is the ZIL always exists in memory. If you have a dedicated device, the memory ZIL is mirrored to the dedicated device, otherwise it is mirrored to your pool. By using an SSD, you reduce latency and contention by not utilizing your data pool (which is presumably comprised of spinning disks) for mirroring the in-memory ZIL. There’s a lot of confusion surrounding ZFS and ZIL device failure. When ZFS was first released, dedicated ZIL devices were essential to data pool integrity. A missing ZIL vdev would render the entire pool unusable. With these older versions of ZFS, mirroring the ZIL devices was essential to prevent a failed ZIL device from destroying the entire pool. This is no longer the case with ZFS. Missing ZIL vdevs will impact performance but will not cause the entire pool to become unavailable. However, the conventional wisdom that the ZIL must be mirrored to prevent data loss in the case of ZIL failure lives on. Keep in mind that the dedicated ZIL device is merely mirroring the real in-memory ZIL. Data loss can only occur if your dedicated ZIL device fails and the system crashes with writes in transit in the unmirrored memory ZIL. As soon as the dedicated ZIL device fails, the mirror of the in-memory ZIL moves to the pool (in practice, this means you have a window of a few seconds where a system is vulnerable to data loss following a ZIL device failure). After a crash, ZFS will attempt to replay the ZIL contents. SSDs themselves have a volatile write cache, so they may lose data during a bad shutdown. To ensure the ZFS write cache replay has all of your inflight writes, the SSD devices used for dedicated ZIL devices should have power protection. HGST makes a number of devices that are specifically targeted as dedicated ZFS ZIL devices. Other manufacturers such as Intel offer appropriate devices as well. In practice, only the designer of the system can determine if the use case warrants a professional enterprise SSD with power protection or if a consumer-level device will suffice. The primary characteristics here are low latency, high random write performance, high write endurance, and, depending on the situation, power protection.

L2ARC Devices

ZFS allows you to equip your system with dedicated read cache devices. Typically, you’ll want these devices to be lower latency than your main storage pool. Remember that the primary read cache used by the system is system RAM, which is orders of magnitude faster than any SSD. If you can satisfy your read cache requirements with RAM, you’ll enjoy better performance than if you use SSD read cache. In addition, there is a scenario where an L2ARC read cache can actually drop performance. Consider a system with 6GB of memory cache (ARC) and a working set that is 5.9 GB. This system might enjoy a read cache hit ratio of nearly 100%. If SSD L2ARC is added to the system, the L2ARC requires space in RAM to map its address space. This space will come at the cost of evicting data from memory and placing it in the L2ARC. The ARC hit rate will drop, and misses will be satisfied from the (far slower) SSD L2ARC. In short, not every system can benefit from an L2ARC. FreeNAS includes tools in the GUI and at the command line that can determine ARC sizing and hit rates. If the ARC size is hitting the maximum allowed by RAM, and if the hit rate is below 90%, the system can benefit from L2ARC. If the ARC is smaller than RAM or if the hit rate is 99.X%, adding L2ARC to the system will not improve performance. As far as selecting appropriate devices for L2ARC, they should be biased towards random read performance. The data on them is not persistent, and ZFS behaves quite well when faced with L2ARC device failure. There is no need or provision to mirror or otherwise make L2ARC devices redundant, nor is there a need for power protection on these devices.
Joshua Paetzel
iXsystems Senior Engineer
<< Part 2/4 of A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design: Hardware Specifics
Part 4/4 of A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design: Network Notes & Conclusion >>

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A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Part II: Hardware Specifics

iX Team — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 20:28:05 +0000

General Hardware Recommendations

I’ve built a lot of ZFS storage hardware and have two decades of experience with FreeBSD. The following are some thoughts on hardware.

Intel Versus AMD

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a long history of working better on Intel than AMD. Things like (but not limited to) the watchdog controllers, USB controllers, and temperature monitoring all have a better chance of being well supported when they are on an Intel platform. This is not to say that AMD platforms won’t work, that there aren’t AMD platforms that work flawlessly with FreeNAS, or even that there aren’t Intel platforms that are poor choices for FreeNAS, but all things being equal, you’ll have better luck with Intel than AMD.
The Intel Avoton platforms are spendy but attractive: ECC support, low power, AES-NI support (a huge boon for encrypted pools). On the desktop side of things, there are Core i3 platforms with ECC support, and of course there are many options in the server arena. The single socket E3 Xeons are popular in the community, and of course for higher end systems, the dual package Xeon platforms are well supported.

Storage Controllers

LSI is the best game in town for add-on storage controllers. Avoid their MegaRAID solutions and stick with their HBAs. You’ll see three generations of HBAs commonly available today. The oldest (and slowest) are the SAS 2008 based I/O controllers such as the 9211 or the very popular IBM M1015. The next generation of these controllers was based on the 2308 which added PCI 3.0 support and increased CPU horsepower on the controller itself. An example here is the 9207. Both the 2008 and 2308 based solutions are 6Gbps SAS parts. The newest generation of controllers are 12Gbps parts such as the 9300. The FreeNAS driver for the 6 Gbps parts is based on version 16 of the stock LSI driver with many enhancements that LSI never incorporated into their driver. In addition, many of the changes after version 16 were specifically targeted at the Integrated RAID functionality that can be flashed onto these cards. As a result, “upgrading” the driver manually to the newer versions found on the LSI website can actually result in downgrading its reliability or performance. I highly recommend running version 16 firmware on these cards. It’s the configuration tested by LSI, and it’s the configuration tested by the FreeNAS developers. Running newer firmware should work, however running older firmware is not recommended or supported as there are known flaws that can occur by running the FreeNAS driver against a controller with an older firmware. FreeNAS will warn you if the firmware on an HBA is incompatible with the driver. Heed this warning or data loss can occur. The newer 12Gbps parts use version 5 of the LSI driver. Cards using this driver should use version 5 of the firmware.
Most motherboards have some number of SATA ports built in. There are certain models of Marvell and J-Micron controllers that are used on motherboards that have large numbers of SATA ports. Some of these controllers have various compatibility issues with FreeNAS, and some of these controllers also have forms of RAID on them. As a general rule, the integrated chipset AHCI SATA ports have no issues when used with FreeNAS, they just tend to be limited to 10 ports (and often far fewer) on most motherboards.

Hard Drives

Desktop drives should be avoided whenever possible. In a desktop, if an I/O fails, all is lost. For this reason, desktop drives will retry I/Os endlessly. In a storage device, you want redundancy at the storage level. If an individual drive fails an I/O, ZFS will retry the I/O on a different drive. The faster that happens, the faster the array will be able to cope with hardware faults. For larger arrays, desktop drives (yes, I’ve seen attempts to built 1PB arrays with ZFS and desktop drives) are simply not usable in many cases. For small to medium size arrays, a number of manufacturers produce a “NAS” hard drive that is rated for arrays of modest size (typically 6-8 drives or so). These drives are worth the additional cost.
At the high end, if you are building an array with SAS controllers and expanders, consider getting the nearline 7200 RPM SAS drives. These drives are a very small premium over Enterprise SATA drives. However, running SATA drives in SAS expanders –while supported– is a less desirable configuration than using SAS end to end due to the difficulty of translating SATA errors across the SAS bus.
Josh Paetzel
iXsystems Director of IT
<< Part 1/4 of A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Purpose and Best Practices

Part 3/4 of A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Pools, Performance, and Cache >>

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A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Part I: Purpose and Best Practices

iX Team — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 19:25:45 +0000

A guide to selecting and building FreeNAS hardware, written by the FreeNAS Team, is long past overdue by now. For that, we apologize. The issue was the depth and complexity of the subject, as you’ll see by the extensive nature of this four part guide, due to the variety of ways FreeNAS can be utilized. There is no “one-size-fits-all” hardware recipe. Instead, there is a wealth of hardware available, with various levels of compatibility with FreeNAS, and there are many things to take into account beyond the basic components, from use case and application to performance, reliability, redundancy, capacity, budget, need for support, etc. This document draws on years of experience with FreeNAS, ZFS, and the OS that lives underneath FreeNAS, FreeBSD. Its purpose is to give guidance on intelligently selecting hardware for use with the FreeNAS storage operating system, taking the complexity of its myriad uses into account, as well as providing some insight into both pathological and optimal configurations for ZFS and FreeNAS.

A word about software defined storage:

FreeNAS is an implementation of Software Defined Storage; although software and hardware are both required to create a functional system, they are decoupled from one another. We develop and provide the software and leave the hardware selection to the user. Implied in this model is the fact that there are a lot of moving pieces in a storage device (figuratively, not literally). Although these parts are all supposed to work together, the reality is that all parts have firmware, many devices require drivers, and the potential for there to be subtle (or gross) incompatibilities is always present.

Best Practices

ECC RAM or Not?

This is probably the most contested issue surrounding ZFS (the filesystem that FreeNAS uses to store your data) today. I’ve run ZFS with ECC RAM and I’ve run it without. I’ve been involved in the FreeNAS community for many years and have seen people argue that ECC is required and others argue that it is a pointless waste of money. ZFS does something no other filesystem you’ll have available to you does: it checksums your data, and it checksums the metadata used by ZFS, and it checksums the checksums. If your data is corrupted in memory before it is written, ZFS will happily write (and checksum) the corrupted data. Additionally, ZFS has no pre-mount consistency checker or tool that can repair filesystem damage. This is very nice when dealing with large storage arrays as a 64TB pool can be mounted in seconds, even after a bad shutdown. However if a non-ECC memory module goes haywire, it can cause irreparable damage to your ZFS pool that can cause complete loss of the storage. For this reason, I highly recommend the use of ECC RAM with “mission-critical” ZFS. Systems with ECC RAM will correct single bit errors on the fly, and will halt the system before they can do any damage to the array if multiple bit errors are detected. If it’s imperative that your ZFS based system must always be available, ECC RAM is a requirement. If it’s only some level of annoying (slightly, moderately…) that you need to restore your ZFS system from backups, non-ECC RAM will fit the bill.

How Much RAM is needed?

FreeNAS requires 8 GB of RAM for the base configuration. If you are using plugins and/or jails, 12 GB is a better starting point. There’s a lot of advice about how RAM hungry ZFS is, how it requires massive amounts of RAM, an oft quoted number is 1GB RAM per TB of storage. The reality is, it’s complicated. ZFS does require a base level of RAM to be stable, and the amount of RAM it needs to be stable does grow with the size of the storage. 8GB of RAM will get you through the 24TB range. Beyond that 16GB is a safer minimum, and once you get past 100TB of storage, 32GB is recommended. However, that’s just to satisfy the stability side of things. ZFS performance lives and dies by its caching. There are no good guidelines for how much cache a given storage size with a given number of simultaneous users will need. You can have a 2TB array with 3 users that needs 1GB of cache, and a 500TB array with 50 users that need 8GB of cache. Neither of those scenarios are likely, but they are possible. The optimal cache size for an array tends to increase with the size of the array, but outside of that guidance, the only thing we can recommend is to measure and observe as you go. FreeNAS includes tools in the GUI and the command line to see cache utilization. If your cache hit ratio is below 90%, you will see performance improvements by adding cache to the system in the form of RAM or SSD L2ARC (dedicated read cache devices in the pool).

RAID vs. Host Bus Adapters (HBAs)

ZFS wants direct control of the underlying storage that it is putting your data on. Nothing will make ZFS more unstable than something manipulating bits underneath ZFS. Therefore, connecting your drives to an HBA or directly to the ports on the motherboard is preferable to using a RAID controller; fortunately, HBAs are cheaper than RAID controllers to boot! If you must use a RAID controller, disable all write caching on it and disable all consistency checks. If the RAID controller has a passthrough or JBOD mode, use it. RAID controllers will complicate disk replacement and improperly configuring them can jeopardize the integrity of your volume (Using the write cache on a RAID controller is an almost sure-fire way to cause data loss with ZFS, to the tune of losing the entire pool).

Virtualization vs. Bare Metal

FreeBSD (the underlying OS of FreeNAS) is not the best virtualization guest: it lacks some virtio drivers, it lacks some OS features that make it a better behaved guest, and most importantly, it lacks full support from some virtualization vendors. In addition, ZFS wants direct access to your storage hardware. Many virtualization solutions only support hardware RAID locally (I’m looking at you, VMware) thus leading to enabling a worst case scenario of passing through a virtual disk on a datastore backed by a hardware RAID controller to a VM running FreeNAS. This puts two layers between ZFS and your data, one for the Host Virtualization’s filesystem on the datastore and another on the RAID controller. If you can do PCI passthrough of an HBA to a FreeNAS VM, and get all the moving pieces to work properly, you can successfully virtualize FreeNAS. We even include the guest VM tools in FreeNAS for VMware, mainly because we use VMware to do a lot of FreeNAS development. However if you have problems, there are no developer assets running FreeNAS as a production VM and help will be hard to come by. For this reason, I highly recommend that FreeNAS be run “On the Metal” as the only OS on dedicated hardware.
Josh Paetzel
iXsystems Director of IT
Part 2/4 of A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design: Hardware Specifics >>

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FreeNAS vs TrueNAS

iX Team — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:18:12 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information. View the newest version of the blog here.

“What’s the difference between TrueNAS and FreeNAS? Is TrueNAS just FreeNAS installed on a server?” If you look at the software feature list, there aren’t a ton of differences. So really….what’s the difference?

The first difference is the software delivery method: TrueNAS is a purpose-built storage appliance while FreeNAS is freely-downloadable software that requires the user to understand storage well enough to select the correct hardware that is appropriate for their application.
TrueNAS is commercially-supported, while FreeNAS is community-supported.
There are performance and usability optimizations in TrueNAS that are specific to the hardware we use and therefore aren’t included with FreeNAS.
High-Availability (failover) is hardware-dependent and only available in TrueNAS.

But, perhaps more critical to understand than the “what” is the “why”:

We make FreeNAS for when storage is non-critical.
There are certainly many storage applications that don’t require professional support. Applications like home storage, simple office file servers, tertiary backups, home streaming media servers, scratch space, storage experimentation, or any other application where data is fungible; FreeNAS can be the perfect solution for all of them.

We make TrueNAS for when storage is critical.
Storage downtime can equal an instant loss of revenue, making reliable storage a painstaking process — a process that requires careful consideration, deep hardware and storage knowledge, and countless hours of testing — certainly eons more difficult than the Software Defined Storage crowd would want you to believe. It took us nearly two years to select, design, test, and qualify the myriad hardware components that go into TrueNAS, which is a purpose-built appliance — meaning software coupled with custom hardware — designed for its one specific application: critical storage. Compared to a user-built system that your software vendor knows nothing about, the appliance platform is inherently easier to support when things don’t go your way, because your software vendor is your hardware vendor as well. And, when storage is this important to your business, it’s imperative to have a Support Team at arm’s length who can resolve any issue that may arise without having to first wrap their heads around the hardware platform you’ve built.

We make FreeNAS for Open Source flexibility.
For those that have the expertise and the spare time to build and support their own solutions, or for those that want to tinker and learn about storage, FreeNAS is freely-available and unencumbered by license restrictions. The FreeNAS Project has a mature community and a team of developers dedicated to providing the best (open-source) software defined network file storage solution in the world. All we ask in return is that you enjoy the software and contribute when and where you can, which can be as simple as providing feedback, filing bugs, and making feature requests, or as involved as helping us write code.

We make TrueNAS for enterprise stability.
Where FreeNAS is the bleeding edge, TrueNAS is the stable handle. FreeNAS is where technologies are tested and refined; therefore the software undergoes an often rapid and frequent release cycle. TrueNAS, by contrast, contains only the most stable and vetted code, keeping software updates to a minimum and the release cycle methodical.

We make FreeNAS for people who want to “DIY”
Some folks like to do it themselves. Some folks only get satisfaction when building things on their own. Some folks don’t mind downtime when there’s an issue and enjoy perusing the FreeNAS forums for help. Some folks have limited budgets yet still want powerful storage software. And, some folks are storage experts themselves. You’re welcome, guys 🙂

We make TrueNAS because businesses don’t want to “DIY”
Instead of buying a fleet of delivery trucks, I suppose we could purchase all the components separately, build the trucks ourselves, and fix them when things break. But, we’re not a car dealership, we’re a storage company. We’d probably save money up front on the cost of the bare parts but would certainly come out way behind with the time spent figuring out how to put them all together and build a functioning car, let alone the costs to maintain it! Most businesses don’t have the time, available hardware, or internal support expertise for a do-it- yourself storage solution — they’re busy focused on their own missions and business models. But, with a 100% software solution, you must build the server yourself. If there is a problem with the server hardware, you can’t look to the software vendor for support, and vice-versa if you have hardware problems. With TrueNAS, you get one throat to choke….ours 🙂

We make FreeNAS because many are turning to virtualization.
FreeNAS is known to work well with all major virtualization platforms, but due to the nature of the decoupled hardware, we aren’t able to officially certify the software with the virtualization vendors. Therefore, if something goes haywire, the user cannot turn to the virtualization vendor for assistance and instead must rely on the FreeNAS community.

We make TrueNAS because many are turning to virtualization…and need Support.
With a software-only solution you must verify that every component is on the virtualization vendors’ compatibility list and when your configuration changes (such as upgrading to a new network card) you need to validate the configuration again. Most businesses can’t afford the risk, so TrueNAS is officially certified to support Citrix XenServer, VMware ESXi, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS both have their rightful places, learn more here.
FreeNAS is the world’s most popular software defined storage OS, with more downloads and installs than any other storage software on the planet. The sheer magnitude of interest speaks volumes about its myriad applications. And, as its enterprise counterpart, TrueNAS has the performance, high-availability, functionality, and professional software support that mission-critical storage applications require.

Brett Davis
iXsystems Executive Vice President

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Insane 48TB FreeNAS Build | FreeNAS Failover Demo | Other Goodies…

iX Team — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 20:03:21 +0000

Hello FreeNAS Users,
FreeNAS 9.3 is here and it sports a ton of great new features including a redesigned UI, a new configuration wizard, and an update manager. In addition, we’ve got a bunch of new videos for you—some instructional, some just for fun. Thanks to everyone who helped us make 2014 a success. Here’s to bigger and better things in 2015!

Happy Holidays,
The FreeNAS Team

Announcing the Release of FreeNAS 9.3
FreeNAS 9.3 is available for download! We highly encourage everyone to upgrade to take advantage of the new features. Read more ›

Download Now

How to Install and Upgrade FreeNAS 9.3
If you need help installing FreeNAS 9.3, check out this tutorial. We also have a video demonstrating how to use the new update manager.

Changes in FreeNAS 9.3 by Linda Kateley
Check out this video from FreeNAS instructor, Linda Kateley, for an in-depth overview of the new features in FreeNAS 9.3.

FreeNAS Failover Demo by Josh Paetzel
At this year’s MeetBSD, Joshua Paetzel, a core member of the FreeNAS Development Team, demonstrated the failover capabilities of FreeNAS…by removing the drives from two Minis and completely destroying them. How long did it take for the system to stop working? Read on to find out.

FreeNAS Powers Digital Library in Africa
In November, Nzega’s digital library came online. Two FreeNAS Minis power the heart of the program—one operates as a central file server for about 5TB of content and the other is used for backups. We’re proud to be a part of this great cause! Read more ›

Insane 48TB FreeNAS Build from LinusTechTips
Linus Sebastian of the popular LinusTechTips YouTube channel built a powerful yet incredibly compact 48TB FreeNAS system with 64GB ECC RAM. Watch the video here.

FreeNAS Certification Classes
We now offer free Intro to FreeNAS classes that run every day. For those of you interested in learning more about advanced topics, we also offer paid, fully interactive classes. Read more ›

Upcoming Live Events

January 31 – February 1, 2015 – FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium
February 19-22 – SCaLE 13x in LA, California
March 12-15 – AsiaBSDCon in Tokyo, Japan

TechTip #12
The Wizard in FreeNAS 9.3 doesn’t make its changes until you confirm at the end. This lets you edit your choices, but also means that if you exit the wizard early, none of your changes are made.

Join the Team
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good people to join our team. Interested? The full list of available positions can be found on our website.

Links of the Month

Episode 67: Must be Rigged via BSD Now
Web Apps in Embedded BSD by Corey Vixie (MeetBSD Talk) via iXsystems
FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years by Jordan Hubbard (MeetBSD Talk) via iXsystems

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FreeNAS 9.3 Released

iX Team — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 03:48:50 +0000

Here’s an early Christmas present for you all: FreeNAS 9.3!
This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases, featuring a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. We’re quite proud of it and excited to make it publicly available.
You can get it here and the list of changes are here. We encourage all existing 9.2.x users and 9.3 beta testers to upgrade.
Last month saw the release of FreeNAS 9.3-BETA. Thousands of users downloaded the beta. Here’s a quick glance at the improvements made to FreeNAS 9.3:

Jordan Hubbard took some time to make a State of the Union video addressing the changes in 9.3 and discussing the plans for 10.x. If you haven’t already, you can see it here:

Additionally, you can watch this video by Linda Kateley, FreeNAS instructor, for an in-depth overview of the changes:

I enjoyed seeing many of you at MeetBSD in San Jose at the beginning of November and I hope everyone enjoys this release of FreeNAS!
Brett Davis
iXsystems Executive Vice President

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FreeNAS & ZFS: The Indestructible Duo – Except for the Hard Drives

iX Team — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 19:49:25 +0000

At this year’s MeetBSD, Joshua Paetzel, a core member of the FreeNAS Development Team, demonstrated the failover capabilities of FreeNAS… by pulling the drives out of two FreeNAS Minis and completely destroying them. Josh ran a build mounted from two FreeNAS Minis populated by four drives each. The compiler was projected on a screen so attendees could see when the build stopped running. Volunteers were then invited to pull out a HDD at random from either of the FreeNAS boxes and destroy them using a selection of tools including a hammer, vice, screwdriver, and tesla coil. Some of the people who gleefully stepped up to participate include:

Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of FreeBSD, CTO of iXsystems
Kirk McKusick, early developer of BSD, inventor of the Berkeley Fast File System
Alfred Perlstein, Sr. Director, Appliance & Kernel Engineering, Norse
George Kola, CTO, Voxer
Devin Teske, FreeBSD Developer

What was the magic number of drives that had to be destroyed before failover on FreeNAS stopped working? Watch the video to find out:

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FreeNAS 9.3 will be released on 2014/12/8

iX Team — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 18:27:08 +0000

Hi folks,
Just a quick update on this topic since it has been communicated (by me, even) that FreeNAS 9.3-RELEASE would come out at the end of November. Obviously, it is now the end of November and that hasn’t happened yet, so time for a quick update!
First, we’d like to thank everyone for their involvement and participation in the 9.3-BETA cycle! Over 5000 unique visitors have checked in for the updates (and continue to do so on a daily basis) and we’ve had many dozens of highly quality bugs filed, all of which have really made the difference in our being able to find and fix issues before 9.3-RELEASE. In fact, we have fixed over 800 bugs during the 9.3 development cycle and are down to just 38 bugs blocking the release, which is why we’re slipping the release date to December 8th. We need a bit more time to fix the show-stoppers. Those bugs we don’t deem show-stopping but still worth fixing as part of the first official post-RELEASE update will have their target version set to SU Candidate (Software Update Candidate), so if you file a bug and see it in that milestone, don’t worry – it won’t make the release but it will be fixed shortly thereafter and will simply show up in the new System->Update panel.
Second, we’d also like to give all the BETA testers one last week to report any final show-stoppers so that we can make 9.3-RELEASE truly production quality, so if you haven’t jumped on the BETA train yet, now would be an excellent time to do so! You don’t have to start with the 9.3-BETA release itself, though you can certainly jump forward from there directly to the latest version using the updater, but if you’re going to start now then you might as well start with the latest nightly (on the BETA train) and simply move forward to RELEASE from there.
Again, we really appreciate all of the community involvement around this release; it’s been truly unprecedented, and I don’t believe any release of FreeNAS has ever generated this level of interest or pre-release feedback. We are greatly looking forward to a really great release, as well as being able to ship small, targeted updates using the new update system with a much shorter turn-around time and far less effort for both us and our users!
Thanks,
The FreeNAS Development Team

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FreeNAS 9.2.1.9 is now available

iX Team — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 12:49:02 +0000

NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.

Hi Folks!
With 9.3-RELEASE just around the corner, we thought it was time to give the folks still running 9.2.1.x a little early Christmas present – an update release to the 9.2.1-BRANCH which fixes just a few strategic bugs that are nonetheless impacting folks (the ZFS memory leak in particular). All of these fixes are also in the 9.3-BETA train, of course, but not everyone is ready to jump on a BETA, particularly in production, and we don’t blame them!
Please get it from the usual place: https://www.freenas.org/download/
This should, knock on wood, be the very last release on the 9.2.1-BRANCH and also the last 32 bit version of FreeNAS, so if you’ve got some older hardware you just have to keep using, this is the release to run!
Please see https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas/issues?query_id=104 for all bugs addressed in this release, though the list is very short:

Fix a bug preventing Directory Server mode from working.
Fix a memory leak in ZFS that is triggered by having a compressed dataset and an L2ARC device.
Preserve the Samba SID across reboots and upgrades.
Fix two problems in the config file generator for CTL:

1. Unbreak device extents when using physical devices or multi path devices.
2. Unbreak the case when target auth or discover auth is set to Auto.

Fix a priviledge escalation issue.
Save debug now includes the output of zpool history.

Again, this release is intentional very minimal and attempts to fix only the most significant and impactful bugs from 9.2.1.x We hope it serves its intended user community well and gives folks on the fence the luxury of more time to consider when they’re ready to jump on the 9.3 train.
Regards,
The FreeNAS Development Team

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What’s Improved in FreeNAS 9.3-BETA | State of the Union Video | In-depth OwnCloud Tutorial Video

iX Team — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 19:58:04 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users,

In case you haven’t heard the big news, FreeNAS 9.3-BETA was released earlier this week. We’ll let Jordan Hubbard, Director of the FreeNAS Project, explain more about it in his new State of the Union address:

Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

FreeNAS 9.3-BETA is Now Out

We know you’ve all been eagerly anticipating this. Some of the major changes in the FreeNAS 9.3-BETA include:

New configuration setup wizard available during and after installation.
New update manager makes it easier to apply patches and updates.
Interface tabs removed completely.
FreeNAS now uses ZFS for the boot device—this allows selection and mirroring of one or more boot devices for greater reliability.
The features of ZFS are also utilized to provide cloned “boot environments” which allow the system to be rolled back (or even forked) to different OS versions.
The boot process now uses the GRUB boot loader which supports multiple boot environments and makes it easy to recover from a failed upgrade, system patch, or configuration.
A boot-time menu is provided for selecting and booting from a specific boot environment.
New boot UI allows the user to create, rename, delete, and select boot environments as well as run diagnostics on the boot pool.
And much more…

We have a quick video summary of some of the changes in FreeNAS 9.3. For the full list of changes or more details about a feature, check out the release notes. We highly encourage the FreeNAS community to try out the beta and give us feedback so we can make the release even better. For our brave betatesters, we
are committed to making sure that you’ll be able to upgrade seamlessly to FreeNAS 9.3-RELEASE once it is available.

The Ultimate Guide to Buying a New Server for Open Source

If you are in the market to purchase new servers or will need to in the future, then download this free server guide. The knowledge you gain from this guide will ensure you avoid common pitfalls including:

Inaccurate and/or over-inflated quotes
Being sold the wrong hardware for your project
Poorly built servers
Missed deadlines
The frustrations of outsourced tech support

Install OwnCloud on FreeNAS From Scratch

DrKK, one of our more prominent forum members, created a video tutorial for installing OwnCloud on FreeNAS. As he points out in the corresponding forum thread, there are multiple ways to install OwnCloud on FreeNAS including the ownCloud plugin. His tutorial is
focused on installing Owncloud in a FreeNAS jail from scratch using lighttpd. This method gives people a bit more control over the configuration and the tutorial itself is designed to be educational. If you want to refine your BSD skills and learn, give the video a watch.

Mid-Range FreeNAS Build Pt II: Performance Tuning

In the previous newsletter, we featured a high-performance, mid-range FreeNAS build sent in from one of our readers. Brian Cunnie wrote a follow-up article about performance tuning the system for iSCSI. The post describes in detail the steps he took to benchmark the build and how he ran the
tests. It includes screenshots and charts of his results. For people looking to do something similar, this is definitely worth a read.

MeetBSD California 2014

A big thanks to everyone that came out to this year’s MeetBSD California. If you missed it, you can view photos of day 1 and day 2 on our Facebook page. We’re still in the process of editing the speaker videos and those will be
posted soon. Keep a lookout for them on the iXsystems YouTube channel. In the meantime, the slides for the talks are available online—check them out!

FreeNAS Training Classes

Have a burning question about FreeNAS? We now offer free Intro to FreeNAS classes that run every day. Classes are taught by Linda Kateley, a software educator with over 20 years of experience and a specialization in ZFS and Storage. For those of you interested in learning more than the basics, you’ll be happy to know that we also offer paid, advanced FreeNAS classes in the following
subjects:

FreeNAS Admin
FreeNAS Sharing Deep Dive
FreeNAS Hardware Architecture & Performance Basics
Fault Analysis Workshop

As of now, we offer a complimentary registration with every new purchase of a FreeNAS certified system. This free registration is good for any advanced class of your choice. The classes are fully interactive, so attendance is limited to 15 people per class, allowing for thorough Q&A with the instructor. Make sure to sign up
early—with over 6 million FreeNAS downloads, we expect these spots to fill up fast.

Upcoming Live Events

We’ll be at the following conferences. If you’re in the area, drop by and say “hi”!
November 17-20 – SuperComputing 2014 in New Orleans, LA
February 19-22 – SCaLE 13x in Los Angeles, CA

Tech Tip #11

FreeNAS 9.3 will allow you to boot from an old version of the operating system if you make a critical mistake configuring FreeNAS and don’t have time to troubleshoot.

Links of the Month

Episode 63: A Man’s man via BSD Now
How Open Source Saved an External HD via Plagtech Blog
AsiaBSDCon Call for Papers via AsiaBSDCon 2015
FreeNAS Box ECC memory upgrade via Tech Uploaded

Join the FreeNAS Team!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers and QA testers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, a 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent
company in the world of FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.
Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Got a FreeNAS hardware build you’re proud of? Come up with a tech tip while tinkering around in the GUI? Have a link or picture you think we should see? As long as it’s not something you wouldn’t send to your boss, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at FNsubmissions@ixsystems.com. We’re always on the lookout for FreeNAS and storage related content to feature in the newsletter and on our social
media channels.

Connect with Us

If you need help with your FreeNAS setup or would like to show off your configuration, share your plugins, or just talk with like-minded people, join the conversation on our community forums. For video tutorials, check out our YouTube channel.
Want real-time updates as they happen? Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or add us to your Google+ circle!

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FreeNAS 9.3-BETA is Now Out!

iX Team — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:44:43 +0000

Today, we are very proud to announce the BETA release of FreeNAS 9.3!
This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases. It features a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Windows 2012 clustering, better integration with VMWare, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. To encourage use of this BETA, we are also committed to making sure that every FreeNAS 9.3 BETA install will be able to upgrade to FreeNAS 9.3 RELEASE seamlessly!
A key feature of the FreeNAS 9.3 BETA release is its revamped user interface. It has been redesigned to place only the most common configuration options first in ‘Standard’ menus, moving the more esoteric options to ‘Advanced’ options, and this design pattern as has been used throughout the UI so everything is essentially more streamlined and less cluttered for novice users who essentially just want to use the defaults.
The interface tabs have also been completely removed, a number of features have been rearranged or combined for added fluidity and ease of use, and the whole UI is simply more self-consistent throughout.
Updating and applying patches (updates) to the system is now much simpler. A secure update server supplies a regular stream of package updates, which are available both as “deltas” from previous release versions and as full packages, rather than the “one large release” model in place for previous FreeNAS versions. The update server can be checked manually, or automatically at intervals, and any available updates downloaded in the background. The user will receive an alert when new updates are available and be given the opportunity to apply them whenever they wish. Users will also be able to choose what kinds of updates to receive, depending on whether they want to use the most recent versions, test future versions, or stay on a single stable branch. For a demo of that in action, please see my FreeNAS state of the union video!
From the “long-requested feature list”, a configuration wizard has finally been added to FreeNAS. On a new install, this wizard will run at the first login, making it easy to quickly create a volume, its associated share(s), and set various options. Users who still prefer to manually create their volumes and shares can exit the wizard and create these in the usual way, but the new set-up wizard can handle the most common types of configuration at installation time, or, as desired, later in the set-up process. We also anticipate that the Wizard will continue to grow functionality as time progresses – this is simply the first version!
FreeNAS 9.3 now NFSv4 support, including Kerberos integration, and allows configuration of NFSv4 from the UI, another long-requested feature.
Perhaps the most significant feature of FreeNAS 9.3 is the fact that it now formats the boot device as a ZFS pool instead of the more limited UFS filesystem we used before, allowing a number of new features to be supported. One such feature is that the boot process now uses the GRUB boot loader and provides support for multiple boot environments, allowing easy recovery from a failed upgrade or configuration change. Being a ZFS pool, the boot device can also now be mirrored and scrubbed periodically to ensure that no impending hardware failures are present.
Finally, FreeNAS 9.3 also changes the default iSCSI target from the userland-based istgt to the in-kernel Cam Target Layer (CTL). This adds a number of features, including compatibility with Windows 2012 clustering, support for additional VAAI primitives, and increased performance in most use cases. The snapshot UI has also been enhanced to coordinate snapshots with VMWare so that VMs using associated datastore(s) can be restored to a stable state if needed.
This is only a sampling of all the new features in 9.3, and since our last release, we have fixed over 725 tickets in the 9.3 branch and have even more enhancements in the pipeline. This is a great FreeNAS release, and we look forward to being able to use the new update mechanism in delivering more timely and granular updates, the ZFS boot, clone and roll-back options giving users even greater confidence in applying them!
Again, please check out my state of the union video if you’d like a “live demo” and walkthrough of the new UI and features, and by all means please read the 9.3-BETA Release Notes for an even more exhaustive list of new features. Those who have been following the documentation will also be pleased to see an entirely revamped “live HTML” version of the FreeNAS 9.3 documentation which is being kept up-to-date using the same source code management tools that the source code for FreeNAS itself uses, allowing everything to be much better coordinated and in-synch.
Enjoy this release!
Jordan Hubbard
FreeNAS Project Manager and iXsystems CTO

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FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 – New: FreeNAS Minecraft Server Plugin, Shellshock Patch & Tutorials

iX Team — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 00:14:59 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users,

Happy fall! By now you’ve probably heard of the Shellshock bug. Although FreeNAS was not affected, we decided to proactively close the vulnerability with FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 just in case. We also have a couple of tutorials for you this month including a bunch of user-created content. After several months of hard work, we’re very close to releasing FreeNAS 9.3—expect a special in-depth update from Jordan Hubbard, Director of the FreeNAS Project and iXsystems CTO, in the next newsletter.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

New FreeNAS 9.2.1.8-RELEASE

It’s time for another FreeNAS release! FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 closes the Shellshock security vulnerability. Although FreeNAS does not use bash as the default system shell, we thought it was still worth addressing. Some of the other changes in this release include:

Fixed bug where use of NONE cipher in replication erroneously reported an error on a successful replication.
Don’t enable LZ4 compression on replication by default if upgrading from a pre-9.2.1.7 release.
Improve performance of viewing snapshots when replication tasks are set up.
Allow binding CIFS to specific IPs.
Fixed LDAP bind URL when using TLS.
Fixed a bug in the mail sending routines used by FreeNAS. With some mailserver configurations the To: address could’ve been set to root instead of the address specified in the root user.
Fix a bug that prevented the system from showing the replicated status of a snapshot if the remote path differed from the local path.

The full list of bugs fixed in 9.2.1.8 can be found here. We hope everyone enjoys this release of FreeNAS and as always, thanks for the support.

MeetBSD California 2014 – Last Call for Registration!

The stage is set for MeetBSD California 2014 at Western Digital’s San Jose headquarters on November 1-2. With only two weeks left, be sure to register for your spot if you haven’t done so already.

Some of the notable speakers this year include Kirk McKusick, Jordan Hubbard, & Rick Reed. BSD Now will also be conducting interviews at the conference. Check out the schedule for more information. As this is an unConference, many aspects of the schedule are left up to the attendees to determine. There will be plenty of opportunities for breakaway groups and hallway tracks for impromptu discussions. We expect this year’s MeetBSD California to be the biggest one yet—don’t miss it!

Transmission on FreeNAS

We have a new, official tutorial video about installing the Transmission plugin available on YouTube. Transmission is a fast, easy, and free BitTorrent client available on many platforms. Setup is pretty straightforward and the video runs through FreeNAS volume creation, user creation, and permissions before demonstrating how to install and configure the Transmission plugin. If you find the video helpful, be sure to take a look at the rest of our YouTube channel for more tutorials.

Obsessed with Minecraft? MineOS on FreeNAS

The name “Joshua Parker Ruehlig” may sound familiar to some of you—he’s responsible for writing several FreeNAS plugins including CouchPotato, Sick Beard, and Maraschino. Recently, he uploaded a video detailing how to install, set up, and update the MineOS plugin on FreeNAS. The MineOS plugin gives you the ability to use a web interface to create and manage Minecraft servers and also has some backup and restore features.
He’s also started a support thread to help those installing the plugin. If having your own Minecraft server sounds like fun, be sure to give this a try.

Turn FreeNAS into a Mumble Server

One of our community members posted a tutorial video showing how to install Murmur (the server side of Mumble) on FreeNAS. Mumble is an open source voice chat software that allows for encrypted communication between users and is primarily intended for use by gamers. The video demonstrates how to install the server on a FreeNAS jail and how to set up the database and superuser accounts.

Mid-range FreeNAS Build

One of our readers sent in a write up that he did of his build. Brian Cunnie built a mid-range, high-performance FreeNAS server for himself at a cost of about $2600. The write up is in-depth but easy to follow. It also runs through the installation process & basic setup with plenty of screenshots and photos of the hardware. The build itself is probably overpowered for most homes, but it’s interesting to see the different use cases people come up with for FreeNAS and the article is definitely worth a read.

FreeNAS Training Classes

FreeNAS Admin
FreeNAS Sharing Deep Dive
FreeNAS Hardware Architecture & Performance Basics
Fault Analysis Workshop

As of now, we offer a complimentary registration with every new purchase of a FreeNAS certified system. This free registration is good for any advanced class of your choice. The classes are fully interactive, so attendance is limited to 15 people per class, allowing for thorough Q&A with the instructor. Make sure to sign up early—with over 6 million FreeNAS downloads, we expect these spots to fill up fast.

Upcoming Live Events

We’ll be at the following conferences. If you’re in the area, drop by and say “hi”!
October 22-23 – All Things Open in Raleigh, NC
October 24-26 – Ohio Linuxfest in Columbus, OH
November 1-2 – MeetBSD California in San Jose, CA
November 4-6 – Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, CA

Tech Tip #10

If you encrypt your FreeNAS pools, make sure you keep 2 copies of your encryption key in safe places. If your boot drive dies, even the NSA won’t be able to access your files without the encryption key.

Links of the Month

Episode 59: Have You Heard of BSD? via BSD Now
Travel Grants for MeetBSD California via FreeBSD Foundation

Join the FreeNAS Team!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers and QA testers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, a 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.
Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Connect with Us

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 – New: FreeNAS Minecraft Server Plugin, Shellshock Patch & Tutorials appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.8-RELEASE is now available

iX Team — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 21:40:29 +0000

Hi folks,
Time for another FreeNAS release! This one fixes a number of issues in 9.2.1.7 as well as addressing the “shellshock” security vulnerability in bash (to which FreeNAS is not generally vulnerable as bash is not the system shell, but it was still worth fixing).
The list of bugs fixed in 9.2.1.8-RELEASE can be found here. The release notes for 9.2.1.8:

Fix bug where use of NONE cipher in replication erroneously reported an error on a successful replication.
Don’t enable lz4 compression on replication by default if upgrading from a pre-9.2.1.7 release.
Multiple kernel iSCSI / CTL improvements. This includes VMWare VAAI and Microsoft ODX acceleration support, improved performance and fixes for number of bugs. Kernel iSCSI can be activated by checking the experimental target checkbox under services -> iSCSI.
Improve performance of viewing snapshots when replication tasks are set up.
Allow binding CIFS to specific IPs.
Fix LDAP bind URL when using TLS.
Validate AD advanced settings. If the GC or DC are manually specified make sure they are reachable.
Set UNIX permissions when the Mac permissions radio button is selected. Netatalk does not play nicely with ACLs.
Fix a bug in the mail sending routines used by FreeNAS. With some mailserver configurations the To: address could’ve been set to root instead of the address specified in the root user.
Fix a bug that prevented the system from showing the replicated status of a snapshot if the remote path differed from the local path.
“Shellshock” security vulnerability in bash (which is not the system shell FreeNAS or FreeBSD) proactively closed.

We hope everyone enjoys this release of FreeNAS!
The FreeNAS Development Team

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FreeNAS 9.2.1.7, TrueNAS Gets all Flashy, New FTP Tutorial & More…

iX Team — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 19:46:02 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

It’s time to mark your calendars. We’re proud to announce that MeetBSD California will be taking place later this year in November. Read on for more details.
On another note, we’ve got a couple of updates for you this month including another FreeNAS point release, the unveiling of a new product, and a new official tutorial.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

New Video Tutorial – FTP Access

We’ve posted another official tutorial video on our YouTube channel. Several people have requested information for setting up FTP access. While we don’t recommend using FTP on your FreeNAS system due to security reasons, we do want to make sure those of you who choose to use it know how to do so correctly. This video covers set-up and demonstrates the best recommended configuration for use with your system. If you find the video helpful, be sure to take a look at the rest of our YouTube channel for helpful tutorials.

It’s that time again — MeetBSD California is back! Every two years, MeetBSD California brings the top minds from all over the BSD world together in the heart of Silicon Valley. This year, the conference will be held at Western Digital headquarters in San Jose on November 1st & 2nd.

Confirmed speakers so far include Brendan Gregg, Kirk McKusick, and Rick Reed. The conference will also feature an unconference format with breakaway groups and hallway tracks for impromptu discussions. Be sure to register and book your travel soon. We expect this year’s MeetBSD California to be the biggest one yet!

FreeNAS 9.2.1.7 is Available

Well, we said 9.2.1.6 would be the last in the 9.2.1.x series, but CVE-2014-3560 (a possible remote Samba exploit) forced us to change those plans! While we were at it, we also added a few small performance improvements and brought over a small feature from 9.3, namely the ability to do replication on a direct link without encryption, potentially speeding up replication anywhere from 3-4X (especially over 10GbE). The changes in this release include:

Samba updated to 4.1.11, addressing this vulnerability.
Increased performance of Directory Copy from CIFS.
Added support for the None Cipher in SSH. This can be used to improve replication performance at the expense of sending your data over the wire in cleartext (think private 10Gbe interlink).
Resolved issue with VLAN interface locking that could cause a kernel panic when creating a number of VLAN interfaces.
Added support for compressing replication jobs with LZ4.

For the full notes on this release, check out the blog post. We encourage all existing 9.2.1.x users to upgrade. As always, thank you for using and testing FreeNAS.

NEW TrueNAS z50 TrueFlash

Our new product, the TrueNAS z50 TrueFlash, made its debut at this year’s VMworld.

TrueFlash is specifically designed for heterogeneous virtualization environments. Featuring an all-flash storage array built using HGST s842 drives, it can be configured to hold up to 24TB of raw storage capacity before deduplication. With a 15x deduplication ratio, that translates to 200-300TB of usable capacity!
Our flagship TrueNAS software is brought to you by the very same team behind FreeNAS. If you’re thinking about using virtualization in your office or need a solution tailored to your work environment, why not send us an inquiry? We specialize in custom built server and storage solutions. Every purchase of a system directly supports the developers of FreeNAS so we can continue making improvements to the project.

Tweaktown Interview with Josh and Matt

You may have read Tweaktown’s recent review of our FreeNAS Mini. They followed up that article by interviewing Josh and Matt of the FreeNAS project at the Flash Memory Summit. They talk about the past and present of the project and the plans in store for upcoming FreeNAS releases. The interview ends with a discussion about the enterprise options (including TrueFlash) and the relationship between the open source software and the propriatary version. It’s definitely worth a look if you’d like some insight on the FreeNAS development roadmap.

FreeNAS Training Classes

FreeNAS Admin
FreeNAS Sharing Deep Dive
FreeNAS Hardware Architecture & Performance Basics
Fault Analysis Workshop

The classes are fully interactive, so attendance is limited to 15 people per class, allowing for thorough Q&A with the instructor. Make sure to sign up early—with over 6 million FreeNAS downloads, we expect these spots to fill up fast.

Upcoming Live Events

We’ll be at the following conferences. If you’re in the area, drop by and say “hi”!
September 25-28 – EuroBSDcon in Sofia, Bulgaria
October 22-23 – All Things Open in Raleigh, NC
October 24-26 – Ohio Linuxfest in Columbus, OH

Tech Tip #9

No matter the file system, if you have 80% of the space in use, you need to get more space or your applications will start slowing down.

Links of the Month

20th Anniversary of the FreeBSD Ports Tree via YouTube
6 Data Backup Devices for Small Businesses via Small Business Computing
Episode 54: Luminary Environment via BSD Now

Need a Job? We need people!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers and QA testers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, a 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of
FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.
Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Connect with Us

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.7, TrueNAS Gets all Flashy, New FTP Tutorial & More… appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

All-NEW TrueNAS, New FreeNAS Release, & Free Classes

iX Team — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 20:34:30 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

What a month! Between the launch of our new flagship TrueNAS storage line, the release of FreeNAS 9.2.1.6, and an overhaul of the FreeNAS training classes, we’ve been quite busy. Keep reading to see what we’ve been up to.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

Introducing: The *NEW* TrueNAS Unified Storage Appliance

After a company-wide effort from the team that brings you FreeNAS, we are proud to unveil the new line of TrueNAS storage appliances.

Unified. Scalable. Flexible. The TrueNAS unified storage appliance is storage power, flexibility, and simplicity combined: high-availability, high-performance, feature-rich storage for a variety of business applications. With SAN and NAS in one appliance, as well as a wide variety of services and protocols, TrueNAS covers every use case. Whether it’s an offsite replication target for business continuity, backing
storage for mission-critical VMs or shared storage for video editing, TrueNAS provides a reliable, fast, and easy-to-manage solution.
The new modular TrueNAS hardware platform allows TrueNAS to grow with your needs. Upgrade from non-HA to HA or from one performance tier to the next by simply swapping or adding controllers. With TrueNAS’ Self-Healing filesystem, you can be sure that corrupted data never makes it to disk and any corruption that’s detected will be corrected in the next disk scrub. TrueNAS intelligently optimizes storage capacity through an adaptive compression algorithm that maximizes storage efficiency while
reducing I/O latency. Our rigorous burn-in process is designed to ensure all drives that leave our Silicon Valley headquarters work as intended when they arrive at your facility.
If you’re looking for an enterprise storage solution, why not send us a quote request? TrueNAS is the only storage platform built and supported by the developers of FreeNAS. Every purchase of a system helps supports the development of FreeNAS, allowing us to add more features to the software. If you love using FreeNAS at home, you’ll love
using
the new TrueNAS at work.

FREE Intro to FreeNAS Classes

We’re proud to open our FREE Intro to FreeNAS classes to the general public. Software educator, Linda Kateley, will be covering the same topics as the full-length class including web UI, setup, volumes, and datasets but the sessions will be much shorter. We’ve incorporated your suggestions from the exclusive trial run last month and will continue to make edits to the class based on feedback you leave
us.
Due to the overwhelming response, we’ve also decided to lift the daily attendee limit on each class. So tell your friends, tell your co-workers, tell anyone who you think would benefit from these classes and sign up for a quick 1-hour session. Classes will run every day.
For those of you interested in learning more than the basics, you’ll be happy to know that we’re also offering paid, advanced FreeNAS classes. Here’s a list of our current subjects:

FreeNAS Administration
FreeNAS Sharing Deep Dive
FreeNAS Hardware Architecture & Performance Basics
Fault Analysis Workshop

The first class will start on September 3rd and classes will take place every Wednesday. These classes are fully interactive, so attendance is limited to 10-15 people per class, allowing for thorough Q&A with the instructor. We also have three free beta classes scheduled so we can refine the material. For the current schedule and to reserve your spot, check out the site. Make sure to sign up early—with over 6 million
FreeNAS downloads, we expect these spots to fill up fast.
A big thanks to everyone who helped quality check the classes and left us comments! We’re working hard to develop these classes and hope you find these resources useful.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RELEASE

It’s finally here — FreeNAS 9.2.1.6 is available for download! All the bugs fixed in this release can be found here. Full release notes can be found here. Some of the key features in this release
include:

Samba is updated to 4.1.9
Netatalk is updated to 3.1.2
A new VirtualBox jail template
Several fixes related to ZFS replication
A new mpr driver, officially sanctioned by LSI, for the LSI 12 Gbps SAS HBA
VirtualBox template updated to 4.3.12

The FreeNAS development team would like to thank all the testers who provided feedback and bug reports for FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA, 9.2.1.6-RC, and 9.2.1.6-RC2.

New Video Tutorial – Installing and Configuring BTSync

We’ve got another new FreeNAS video tutorial for you. By popular demand, our newest video demonstrates how to install and configure the BitTorrent Sync plugin for FreeNAS.
BTSync is a file synchronization tool that utilizes the peer-to-peer technology BitTorrent is known for. It’s one of our more popular plugins because it allows you to directly share files between your FreeNAS system and other devices. By skipping third-party services, you ensure that your data remains private.
If you found this tutorial helpful, check out our entire YouTube channel for more step-by-step tutorials.

TweakTown Reviews the FreeNAS Mini

If all the other reviews from the past haven’t convinced you about the FreeNAS Mini, maybe this in-depth review from TweakTown will. TweakTown recently pit the Mini against several other popular small office NAS appliances in a series of benchmark tests. As they put it:
“With the cache drive, the Mini breezes through the enterprise workload with ease and makes the other products on our chart look entry-level… The iXsystems FreeNAS Mini has server level performance and custom options at an off-the-shelf-price.”
For more details, check out the article. They’ve included some pretty impressive graphs based on the tests they ran. We won’t give away all the details, but we will say that the FreeNAS Mini won TweakTown’s Best Performance Award.

FreeNAS & Plex on Know How…

You may remember that Know How… previously featured a FreeNAS build tutorial. Our software was recently featured again on Episode 95, this time with a focus on the Plex plugin. After a quick guide on FreeNAS hardware selection, the hosts demonstrated how to install and configure the Plex plugin. Be sure to give it a watch if you’ve been
thinking about setting up your own Plex server at home.

Interview with Brett Davis

This month’s issue of BSD Magazine features an exclusive interview with the VP of iXsystems, Brett Davis. As one of the first iX employees, Brett is a prime person to ask about the early days of iXsystems and the relationship with FreeNAS. The interview also goes into detail about the new TrueNAS product line that was recently released and the qualities that make the company and product stand
out from its competitors. Be sure to check out the article for a behind-the-scenes look at how iXsystems operates.

Upcoming Live Events

We’ll be at the following conferences. If you’re in the area, drop by and say “hi”!
August 24-25 – VMWorld in San Francisco, CA
September 11-13 – Fossetcon in Orlando, FL
September 25-28 – EuroBSDcon in Sofia, Bulgaria

Tech Tip #8

If you’re using LZ4 Compression, don’t worry about aligning RAID-Z to powers of 2 drive counts – there’s no performance benefit.

Links of the Month

Switching from Tape Backups to FreeNAS via Jamie Darville
Interview with William Grzybowski about Using Dojo on FreeNAS via Dojo Tool Kit
FreeNAS Mini At the Heart of the Nzega Digital Library Initiative via Peers Corps Global
How to Fix the IPMI Remote Management Vulnerability via iXsystems
Episode 48: Liberating SSL via BSD Now

Need a Job? We need people!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!

iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers and QA testers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, a 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of
FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.
Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Connect with Us

The post All-NEW TrueNAS, New FreeNAS Release, & Free Classes appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.7 Now Available

iX Team — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 17:54:09 +0000

Hi folks,
Well, we said 9.2.1.6 would be the last in the 9.2.1.x series, but CVE-2014-3560 (a possible remote Samba exploit) forced us to change those plans!
While we were at it, we also added a few small performance improvements and brought over a small feature from 9.3, namely the ability to do replication on a direct link without encryption, potentially speeding up replication anywhere from 3-4X (especially over 10GbE). This is generally most useful when doing initial replication to a backup box, while they are co-located together, after which normal encryption can be used in sending the deltas.
Appended are the release notes for 9.2.1.7. We encourage all existing 9.2.1.x users to upgrade. Thanks!
– The FreeNAS Development Team

Samba updated to 4.1.11. This addresses http://www.samba.org/samba/security/CVE-2014-3560
Increase performance of Directory Copy from CIFS
Add support for the None Cipher in SSH. This can be used to improve replication performance at the expense of sending your data over the wire in cleartext. (Think private 10Gbe interlink)
Resolve issue with vlan interface locking that could cause a kernel panic when creating a number of VLAN interfaces.
Add support for compressing replication jobs with lz4

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.7 Now Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RELEASE is Now Available

iX Team — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 01:44:12 +0000

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RELEASE is available here: https://www.freenas.org/download/.
All bugs fixed in FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RELEASE can be found here: https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas/issues?query_id=78.
The major items of interest are mentioned in the ReleaseNotes here: http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1.6/RELEASE/ReleaseNotes.
These items include:

Samba is updated to 4.1.9
Netatalk is updated to 3.1.2
Several fixes related to the System Dataset
A new VirtualBox jail template
Several fixes related to ZFS replication
A new mpr driver, officially sanctioned by LSI, for the LSI 12 Gbps SAS HBA
An experimental in-kernel iSCSI target
A .usb file which can be imaged to a USB key. This can be used for installing FreeNAS from a USB key.
various iSCSI fixes
scponly shell has been fixed
SMB2 protocol is the default for CIFS shares
VirtualBox template updated to 4.3.12
Security fixes in file(1) and libmagic(3), and gss_pseudo_random interoperability issue. CVE-2013-7345, CVE-2014-1943, CVE-2014-2270, [EN-14:08]

The following bugs were fixed since 9.2.1.6-RC2:

performance improvements of ZFS ZVOLS when used over ISCSI with VMWare ESX
UI fixes for jails
other fixes

The FreeNAS development team would like to thank all the testers who provided feedback and bug reports for FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA, 9.2.1.6-RC, and 9.2.1.6-RC2.
Thank you for using FreeNAS!
– The FreeNAS Development Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RELEASE is Now Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RC2 is now available

iX Team — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 17:00:00 +0000

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RC2 is available here: http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1.6/RC2/
All bugs fixed in FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RC can be found here: https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas/issues?query_id=78
The major items of interest are mentioned in the ReleaseNotes here: http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1.6/RC2/ReleaseNotes. These items include:

Samba is updated to 4.1.9
Netatalk is updated to 3.1.2
Several fixes related to the System Dataset
A new VirtualBox jail template
Several fixes related to ZFS replication
A new mpr driver, officially sanctioned by LSI, for the LSI 12 Gbps SAS HBA
An experimental in-kernel iSCSI target
A .usb file which can be imaged to a USB key. This can be used for installing FreeNAS from a USB key.
various iSCSI fixes
scponly shell has been fixed
SMB2 protocol is the default for CIFS shares
VirtualBox template updated to 4.3.12

Since the last 9.2.1.6-RC, additional items have been fixed including:

Samba updated from 4.1.8 to 4.1.9
Security fixes in file(1) and libmagic(3), and gss_pseudo_random interoperability issue. CVE-2013-7345, CVE-2014-1943, CVE-2014-2270, [EN-14:08]
other fixes

Please provide feedback on this RC. If no major problems are found, we will release 9.2.1.6-RELEASE in approximately 14 days.
Thank you for testing FreeNAS!
– The FreeNAS Development Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RC2 is now available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RC is Now Available

iX Team — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 17:13:23 +0000

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RC is available here: http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1.6/RC.
All bugs fixed in FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RC can be found here: https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas/issues?query_id=78.
The major items of interest are mentioned in the Release Notes here: http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1.6/RC/ReleaseNotes.
These items include:

Samba is updated to 4.1.8
Netatalk is updated to 3.1.2
Several fixes related to the System Dataset
A new VirtualBox jail template
Several fixes related to ZFS replication
A new mpr driver, officially sanctioned by LSI, for the LSI 12 Gbps SAS HBA
An experimental in-kernel iSCSI target
A .usb file which can be imaged to a USB key. This can be used for installing FreeNAS from a USB key.

Since the last 9.2.1.6-BETA, additional items have been fixed including:

various iSCSI fixes
scponly shell has been fixed
SMB2 protocol is the default for CIFS shares
VirtualBox template updated to 4.3.12

Please provide feedback on this RC. If no major problems are found, we will release 9.2.1.6-RELEASE in approximately 14 days.
Thank you for testing FreeNAS!
– The FreeNAS Development Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-RC is Now Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS State of the Union & Free(NAS) Training!

iX Team — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 19:01:45 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

For the first time (but hopefully not the last), Jordan Hubbard, the head of FreeNAS engineering gives a status report on the current state of the FreeNAS project and what’s in store for the future. Take a look:

Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

Free Intro to FreeNAS & ZFS Class

You read that right — we’ll start offering a free, condensed version of the original “Intro to FreeNAS” classes soon. Linda Kateley will still cover the same topics as the full-length class including web UI, setup, volumes, and datasets but the sessions will be much shorter. Each class will be limited to 45 attendees but we expect those spots to fill up fast, so be sure to sign up early when it’s available.
We’re making a couple of changes to fit the new format. The ability to give verbal feedback will be removed due to the increased number of participants but attendees will be able to ask questions via e-mail. We will also offer paid, advanced FreeNAS classes for more in-depth instruction about the following topics:

System Administration
FreeNAS Sharing
FreeNAS Systems Design and Architecture

A beta of the system administration class will also be available soon with priority access for people who attended the full-length intro classes.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA is Available

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA can be downloaded here. The full list of bugs fixed in 9.2.1.6 can be found here.
Some noteworthy changes include:

Samba is updated to 4.1.8
Netatalk is updated to 3.1.2
Several fixes related to the System Dataset
A new VirtualBox jail template
Several fixes related to ZFS replication
A new mpr driver, officially sanctioned by LSI, for the LSI 12 Gbps SAS HBA
An experimental in-kernel iSCSI target
A .usb file which can be imaged to a USB key. This can be used for installing FreeNAS from a USB key.

For the full list of changes, see the Release Notes. Please provide feedback on this BETA. If no major problems are found, 9.2.1.6-RELEASE will be available in approximately 14 days.

New FreeNAS Tutorial Videos

We posted a few more tutorials on our official YouTube channel this past month. The first video focuses on the basics of setting up volumes and snapshots and also covers different volume layouts including stripes, mirrors, RAIDZ, and more. By popular request, the second video demonstrates how to set up shares for Apple (AFP), Unix (NFS), Windows (CIFS), and Time Machine on FreeNAS 9.2.1.5.
Be sure to check out these videos and the rest of the channel if you need help setting up your FreeNAS. After all, who knows more about setting up FreeNAS than the people who wrote it?

New Job Position: QA Testers Wanted

Speaking of testing, iXsystems has a new job position open. We are looking for individuals who are highly self-driven and able to work closely with our engineers in assessing the most appropriate priorities for testing, the creation of automated test frameworks, and driving the overall testing process to higher levels of quality and automation.
Skills in any of the following areas are a plus but not strictly mandatory – we are willing to train the right candidates. Enthusiasm and willingness to work hard count for at least as much as experience!

Network Attached Storage technologies (FreeNAS experience a huge plus)
Familiarity with Unix Operating systems (any flavor)
Python, Perl, Ruby or Unix shell scripting
Experience with testing frameworks and testing automation.
A basic understanding of the software life-cycle

The full job description can be found on the careers section of the iX site.

EconoNAS 2014 by Brian Moses

You may remember Brian from his various FreeNAS DIY articles over the years. Well, Brian recently updated his EconoNAS build for 2014. The new build is slightly more expensive than the previous version but the extra cost allows Brian to increase the storage capacity by 25% and RAM by 100%.
This is the first time he’s gone through the entire build and setup process, so he’s doing something special with the system — he’s giving it away! Make sure you check out his blog to see his hardware recommendations and find out how you can enter to win his giveaway.

FreeNAS Plugin Overview

This article from OpenLogic takes a look at using the FreeNAS plugins system to increase your system’s functionality. After an overview of several of the more popular plugins including Plex, CrashPlan, and ownCloud, the article runs through the process of plugin installation and configuration with screenshots to help readers understand what to do. Most notably, the article also includes a troubleshooting section at the end to address some of the common issues people run into when working with plugins.

FreeNAS in the Wild – BSDCan

We had a small table with freebies at BSDCan in Ottawa this year. Several of our developers attended the conference and Dev Summit including Dru, John, and Craig who all wrote recaps about their experience at the show and the work they did there. Check out the photos on our Facebook and Google+, courtesy of Ollivier Robert.
If you missed us, keep reading to find out which shows the FreeNAS team will be going to next.

Upcoming Live Events

We’ll be at the following conferences. If you’re in the area, drop by and say “hi”!
June 13-14 – Texas Linuxfest in Austin, TX
June 20-22 – Southeast Linuxfest in Charlotte, NC
July 20-24 – OSCON in Portland, OR

Tech Tip #7

FreeNAS benefits greatly from ECC RAM, which prevents data corruption before writing to disk and while reading from it. However, if it’s a budgetary choice between ECC RAM and a better-protected RAID array due to one more disk, go with the disk every time.

Links of the Month

PC-BSD on an Old Vaio Laptop via Larry the Free Software Guy (aka, Jordan’s neighbor)
Commit This Bit via BSD Now
DIY Vintage Raspberry Pi Internet-Radio/Spotify Device via Imgur

Need a Job? We need people!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers and QA testers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.
Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Connect with Us

The post FreeNAS State of the Union & Free(NAS) Training! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA is Now Available

iX Team — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 17:58:52 +0000

FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA is available here.
All bugs fixed in FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA can be found here.
The major items of interest are mentioned in the Release Notes here.
These items include:

Samba is updated to 4.1.8
Netatalk is updated to 3.1.2
Several fixes related to the System Dataset
A new VirtualBox jail template
Several fixes related to ZFS replication
A new mpr driver, officially sanctioned by LSI, for the LSI 12 Gbps SAS HBA
An experimental in-kernel iSCSI target
A .usb file which can be imaged to a USB key. This can be used for installing FreeNAS from a USB key.

Please provide feedback on this BETA. If no major problems are found, we will release 9.2.1.6-RELEASE in approximately 14 days.
Thank you for testing FreeNAS!
– The FreeNAS Development Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.6-BETA is Now Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS supports Solar Roadways!

iX Team — Tue, 27 May 2014 20:43:31 +0000

Solar Roadway is a company that aims to put solar panels in roads, parking lots, and driveways. The solar panels will pay for themselves by producing clean, sustainable energy to power homes and businesses (including ours!). The panels can be walked and driven on and they have many other features as well, including: heating elements to stay snow and ice free, LEDs to make road lines and signage, and attached Cable Corridor to store and treat stormwater and provide a “home” for power and data cables. iXsystems is very excited to help Solar Roadways with their fundraising campaign. We can already envision the day when the iX datacenter is completely powered by solar roadways.
For more information, see the campaign at IndieGogo.

The post FreeNAS supports Solar Roadways! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.5-RELEASE and the Heartbleed Bug…

iX Team — Fri, 09 May 2014 20:05:45 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride, but FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 is finally out. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there. Read on to find out how you can be a part of the next release, and as always, we’ve got some tutorials and pointers in this edition for you as well. A big thanks to everyone who’s been involved in the development of FreeNAS so far. We couldn’t have done it without all of our dedicated beta testers and community members. Here’s to greater things ahead!
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

How Heartbleed Affected FreeNAS

A few people have asked about this and well, the short answer is: it didn’t. We are happy to say that FreeNAS was completely unaffected by the Heartbleed vulnerability because the current branch of FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD 9.2, which uses OpenSSL 0.9.8. Please be advised that users of FreeBSD 10 and FreeBSD 10-based systems like PC-BSD 10 Joule Edition were affected by the bug. To test your own server for the bug, try out this nifty tool.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 – RELEASE

FreeBSD 9.2.1.5-RELEASE is now available for download. It fixes more bugs in the 9.2.1.x series. We’re currently working on another point release to squash out the last of the remaining bugs in the 9.2.1-BRANCH, but we’re taking our time with the 9.2.1.6-RELEASE because we’d really like it to be good. That being said, we
need your help!
If you have some spare hardware, care about making sure that FreeNAS 9.2.1.6 will be the release everyone wants it to be, and are willing to put a little time and effort into testing the latest nightly builds, we’d like to invite you to join our newly re-launched freenas-testing@lists.freenas.org mailing list.
The 9.2.1.x series has been a bit rocky for us, partially because we bit off more than we could chew with the Samba 4 upgrade and partially because, well… we just couldn’t seem to stop breaking things in our attempt to fix other things. We are now attempting to learn from our mistakes.
We know that the community would obviously like 9.2.1.6 to be really good too, shipping with all the bugs from 9.2.1.5 fixed and no new bugs introduced. So if you would like to be a part of making that happen, please subscribe to the mailing list and follow the updates from the release engineering and QA teams as things progress.

FreeNAS Mini Review

One of the FreeNAS forum users recently reviewed the new FreeNAS Mini. You may have heard of cyberj0ck – he’s a pretty prolific forum contributor. He recently utilized his FreeNAS expertise and examined the FreeNAS Mini in depth. For his review, he detailed the hardware specs and ran a series of performance tests to see how well it stacks up. His conclusion?
“All of the hardware in the new FreeNAS Mini is awesome. No complaints. The hardware is solid and the hardware is definitely capable of doing what almost all of us could ever do with it… Overall I can’t find any faults at all. The concern that the CPU might not be a good fit for a small home server is clearly unfounded. It passed every one of my tests.”
Thinking about getting a Mini now that it’s been vetted and approved by cyberj0ck? Send us a quote request here and we’ll be happy to help you out. Remember, every purchase helps support the developers of FreeNAS so we can keep making improvements to the project.

BSD Now – Interview with John Hixson

The folks over at BSD Now recently interviewed John Hixson, a senior developer for the FreeNAS project. It’s a pretty insightful look at how one of our own got his start in the world of FreeBSD and the work he’s currently responsible for. He also talks about the direction FreeNAS is taking and explains how people can get involved and help out. For a look inside the FreeNAS project, especially from a
developer’s perspective, give the video a watch.

Setting Up Your First NAS with FreeNAS by Ben Milman

Ben Milman gave a talk at Linuxfest Northwest 2014 to a room full of people who were eager to learn. His talk covered installation, volumes, datasets, users, permissions, and shares with a demo and a short Q&A session afterwards. The slides and a recording of his presentation can be seen on the iXsystems blog. A recap of the event and pictures from Day 1 and Day 2 are also available online. Be sure to check it out if you’d like some pointers on the basics of setting up and configuring your first FreeNAS
system.

Upcoming Live Events

We’ll be at the following conferences. If you’re in the area, drop by and say “hi”!
May 13-15 – FOSE in Washington DC (booth 1130)
May 14-17 – BSDCan in Ottawa, ON, Canada
June 13-14 – Texas Linuxfest in Austin, TX
June 20-22 – Southeast Linuxfest in Charlotte, NC

Tech Tip #6

Build your storage pool for future capacity needs – getting it right the first time is easier and cheaper than starting over later.

Links of the Month

An Example of Front End Build (feat. Raspberry Pi) via DIY Tryin
Let’s Get RAID via BSD Now
FreeNAS Mini Unboxing Video via Gerard van Essen

Need a Job? We need people!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of FreeBSD; in fact,
we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.
Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Connect with Us

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.5-RELEASE and the Heartbleed Bug… appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 – waking up edition

iX Team — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 18:41:22 +0000

Hey folks,

You remember the ending of the movie “The Wizard of Oz”, where Dorothy woke up and it was all just a dream?

Well, that’s exactly the case with FreeNAS 9.2.1.4.1. It apparently never happened, we all just dreamed that it did. Haha! You all didn’t really think we’d release something with so many numbers, or with more bugs than 9.2.1.3, right? Right. Just a bad dream.
So anyway, now that we’re all awake again, we’d just like to point out that the release fairies appear to have done a 9.2.1.5-RELEASE during the night, which is now available on https://www.freenas.org/download/. It fixes even more bugs in the 9.2.1.x series (including those we all dreamed were in 9.2.1.4.1) and is a more fitting end to the 9.2.1.x series, especially given that 9.2.2 isn’t going to be out for awhile!
Bugs fixed in 9.2.1.5 https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas/issues?query_id=75.
Sweet dreams!
– The FreeNAS engineering team

The post Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 – waking up edition appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.4-RELEASE is now available

iX Team — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 17:44:49 +0000

Hi folks,
Well, we’ve successfully rolled another good 9.2.1.x point release! Please come and get it from the usual location. Also as usual, the issues we fixed in this release are best described by looking at the list of fixed tickets in the 9.2.1.4 milestone. We improved replication speed, we fixed more issues with CIFS, we brought in some ZFS fixes (addressing the zpool history 100% CPU spin, among other things), and just basically did our best to keep whittling away at the issues that made 9.2.1.3 less than complaint-free.
So, since the bug database does a better job than we ever could of describing what we’ve fixed in 9.2.1.4, let us take this opportunity to talk a bit about the 9.2.1.x series and our plans for 9.2.2!
As most folks have undoubtedly figured out by now, we’ve been putting a substantial amount of effort into evolving the 9.2.1-BRANCH of FreeNAS with this series of 9.2.1.x releases. There are two primary reasons for this:

We took on a bit more than we expected with the Samba3->Samba4 upgrade, especially given how much more stringent Samba4 is about respecting ACLs and, as we’ve come to understand, the kinds of havoc one can create in FreeBSD by mixing ACLs and chmod(1) since they share the same permission space (and Windows likes ACLs, not Unix mode flags). We’ve added a few seat-belts here and there and also fixed some outright bugs, but it’s clear we still have some work to do in documenting how to use Samba4 effectively.
We’re strongly motivated to get the 9.2.1.x series polished to the point where we can stop doing frequent releases for it and give both ourselves and the FreeNAS community a bit of a rest in that regard, allowing the documentation and other resources to catch up while we go to work full-time on FreeNAS 9.2.2!

Which brings us to FreeNAS 9.2.2. Here is some of what we have in store for the next major release of FreeNAS:

Live updates: Explicit downloading and installation of updates (and manually supplying checksums) will become a thing of the past. FreeNAS will update itself like most other commercial products do – by checking in with an update server, downloading any available updates in the background, and then asking the user for an opportune time to apply them. Worry not, we’re not going to reboot without an admin’s express permission, or give them only one type of update server to use (we know many corporate users are behind firewalls or want to run their own update servers) – we’ll be making provisions to make this as non-intrusive, and as secure, as it should be. This is a bigger topic than one post can possibly do justice to, however, so please stay tuned for more details!
NFSv4: Yes, it’s time for NFSv4 support. This will require some fairly substantial NFS sharing UI changes since NFSv4 is a lot more powerful and flexible than NFSv3.
HAST: Fail-over peering is coming to FreeNAS. For more information, see the link. The UI for this will also be fairly substantial, and we look forward to your feedback as the feature starts entering the daily BETA builds of 9.2.2!
Kernel iSCSI: iSCSI is one of FreeNAS’ more popular features (especially for VMWare folks), and this will be a substantial improvement for this service, both from a performance and feature perspective.

We also have a lot of tickets on our plate for 9.2.2 that cover a positively huge number of enhancements to replication (especially in the UI), performance, “fit and finish” and general bug fixes. We’re really looking forward to making major major progress on 9.2.2 over the coming year (and no, before you ask, we don’t have a specific release date yet – that will be announced later), but first we need to get this pesky 9.2.1.x series behind us. 🙂
We hope that you enjoy using 9.2.1.4 as much as we enjoyed making it. Onwards toward 9.2.2.!
– The FreeNAS Engineering Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.4-RELEASE is now available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

NEW FreeNAS ZFS Classes and a NEW Addition to the iXsystems Family

iX Team — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 22:38:22 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

Since you signed up for the FreeNAS newsletter, we expect that you’ve got backups down pat. Still, we hope you celebrated World Backup Day all the same even if you consider every day “backup day”. But if you’re having trouble getting your system just right, you might be interested in knowing that we’re now offering FreeNAS classes. Keep reading for more details.
In other big news, we’re also welcoming FreeBSDNews.net to the iXsystems family. We hope to continue the great work that Gerard’s done on the site for years. With so much happening, we’re also seeing an influx of user-generated content. Our community is growing faster than ever, and we’re thrilled people have an active interest in contributing back as it embodies the values of the Open Source community we’re proud to be a part of. We’ve featured some of those submissions in this month’s edition. Here’s to even greater things ahead.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

NEW FreeNAS classes – Intro to FreeNAS and ZFS

We’re now offering live FreeNAS classes in collaboration with ZFS expert, Linda Kateley. Linda is a professional software educator with over 20 years of experience who specializes in ZFS and storage. This initial series of classes will introduce you to the FreeNAS GUI and teach you everything you need to know to get started with FreeNAS, including:

Basic Setup
Volumes and Datasets setup
Sharing with AFP, NFS, CIFS
Enterprise ZFS Features (Caching, Checksums, Snapshots, Replication)

The first class will begin on April 16th at 10AM CST. Classes are limited to 15 people per session in order to allow for focused collaborative attention and a robust Q&A session. Each class is designed to be topic-specific, taken “a la carte”, and no longer than 3-4 hours. Sign up for your spot now.

New Partnership with FreeBSDNews.net

iXsystems has announced a new partnership with Gerard van Essen, the creator of FreeBSDNews.net. As part of our agreement, iXsystems will now maintain and host FreeBSDNews.net. With Gerard’s continued involvement on the reporting and editorial side, our added efforts will allow the website to continue its growth and expand its coverage.
Needless to say, we’re very excited about this. As regular visitors to our site know, we eat, sleep, breathe, and live FreeBSD. With this newest venture, we’ve got the community’s best interests in mind. We are dedicated to the continued delivery of the high quality FreeBSD news, interviews, and announcements that FreeBSDNews.net is known for.
We invite all of our readers to check out FreeBSDNews.net now and subscribe to the RSS feed. We’ve got big ideas for the future and we hope you’ll be a part of it.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.4-BETA is now available

OFFICIAL FreeNAS 9.2.1.3 Installation Video

We’re back with another official tutorial! This time, we’re demonstrating the entire installation process for FreeNAS 9.2.1.3. This is hands down the best FreeNAS installation tutorial this side of the internet (since it’s from the people who develop the software). The video takes you through all of the steps including:

Necessary tools
Booting the FreeNAS ISO
Installing FreeNAS
Accessing the web UI

Check out our YouTube channel for more tutorials and subscribe so you don’t miss any. We’ll be coming out with more in the upcoming weeks. If you’ve created your own tutorial (video or article), we’d love to see it! Send it to FNsubmissions@ixsystems.com and you might just see it featured in the newsletter.

FreeNAS at Great Wide Open

FreeNAS made an appearance at Great Wide Open this year. Dru Lavigne debuted our newest table banner and gave away FreeNAS promotional items. You may be familiar with GWO as the rebranded POSSCON from previous years. As a well-established conference, it draws a usual crowd of 600+ attendees each year. To find out how the conference went, read the recap on the iXsystems blog.

Unbox the Mini

Wonder what it’s like when you get your FreeNAS Mini? One of the recipients of the Mini system made a video of his unboxing experience. Vaclav interned at the iXsystems headquarters last summer and as part of our thanks, we shipped one of the new Minis to his home.
During the video, Vaclav shows off the hardware, the packaging we use to keep the system safe, and of course, the FreeNAS goodies included in each Mini box. If you’re interested in ordering your own, just send us a quote request. Every purchase of a FreeNAS Mini directly supports the developers of FreeNAS so we can continue making improvements and adding features to the software.
We’ve already made updates to the packaging, so recent FreeNAS Mini customers can expect a change to the unboxing experience. And for those of you who haven’t bought your own Mini yet, keep your eyes peeled for a new video in the coming weeks. Of course, nothing beats the real thing. 😉

FreeNAS Articles by Kevin Hanson

One user recently made the switch from Synology to FreeNAS and blogged about some of the things that motivated his decision. The biggest reasons Kevin Hanson gave for his switch were the security, customizability, and ZFS that FreeNAS offers. The constant bugs that came with his Synology box didn’t help.
As he started configuring his system, he wrote a tutorial for getting Time Machine set up with multiple Macs for FreeNAS 9.2.1.3. Kevin included diagrams in his easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorial. Give it a read if you’d like to do something similar with your machine.

Dick Installs – Back Up to FreeNAS Tutorial Videos

Dick Thomas is back with more FreeNAS videos. He’s a prolific contributor of tutorials such as his earlier videos “FreeNAS 9.x Setup with Samba File Shares, OwnCloud, Bittorrent and Plex” and “FreeNAS 9.2.x with BTSync, Transmission, Couchpotato, SickBeard, and Plex” that focused on plugin setup.
His most recent series demonstrates how to back up to FreeNAS. He started with the video “Windows Backup to FreeNAS”. He followed that up with two CrashPlan videos due to popular demand, one for Windows and one for Macs. Several users have expressed gratitude for his tutorials, so that should tell you how useful they are!

Tech Tip #5

At low drive counts, the non-optimal configuration warning in FreeNAS is less significant than the performance gained by adding one more hard drive.

Links of the Month

Why One User Chose NOT to Use ECC RAM via Brian Moses
One User’s FreeNAS Build & Performance Reports via Jungle-IT
Episode 32: PXE Dust via BSD Now

Need a Job? We need people!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!
iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.
Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Connect with Us

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iXsystems Announces New Partnership with FreeBSDNews.net

iX Team — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:22:50 +0000

iXsystems has announced a new partnership with Gerard van Essen, the creator of FreeBSDNews.net.
FreeBSDNews.net is a premier source of aggregated news for FreeBSD aficionados everywhere. Gerard has spent years gathering the best of FreeBSD content and news together in one place, making it easy to find information for a much underrepresented community. In fact, a lot of our blog posts, pictures, and news show up on the site.
So when we heard that Gerard wanted someone to help run the site, we jumped at the opportunity. As part of our agreement, iXsystems will now maintain and host FreeBSDNews.net. With Gerard’s continued involvement on the reporting and editorial side, our added efforts will allow the website to continue its growth and expand its coverage.
Needless to say, we’re very excited about this. As our regular visitors know, we eat, sleep, breathe, and live FreeBSD. With this newest venture, we’ve got the community’s best interests in mind. We are dedicated to the continued delivery of the high quality FreeBSD news, interviews, and announcements that FreeBSDNews.net is known for.
We invite all of our readers to check out FreeBSDNews.net now and subscribe to the RSS feed. This is a big day for the FreeBSD community and we hope you’re a part of it.

The post iXsystems Announces New Partnership with FreeBSDNews.net appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.4-BETA is now available

iX Team — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 23:17:43 +0000

This point release for 9.2.1 fixes performance issues with ZFS replication, SMB spins / hangs under certain circumstances, and a variety of smaller issues.
All bugs fixed in 9.2.1.4-BETA can be found here.
This is a very small point release – very few changes have been made as we are endeavoring to continue refining 9.2.1.x until no significant bugs are left and we can focus exclusively on 9.2.2, which will have far more substantial changes (see this link for some notion of what is planned for 9.2.2).
We’re releasing a BETA first to make sure there are no lingering issues we’ve missed, otherwise it will be substantially the same as 9.2.1.4-RELEASE (which we’ll release in another 14 days or so).
Thank you, as always, for your testing!
– The FreeNAS Development Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.4-BETA is now available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1.3-RELEASE

iX Team — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 20:21:09 +0000

Hey folks!

In our never(?)-ending quest to continue to add polish to the 9.2.1-BRANCH of FreeNAS, we are very pleased to announce 9.2.1.3-RELEASE – come and get it!

This point release for 9.2.1 adds ZFS replication status, fixes various issues found in 9.2.1.2 in CIFS, AFP, FTP, serial console support, and other areas.

A list of all bugs fixed in 9.2.1.3-RELEASE can be found here.

High level features for 9.2.1.3:

* Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.6
* Netatalk (AFP support) upgraded to version 3.1.1
* ZFS replication status is now provided in ZFS Replication UI
* The bug preventing FTP from starting when logging to system dataset has been fixed.

We’ve worked very hard to nail all sorts of issues in this series of 9.2.1.x point releases, hopefully without doing anything destabilizing at the same time, and are confident that we’ve managed to polish this branch to a pretty high gloss (which is what you want in a NAS!). We certainly could not have done so without all of your testing and feedback over the last couple of months, so thanks!

– The FreeNAS Engineering Team

The post Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1.3-RELEASE appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.3-BETA now available

iX Team — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 18:07:49 +0000

Hey folks,
It’s been almost 3 weeks, so it must be time for another FreeNAS build!
Come and get it from here, under “Legacy, 32-bit, and Other Downloads”.
See what we fixed here (though this list is not entirely definitive – some of the bugs here may also be fixed – we’re still waiting for some feedback!).
We probably won’t do a Release Candidate for 9.2.1.3 because the changes are truly small, so please do test the BETA and see if we squashed your favorite 9.2.1.2 bug, otherwise 9.2.1.3-RELEASE will come out and it will be too late!
Not much to post for Release Notes here. Samba was upgraded to 4.1.6 and Netatalk to 3.1.1, which should fix some Samba crashes and the 32 bit “Time Machine bug” that was in the 9.2.1.2 Errata. We also fixed a bug with libinotify which accounted for some of the Samba spins that ate 100% CPU.
Again, please get it here: https://www.freenas.org/download/
Thanks, as always, for your testing!
– FreeNAS Engineering Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.3-BETA now available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.2-RELEASE & Team Interviews (Bonus – a Closer Look at the New FreeNAS Mini)

iX Team — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 21:03:05 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

Spring is in the air and it’s a time for changes. After adding more bugfixes and patches, we’re announcing the release of FreeNAS 9.2.1.2 and the next point release is just around the corner.

We also have several videos and interviews for you this month now that all of our programmers are finally popping their heads out of their cubicles to enjoy the sun. As a bonus, the interview with Jordan Hubbard on DIY Tryin also featured some shots of the all-new FreeNAS Mini. We’ve got some new official FreeNAS tutorial videos on the way so keep reading to see the first video we’ve made for the 9.x branch (and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you
don’t miss any). And since it’s Friday, take it easy and spend some time on Facebook to check out photos of the FreeNAS team at SCALE 12x.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

9.2.1.2 – Release is Available

FreeNAS 9.2.1.2 is now available for download. This point release fixes even more issues found in 9.2.1.1 in CIFS, NFS locking, the new .system dataset, ACLs, migration during upgrades, serial consoles, and a few other smaller things. All bugs fixed in 9.2.1.2-RELEASE can be found here.

From a high level, these are the most significant changes:

Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.5
Linux Jails now work with UFS
NFS lockd now starts properly at boot time
Serial console misconfiguration is now harder to do.
Logging to .system dataset is now optional. If you have an old syslog dataset (which is how this was formerly done), you are strongly encouraged to transition to the new .system/syslog dataset by enabling that option in System->Settings->Advanced and simply deleting your old syslog dataset.

We’d like to thank the community for its patience in dealing with the many issues we introduced in the name of progress in 9.2.1 and we’re working on another point release as we speak. We certainly could not have done this without all of your testing and feedback over the last month, so again, thanks!

Jordan Hubbard Interview Series with DCIG

DCIG recently sat down with Jordan Hubbard, lead developer of FreeNAS and CTO of iXsystems, for a look at the ideas and principles that drive the success of the company. Jordan started the interview by explaining how the FreeNAS project sets iXsystems apart from its competitors.
He then goes into detail about why the custom solutions iXsystems is known for are superior to a pre-built system and why hybrid storage is the best solution right now. Jordan then maps out how open source fits into iXsystems’ business model, how the company benefits from working so closely with the open source community, and where the line between open source and propriety code falls.
The series is still ongoing so be sure to check back regularly for a revealing look at how iXsystems operates and the relationship between the company and the FreeNAS project.

FreeNAS Team on Revision3 (Bonus: Mini Close-ups)

Jordan Hubbard and James Nixon made an appearance on a recent episode of DIY Tryin with hosts, Patrick Norton and Michael Hand. This new video was a follow up to the first episode of DIY Tryin from way back in December. Patrick has a long history with FreeNAS so he invited us to the show to get expert information straight from the horse’s mouth.
Jordan brought along the new FreeNAS Mini for comparison as he spoke with Patrick about optimal hardware specs and the history of FreeNAS. Patrick revealed he is actually a huge fan of Jordan when he started gushing during a fanboy moment near the end of the interview. James followed with a plugin primer tutorial using Plex and Owncloud to demonstrate how to navigate the directory and configure plugins in the jails. The rest of Jordan’s interview was featured on Tekzilla, where he elaborated further about FreeBSD, FreeNAS, and the open source communities.
Details about the FreeNAS Mini featured in DIY Tryin can be found on the iXsystems website. Every purchase of a FreeNAS Mini supports the developers of FreeNAS, allowing us to add more features and improvements to the project.

Official Tutorial – FreeNAS 9.2.1 Initial Setup & Plex Plugin

We get lots of requests for more FreeNAS videos and we’re happy to say that we’ve taken your feedback to heart. We’re now in the process of making a series of official guides for the 9.x release branch of FreeNAS. For our first video, we’ve got a tutorial to show you how to set up FreeNAS 9.2.1 and install the Plex plugin.
This video takes you through all the steps, including adding a volume, creating a ZFS dataset, transferring media, and adding storage to jails. Check out our YouTube channel for more videos that we’ve posted in the
past and subscribe so you don’t miss the new ones coming soon!

Miss us at SCALE 12x?

For three days, we walked, talked, and taught until we were exhausted – all in the name of getting the word out to the 2000+ attendees of SCALE 12x about the great things you can do with FreeNAS and ZFS. The FreeNAS booth was just one of many exhibitors at the conference and we had a lot of fun with all of our Open Source brethren.

For a recap of our experience, check out our blog write-up. Photos from day 1
and day 2 of the expo can be found on Facebook. This year, we were able to get videos of Dru and John’s presentations. If you’d like to know everything there is to know about ZFS, check out the video of Dru’s talk, ZFS 101 (aka ZFS is Cool and Why You Should be Using it). If you’ve ever been curious about how FreeNAS is created, take a look at John’s presentation, Introduction to FreeNAS Development. It may or may not contain ponies.

Tech Tip #4

When upgrading, FreeNAS asks if you would like to back up your configuration. ALWAYS take this option.

Links of the Month

Big cable Tries Outlawing Municipal Broadband via ArsTechnica
Episode 28: Ghost of Partition via BSD Now

Need a Job? We need people!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well…now you can be!

iXsystems, the company that sponsors FreeNAS, is looking for a few good developers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as
some of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.

Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Send Us Your Content

Got a FreeNAS hardware build you’re proud of? Come up with a tech tip while tinkering around in the GUI? Have a link or picture you think we should see? As long as it’s not something you wouldn’t send to your boss, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at FNsubmissions@ixsystems.com. We’re always on the lookout for FreeNAS and storage related
content to feature in the newsletter and on our social media channels.

Connect with Us

If you need help with your FreeNAS setup or would like to show off your configuration, share your plugins, or just talk with like-minded people, join the conversation on our community forums.
For video tutorials, check out our YouTube channel.
Want real-time updates as they happen? Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or add us to your Google+ circle!

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.2-RELEASE & Team Interviews (Bonus – a Closer Look at the New FreeNAS Mini) appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.2-RELEASE is now available

iX Team — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 03:01:19 +0000

Howdy,
OK, it’s done!
9.2.1.2-RELEASE is now up on https://www.freenas.org/download/ – please come and get it!
This point release for 9.2.1 fixes even more issues found in 9.2.1.1 in CIFS, NFS locking, the new .system dataset, ACLs, migration during upgrades, serial consoles, and a few smaller things. All bugs fixed in 9.2.1.2-RELEASE can be found here.
From a high level, these are the most significant changes:

Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.5
Linux Jails now work with UFS
NFS lockd now starts properly at boot time
Serial console misconfiguration is now harder to do.
Logging to .system dataset is now optional. If you have an old syslog dataset (which is how this was formerly done), you are strongly encouraged to transition to the new .system/syslog dataset by enabling that option in System->Settings->Advanced and simply deleting your old syslog dataset.

Otherwise, the 9.2.1.1 ReleaseNotes still apply, so I won’t repeat them all here!
We’d like to thank the community for its patience in dealing with the many issues we introduced in the name of progress (or just hadn’t been found until people really started beating on CIFS) in 9.2.1.
We’ve worked very hard to nail those issues in this series of point releases and are confident that we’ve finally gotten this branch polished to a pretty high gloss (which is what you want in a NAS!). We certainly could not have done so without all of your testing and feedback over the last month, so again, thanks!
– The FreeNAS Engineering Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.2-RELEASE is now available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1.2-RC is now available

iX Team — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 19:15:50 +0000

Howdy folks,
In our seemingly never-ending quest to get 9.2.1 polished up just right, we have found it necessary to create yet another point release! 9.2.1.2-RC is now up on http://download.freenas.org – please come and get it!
This release candidate point release for 9.2.1 fixes even more issues found in 9.2.1.1 in CIFS, NFS locking, the new .system dataset, ACLs, migration during upgrades, serial consoles, and a few smaller things. A list of all bugs fixed in 9.2.1.2-RC can be found here.
From a high level, these are the most significant changes:
Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.5
Linux Jails now work with UFS
NFS lockd now starts properly at boot time
Serial console misconfiguration is now harder to do.
Logging to the .system dataset is now optional and configurable (and many migration problems with the system dataset and older-style .samba4 datasets have been fixed).
Otherwise, the 9.2.1.1 ReleaseNotes apply so I won’t repeat them all here!
We’d like to push 9.2.1.2-RELEASE out the door in a couple of days, so the testing cycle on this RC is very short. We feel this to be reasonable because so little has changed (by design) in this point release and we’ve all been testing these changes internally quite heavily since 9.2.1.1 was released.
We’d also like to thank the community for its patience in dealing with the many issues we introduced in the name of progress (or just hadn’t been found until people really started beating on CIFS) in 9.2.1. We’ve worked very hard to nail those issues in this series of point releases and are confident that we’ve finally gotten this branch polished to a pretty high gloss (which is what you want in a NAS!). We certainly could not have done so without all of your testing and feedback over the last month, so again, thanks!
– The FreeNAS Engineering Team

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1.2-RC is now available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1.1-RELEASE

iX Team — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:20:38 +0000

Greetings, FreeNAS fanatics!

Yes, it’s our first point release to a point release! We are not particularly thrilled that we had to do one, but there were some Samba (CIFS) and jail related bugs (including a panic!) that definitely made it necessary; we’ve done little else for the last 2 weeks but tracking them down and stomping on them! Our thanks also go out to the Samba team (you know who you are) who helped us to identify and fix some of the key issues, as well as to FreeNAS developer John Hixson, who worked extra hard on diagnosing and fixing the CIFS issues!

The list of bugs fixed in 9.2.1.1 can be found here.

Should you encounter any other bugs in this release, or wish to submit enhancement requests, please visit http://bugs.freenas.org and by all means file a bug! We use the bug tracking system quite religiously and screen bugs on a daily basis, so filing a bug report is the best way of making sure that any issues do not get lost! Since no release engineering process is ever truly finished, we are already planning for 9.2.2 and will aim to fix any “fit and finish” bugs we deem appropriate for the next software update.

We also have the FreeNAS forums for general discussion and encourage everyone to use them. Finally, the FreeNAS developers also hang out in the #freenas IRC channel on FreeNode in their copious spare time should you wish to discuss things more in real-time.

The Errata List remains for 9.2.1.1, though we’re happy to say that we squashed 3 out of the 4 issues that were on it for 9.2.1. The last remaining issue is 32-bit only, and only affects Time Machine backups.

Again, if you didn’t follow the link in the first paragraph, the bits are in http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1.1/RELEASE/

Thanks!

The FreeNAS Engineering Team

Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.2.1.1-RELEASE

Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.4, with select key fixes cherry-picked from 4.1.5. This version adds support for SMB3, the ability for FreeNAS to be a Windows Domain Controller, and advanced features like server-side copy support in Windows 2012 and later, along with multiple years worth of improvements over the version of Samba that shipped in 9.2.0. Samba4 also enables SMB protocol version 3. Previous versions of FreeNAS limited samba to SMB2 because of random crashes that would occur using SMB3. We also fixed a number of Samba issues specific to FreeNAS in 9.2.1.1 – see the fixed bug list for details.
A system dataset (.system) is now created in a user-configurable pool, the default being the first pool found. This can be changed in System->Settings->Advanced, the .system dataset being created as needed. This dataset becamse necessary for storing persistent Samba permissions, and is also being leveraged for other purposes, like collecting core files (which otherwise might overflow the limited system partition space) and storing system log files. It will be used for additional purposes as FreeNAS evolves.
A panic that occurred with VIMAGE jails has been fixed.
A bad bug with jail templates that caused them to be gratuitously downloaded has been fixed. See the fixed bugs query above for details.

Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.2.1-RELEASE (since 9.2.1.1 is just a bug fix release for 9.2.1):

Added the LSI 12G SAS driver as a module to the build. This can be enabled by adding a tunable for mpslsi3_load with a value of YES. This driver is still under development and not yet committed to FreeBSD. It is provided for beta testing only. For production use please consider using a 6G SAS adapter, such as the LSI 9207.
Fixed a bug with netatalk that prevented share browsing from working in the finder on OSX. Also enabled options for fuller-fidelity AFP copies with Mac OS ACLs (ACEs) now stored as ZFS ACLs. Remove the non functional share password field from AFP shares.
Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, improving the Mac share browsing experience.
Added additional Web API functionality for manipulating ZFS snapshots.
Added IPMI network configuration support for machines with that capability (enabled by setting ipmi_load tunable to YES).
Brought back the FreeNAS 8.x volume manager as a “Manual Setup” option. This volume manager allows manual vdev building and offers no seat belts. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, using the standard volume manager is highly recommended by the development team!
Made some changes to reporting graphs that segregates reports by type, one type per tab. Add graphs that show individual disk activity.
Fixed a bug that prevented building an encrypted volume using multipath devices.
Update django (used by the WebUI) to 1.6 and dojo to 1.9.2
Add the following ZFS features: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks
Add trafshow to the image. This utility gives a CLI view of connections and usage to the FreeNAS box.
Fix kernel module load for fuse. This is needed for importing NTFS volumes.
Add the ability to use a keytab for AD joins. This eliminates the need to use the AD Administrator account to join FreeNAS to AD, closing a long standing issue of needing the AD Admin password in the FreeNAS configuration database.
Updated the LSI 6 Gbps HBA driver (mps) to version 16. Please update the firmware of any mps HBAs to phase 16.

The post Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1.1-RELEASE appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

New Sync Hack, 9.2.1 Release, & Hardware Surprise…

iX Team — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 22:35:48 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

As a token of our love, please accept this newsletter update!
A lot of things happened last month and we’re bursting with excitement to share them with you! First off, FreeNAS 9.2.1 was released! We’ve also got a very special announcement we’re dying to tell you, but you’ll have to read on for more about that.
For those of you who are FreeBSD aficionados, we think you’ll be interested in a new publication called FreeBSD Journal. Also in this issue, find out how you can help the FreeNAS project! We’ve got a few job openings and we’re always looking for more testers. We’ve also added a method for you to submit your own FreeNAS content. As always, there’s a ton of builds and tutorials for you in this edition.

Love,

The FreeNAS Team

FreeNAS 9.2.1-Release is Out!

It’s been less than a month since the release of FreeNAS 9.2, and FreeNAS 9.2.1 is already available. Our dev team has been working around the clock (for mysterious reasons) to get this one out the door. Here are a couple of reasons why you should update:

Improved hardware & software support
Improved ZFS performance
Upgrade to Samba 4.1.3
Almost 200 bugfixes

The full release notes can be found here. Sign up for the announcements mailing lists to get updates on new releases as they happen.
We are very proud of this release and the hard work that has gone into it. We are also tremendously grateful to the many people who have taken the time to file bugs, fix bugs and send us pull requests, post helpful comments in the FreeNAS forums, or otherwise be a part of the ever-growing FreeNAS community. We hope you will install 9.2.1 at your earliest opportunity – we have been running it in production for some time and are very happy with the level of “fit and finish” in this release!

We Love Bug Report(er)s

We’re always looking for people to test and report bugs on FreeNAS so we can make improvements and make sure it’s in perfect condition. We’re happy to say that we’ve fixed a LOT of bugs since 9.2.0 was released. Lots. You folks have been going crazy with finding and filing the bugs every day! Since 9.2.0 was released, we have fixed over 189 bugs, added new features, polished the UI, and improved the performance of FreeNAS even further!
Should you encounter any bugs in 9.2.1, or wish to submit enhancement requests, please visit http://bugs.freenas.org and by all means file a bug! We use the bug tracking system quite religiously and screen bugs on a daily basis, so filing a bug report is the best way of making sure that any issues do not get lost! Since no release engineering process is ever truly finished, we are already planning for 9.2.2 and will aim to fix any “fit and finish” bugs we deem appropriate for the next software update. Make sure you note in your bug report which version of FreeNAS you saw it in and also note the datestamp of the build, since we will continue to release nightly builds and it’s otherwise very hard to tell which build you saw the problem in if you don’t tell us.

Announcing the *NEW* FreeNAS Mini

Drum roll please! After much speculation and wild guessing, we’re proud to officially announce the imminent release of a new FreeNAS Mini. These systems are configured so that they are the best-performing home NAS you can buy. The upgraded Mini is more powerful and robust thanks to these new features:

8-core Intel 2.4GHz processor
16GB of ECC memory (with an option to upgrade to 32GB)
On-board dual Gigabit network controllers
Dedicated IPMI port
Hot swap capabilities for the tool-less drive bays

We’re already taking orders, and models will begin to ship in the next couple of weeks. Contact us now to get one of the first ones off the line.

New FreeNAS Schwag in the Mall

By popular request (and some outright demands), new FreeNAS t-shirt designs are now available for purchase in the mall. Be sure to check out the other schwag that’s up for sale while you’re there. Sales support the FreeNAS and the FreeBSD projects.

Sync Hack – Setting up FreeNAS with BT Sync via BitTorrent

BitTorrent recently published a tutorial from our very own Ben Milman about setting up BTSync on FreeNAS. This is not the first post BitTorrent has shared about using BTSync on FreeNAS, but since then, we’ve made a plugin for the service so the setup process is much, much easier. You may know Ben as one of the co-authors of another guide from Admin Magazine. If you enjoyed the other article or if you’re interested in setting up the plugin on your own system, be sure to give this one a read.

FreeNAS Hardware and Software Guide via Tek Syndicate

Tek Syndicate recently uploaded a two-video series featuring FreeNAS. The first video shows off their hardware build, which they’ve dubbed “NASFeratu”. The second is a tutorial about the actual software itself and covers several features including a range of plugins that are accessible in FreeNAS. Both videos are very comprehensive and provide good information for anyone who needs help building and setting up FreeNAS. We definitely recommend you take a look.

FreeNAS featured on Know How… via Twit.tv

A recent episode of Know How… featured FreeNAS with the famous Patrick Norton and Fr. Robert Ballecer. Patrick has a long history with us, back from his days at Tekzilla to his more recent video on DIY Tryin. On this episode, the hosts demonstrated the steps needed to install FreeNAS and covered hardware and RAID options. For an entertaining tutorial on the basics of setting up your own FreeNAS system, check out this video.

Need a job? We need people!

If you’ve been reading about all the great things we’ve been up to and thought to yourself, “Hmm, I wish I could be a part of that”, well… now you can be!
iXsystems, the company that sponsors the development of FreeNAS, is looking for a system administrator and a few good developers to join our team. We offer competitive salaries, health benefits, stock options, 401k, and access to a fancy-schmancy coffee maker as some
of the benefits. We’re a very prominent company in the world of FreeBSD; in fact, we employ more FreeBSD developers per capita than anyone else you can think of.
Interested? The full job descriptions can be found here. If this sounds like your cup of double-shot espresso, email Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with your resume. Cover letters appreciated but not required.

Tech Tip #3

Backups are more than just data. Document everything!

Links of the Month

DIY: Building a ZFS NAS with FreeNAS via proligde’s WordPress
DIY NAS: 2014 Edition via Brian Moses’s Blog
ZFS – One File System to Rule Them All via Lease Web Labs

User Submissions

Got a FreeNAS hardware build you’re proud of? Come up with a tech tip while tinkering around in the GUI? Have a link or picture you think we should see? As long as it’s not something you wouldn’t send to your boss, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at FNsubmissions@ixsystems.com. We’re always on the lookout for things to feature in the newsletter and on our social media channels.

Connect with Us

The post New Sync Hack, 9.2.1 Release, & Hardware Surprise… appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

New Release, Same Great FreeNAS

Annie Zhang — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 07:52:07 +0000

While there aren’t as many shiny new knobs to test out this release cycle, one thing is for certain: bugs are being uncovered and killed at an alarming rate. Recently, the team has been on a crusade to avenge fallen systems out in the field with the aid of our Redmine bug tracker. There’s actually too much to cover here so instead I’ll give you a brief rundown on what my experience was updating FreeNAS 8.2.0 to 9.2.1.

Updating: The Good, The Bad, and the Bugly

There’s a number of reasons why one should update their FreeNAS, however, there are plenty of reasonable fears attributed with updating. Oftentimes, one finds themself in this predicament: should I stay, or should I go?
The answer is: GO update, right now! It’s good for you and it’s good for your data. You will not lose your pool, files, or anything like that. You run the risk of losing some configurations for things like jails and plugins, but you enjoyed setting all of that up the first time around, didn’t you? I know I sure did. And now that I’ve grabbed your attention with some passive-aggressive deadpan wit, let us begin…

How to safely update FreeNAS 8.x to 9.x

I was approached by a co-worker who was still running FreeNAS 8.2.0 on his FreeNAS Mini about updating to 9.2.1, and what the implications of that were. It’s pretty easy to do and mostly safe. Just download the 8.3.1 GUI update txz as well as the one for 9.2.1, then go from 8.x to 8.3.1, then reboot and do the same for 9.2.1. Note: Your IP may change after your first (or second) reboot.
After updating you’ll notice that plugins are each installed into their own jail. In 8.x all plugins were installed into a single jail. This makes updating plugins challenging, so first things first: back that NAS up.
Thankfully, FreeNAS has an easy button for backing up the web user interface config. What FreeNAS doesn’t have is an easy button for backing up plugin configs or updating old plugins, so here’s what I did:

Dropped into a shell and ssh’d into FreeNAS
Ran the “jls” command to get a list of jails
Ran “jexec plugin_jail csh” to drop into the plugin jail
Tar’d up all installed plugins by running: “tar cfv plugins_YYYYMMDD.tar /usr/pbi/”
SCP’d the tarball down from FreeNAS onto my local machine
Extracted the tarball and then poked around looking for config files using “find . -name “*.ini* -print”
Copied the config files located in the “data/” directory in each plugin onto my desktop
Removed all plugins from the FreeNAS UI
Reinstalled plugins, now available with a slightly different UI
Located the new directory for config files: /usr/pbi/pluginName/etc/pluginName/ (no longer found in ‘data/’)
Copied each config file to the right place and toggled each plugin on/off

Those 11 “easy steps” are not very easy and at times it was even frustrating (especially when the IP decided to change after an update/reboot, but I digress). For some unknown reason, installing plugins and removing them repeatedly while several hundred miles away from the physical location of the box made things increasingly more lulzy. For instance, sometimes the UI would just hang there while a plugin was installing, meanwhile my ssh session times out and then stops responding. It eventually came back (a few minutes later) each time this happened, except for the last time where it took out my co-workers entire home network. Upon reboot things were back to normal, so I suspect it was a simple IP conflict. Users of plugins will want to be sure to check all the IP’s in-use on their networks before updating.

But why should I?

Because it’ll make the universe whole and restore peace back to the galaxy. Actually, that’s not true, but it’s probably a good idea to update if you’d like a more stable FreeNAS than ever before with the added bonus of all the amazing work that went into closing all those bugs. It’ll be painful, but much like life: nothing good comes easy, but if it does, take it!
James Nixon
Webmaster

The post New Release, Same Great FreeNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1-RELEASE

iX Team — Sat, 08 Feb 2014 03:34:11 +0000

Greetings, FreeNAS fans!
After one BETA, two Release Candidates, and many nightly builds (which many of you tested, to our everlasting gratitude) we are, as always, proud to announce the public availability of FreeNAS 9.2.1-RELEASE.
FreeNAS 9.2.0 was a great release, and we’re pleased to say that FreeNAS 9.2.1 is even better! Since 9.2.0 was released, we have fixed over 189 bugs, added new features, polished the UI, and improved the performance of FreeNAS even further!
The documentation has also been updated for 9.2.1, though the source code (see release notes) is still a useful reference for features like the web API, which comes with several examples in the source tree.
Should you encounter any bugs in this release, or wish to submit enhancement requests, please visit http://bugs.freenas.org and by all means file a bug! We use the bug tracking system quite religiously and screen bugs on a daily basis, so filing a bug report is the best way of making sure that any issues do not get lost! Since no release engineering process is ever truly finished, we are already planning for 9.2.2 and will aim to fix any “fit and finish” bugs we deem appropriate for the next software update.
We also have the FreeNAS forums for general discussion and encourage everyone to use them. Finally, the FreeNAS developers also hang out in the #freenas IRC channel on FreeNode in their copious spare time should you wish to discuss things more in real-time.
We are very proud of this release and the hard work that has gone into it. We are also tremendously grateful to the many people who have taken the time to file bugs, fix bugs and send us pull requests, post helpful comments in the FreeNAS forums, or otherwise be a part of the ever-growing FreeNAS community. We hope you will install 9.2.1 at your earliest opportunity – we have been running it in production for some time and are very happy with the level of “fit and finish” in this release!
For the first time, we are also publishing an Errata List for 9.2.1 so people will know about known-issues that were not deemed severe enough to be “show stoppers” for this release. They will be addressed in due course in 9.2.2, and we will also update the Errata as necessary should any other problems of significance be found.
Again, if you didn’t follow the link in the first paragraph, the bits are in http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1/RELEASE/
Thanks!
The FreeNAS Engineering Team
Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.2.1-RELEASE

Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.3. This adds support for SMB3, the ability for FreeNAS to be a Windows Domain Controller, and advanced features like server-side copy support in Windows 2012 and later, along with multiple years worth of improvements over the version of Samba that shipped in 9.2.0. It also enables SMB protocol version 3. Previous versions of FreeNAS limited samba to SMB2 because of random crashes that would occur using SMB3.

Added the LSI 12G SAS driver as a module to the build. This can be enabled by adding a tunable for mpslsi3_load with a value of YES. This driver is still under development and not yet committed to FreeBSD. It is provided for beta testing only. For production use please consider using a 6G SAS adapter, such as the LSI 9207.

Fixed a bug with netatalk that prevented share browsing from working in the finder on OSX. Also enabled options for fuller-fidelity AFP copies with Mac OS ACLs (ACEs) now stored as ZFS ACLs. Remove the non functional share password field from AFP shares.

Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, improving the Mac share browsing experience.

Added additional Web API functionality for manipulating ZFS snapshots.

Added IPMI network configuration support for machines with that capability (enabled by setting ipmi_load tunable to YES).

Brought back the FreeNAS 8.x volume manager as a “Manual Setup” option. This volume manager allows manual vdev building and offers no seat belts. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, using the standard volume manager is highly recommended by the development team!

Made some changes to reporting graphs that segregates reports by type, one type per tab. Add graphs that show individual disk activity.

Fixed a bug that prevented building an encrypted volume using multipath devices.

Update django (used by the WebUI) to 1.6 and dojo to 1.9.2

Add the following ZFS features: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks

Add trafshow to the image. This utility gives a CLI view of connections and usage to the FreeNAS box.

Fix kernel module load for fuse. This is needed for importing NTFS volumes.

Add the ability to use a keytab for AD joins. This eliminates the need to use the AD Administrator account to join FreeNAS to AD, closing a long standing issue of needing the AD Admin password in the FreeNAS configuration database.

Updated the LSI 6 Gbps HBA driver (mps) to version 16. Please update the firmware of any mps HBAs to phase 16.

The post Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1-RELEASE appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1-RC2 is now available for download

iX Team — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 22:55:52 +0000

Greetings!
The FreeNAS development team is filled with mixed emotions in announcing the second Release Candidate image of FreeNAS 9.2.1!
On the one hand, we’re happy to say that we’ve fixed a LOT of bugs since 9.2.1-RC was released. Lots. You folks have been going crazy with finding and filing the bugs every day! Seriously, we can hardly keep up (but please don’t stop filing them). We have fixed over 164 bugs in 9.2.1 so far, also adding some new features along the way and doing lots of stuff to make 9.2.1 better in almost every conceivable way!
On the other hand, we still have 16 bugs left, and most of them are in SMB (CIFS), so we’re pretty sure we’re going to have to release a 9.2.1-RC3 before this is all said and done since we just can’t release SMB with known breakages. These aren’t “SMB will eat your data” breakages, these are more subtle issues that most people will never hit, but we know they’re there so we have to fix them!
Therefore, we will not be doing 9.2.1-RELEASE on Feb 7th as originally planned. It would have been nice, but quality before schedule! The new provisional release date for 9.2.1-RELEASE is Feb 12th. We don’t have a LOT of work to do, but we’d like to make our next Release Candidate a genuine “we don’t know of any significant problems with this” release, so that means we’ll kick this RC2 out the door and give it around 5 days to get tested (there’s a lot more to FreeNAS than CIFS), then we’ll roll -RC3 when we’ve fixed all the remaining blockers for release and could conceivably just rename 9.2.1-RC3 to 9.2.1-RELEASE if no show stoppers were found!
Please feel free to file bugs against this build, taking care to note in your bug report that you saw it in 9.2.1-RC2 and also note the datestamp of the build, since we will continuing to release 9.2.1-RC2 nightly builds and it’s otherwise very hard to tell which build you saw the problem in if you don’t tell us.
Please download it now and check it out!
Thanks,
The FreeNAS Development Team
Release notes:

Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.4. This adds support for SMB3, the ability for FreeNAS to be a Windows Domain Controller, and advanced features like server-side copy support in Windows 2012 and later, along with multiple years worth of improvements over the version of Samba that shipped in 9.2.0. It also enables SMB protocol version 3. Previous versions of FreeNAS limited samba to SMB2 because of random crashes that would occur using SMB3.
Added the LSI 12G SAS driver as a module to the build. This can be enabled by adding a tunable for mpslsi3_load with a value of YES. This driver is still under development and not yet committed to FreeBSD. It is provided for beta testing only. For production use please consider using a 6G SAS adapter, such as the LSI 9207.
Fixed a bug with netatalk that prevented share browsing from working in the finder on OSX. Also enabled options for fuller-fidelity AFP copies with Mac OS ACLs (ACEs) now stored as ZFS ACLs.
Remove the non functional share password field from AFP shares.
Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, improving the Mac share browsing experience.
Added additional Web API functionality for manipulating ZFS snapshots.
Brought back the FreeNAS 8.x volume manager as a “Manual Setup” option. This volume manager allows manual vddv building and offers no seatbelts. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, using the standard volume manager is highly recommended by the development team!
Made some changes to reporting graphs that segregates reports by type, one type per tab. Add graphs that show individual disk activity (and sort them correctly now!)
Fixed a bug that prevented building an encrypted volume using multi path devices.
Update django (used by the WebUI) to 1.6 and dojo to 1.9.2
Add the following ZFS features: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks
Add trafshow to the image. This utility gives a CLI view of connections and usage to the FreeNAS box.
Fix kernel module load for fuse. This is needed for importing NTFS volumes.
Add the ability to use a keytab for AD joins. This eliminates the need to use the AD Administrator account to join FreeNAS to AD, closing a long standing issue of needing the AD Admin password in the FreeNAS configuration database.
Updated the LSI 6 Gbps HBA driver (mps) to version 16. Please update the firmware of any mps HBAs to phase 16.

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1-RC2 is now available for download appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1-RC is Now Ready for Download

iX Team — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 19:32:53 +0000

Jordan has announced that FreeNAS 9.2.1 – RC is available from http://download.freenas.org/9.2.1/RC/.
Release notes:

Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.4. This adds support for SMB3, the ability for FreeNAS to be a Windows Domain Controller, and advanced features like server-side copy support in Windows 2012 and later, along with multiple years worth of improvements over the version of Samba that shipped in 9.2.0. It also enables SMB protocol version 3. Previous versions of FreeNAS limited samba to SMB2 because of random crashes that would occur using SMB3.

Added the LSI 12G SAS driver as a module to the build. This can be enabled by adding a tunable for mpslsi3_load with a value of YES. This driver is still under development and not yet committed to FreeBSD. It is provided for beta testing only. For production use please consider using a 6G SAS adapter, such as the LSI 9207.

Fixed a bug with netatalk that prevented share browsing from working in the finder on OSX. Also enabled options for fuller-fidelity AFP copies with Mac OS ACLs (ACEs) now stored as ZFS ACLs.
Remove the non functional share password field from AFP shares.

Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, improving the Mac share browsing experience.

Brought back the FreeNAS 8.x volume manager as a “Manual Setup” option. This volume manager allows manual vddv building and offers no seatbelts. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, using the standard volume manager is highly recommended by the development team!

Made some changes to reporting graphs that segregates reports by type, one type per tab. Add graphs that show individual disk activity.

Fixed a bug that prevented building an encrypted volume using multi path devices.

Update django (used by the WebUI) to 1.6 and dojo to 1.9.2

Add the following ZFS features: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks

Add trafshow to the image. This utility gives a CLI view of connections and usage to the FreeNAS box.

Fix kernel module load for fuse. This is needed for importing NTFS volumes.

Added the ability to use a keytab for AD joins. This eliminates the need to use the AD Administrator account to join FreeNAS to AD, closing a long standing issue of needing the AD Admin password in the FreeNAS configuration database.

———————————————–

Please feel free to file bugs against this build, taking care to note in your bug report that you saw it in 9.2.1-RC and also note the datestamp of the build, since we will continuing to release 9.2.1-RC nightly builds and it’s otherwise very hard to tell which build you saw the problem in if you don’t tell us.

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1-RC is Now Ready for Download appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.1-BETA Now Ready for Download

iX Team — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 21:18:06 +0000

Jordan has announced the release of FreeNAS 9.2.1-BETA.
What’s new in this build:
*Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.4. This adds support for SMB3, the ability for FreeNAS to be a Windows Domain Controller, and advanced features like server-side copy support in Windows 2012 and later, along with multiple years worth of improvements over the version of Samba that shipped in 9.2.0. It also enables SMB protocol version 3. Previous versions of FreeNAS limited samba to SMB2 because of random crashes that would occur using SMB3.
*Added the LSI 12G SAS driver as a module to the build. This can be enabled by adding a tunable for mpslsi3_load with a value of YES. This driver is still under development and not yet committed to FreeBSD. It is provided for beta testing only. For production use, please consider using a 6G SAS adapter, such as the LSI 9207.
*Fixed a bug with netatalk that prevented share browsing from working in the finder on OSX. Also enabled options for fuller-fidelity AFP copies with Mac OS ACLs (ACEs) now stored as ZFS ACLs. Removed the non functional share password field from AFP shares.
*Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, giving better Mac interoperability for share browsing.
*Brought back the FreeNAS 8.x volume manager as a “Manual Setup” option. This volume manager allows manual vddv building and offers no seat belts. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, using the standard volume manager is highly recommended by the development team!
*Fixed a bug that prevented building an encrypted volume using multi-path devices.
*Update django (used by the WebUI) to 1.6 and dojo to 1.9.2
*Add reporting graphs that show individual disk activity.
*Add the following ZFS features: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset bookmarks
*Add trafshow to the image. This utility gives a CLI view of connections and usage to the FreeNAS box.
*Fix kernel module load for fuse. This is needed for importing NTFS volumes.
*Add the ability to use a keytab for AD joins. This eliminates the need to use the AD Administrator account to join FreeNAS to AD, closing a long standing issue of needing the AD Admin password in the FreeNAS configuration database.
*Miscellaneous bugs that didn’t make the cut-off for 9.2.0
—————————————–
Bugs currently filed against 9.2.1 can be found here: https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas/issues?query_id=13
Please feel free to file bugs against this build, taking care to note in your bug report that you saw it in 9.2.1-BETA and also note the datestamp of the build, since we will continuing to release 9.2.1-BETA nightly builds and it’s otherwise very hard to tell which build you saw the problem in if you don’t tell us.

The post FreeNAS 9.2.1-BETA Now Ready for Download appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

A FreeNAS 9.2 RELEASE to Ring in the New Year

iX Team — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 19:06:53 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

Happy New Year! We hope your holidays were well-spent with loved ones. It’s a new year, so we’re taking some time to look back and reflect on the things we’ve accomplished last year… such as the new FreeNAS 9.2 RELEASE! Of course, it’s also about planning for the future, so we’re currently looking to hire new talent to join the FreeNAS team. If that piqued your interest, read on!
In keeping with New Year traditions, we resolve to keep pushing out new releases and features, to listen to your feedback, and to always work with the goal of making FreeNAS better. Thank you for being a part of our community and let’s all work to make 2014 even more successful.
Cheers
The FreeNAS Team

NEW FreeNAS 9.2 – RELEASE

It’s finally here! We know you’ve been waiting a long time for this and we’re proud to announce the official release of FreeNAS 9.2 stable.
If you’ve got an older version of FreeNAS and it’s working fine, why should you update? Well, along with several bugfixes, the newest version unlocks several great, new features including:

Linux jail support
Based on FreeBSD 9.2 with added features and hardware support
Improved performance of encrypted ZFS volumes
Jails templates allow quicker deployments of copies of a model jail
Shell button added to jails – makes it easier to access the Shell from Jails

A full list of features can be found in the release notes. Sign up for the announcements mailing lists to get updates on new releases
A big thanks to everyone who helped with development, sent in bug reports, made suggestions, or contributed otherwise to this release. You guys made this all happen; we couldn’t have done it without you!

Job Opening: Call for Developers

Like what you see? Want to be a part of the next FreeNAS release? Well, iXsystems is looking for a few good developers!
Who are we? iXsystems is the corporate sponsor of the FreeNAS project. We are also the sponsors of PC-BSD, FreeBSD for the desktop, and long-time contributors to the FreeBSD and ZFS projects! You could say that Open Source and OS development is in our blood. If you feel the same way, please read further!
Deep knowledge of Unix and Unix internals is required (Linux is OK, but BSD is a big plus!). Must be extremely fluent in C. Python fluency not required, but a definite plus as our UI is written in Python & Django. Storage/Enterprise market experience is also a plus, though not a strict requirement; if you’re a great Unix + C developer, we can teach you about the storage and enterprise market! You will have the ability to substantially influence the evolution of the FreeNAS product, as well as other future Hardware & OSS Software appliances, with very little internal politics or “silos” to stand in your way. We are a small shop, and those who do great work get long leashes!
iXsystems is based in San Jose, CA so residency or willingness to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area is definitely a plus, but not a strict requirement – for the right person, we will consider full or part time telecommuting from inside or outside the U.S. H1-B VISA sponsorship will also be considered for the right person (if you really kick butt, we’ll go the extra mile in both respects!). We also offer competitive salaries, health benefits, and 401K.
Interested? Think you have what it takes? Contact Jordan Hubbard at jkh@ixsystems.com with a current copy of your resumé. Cover letters appreciated but not required!

An Introduction to FreeNAS via ADMIN Magazine

ADMIN Magazine recently published an article called “Introduction to FreeNAS” by Ben Milman and Mark VonFange. Both Ben and Mark are employees of iXsystems, so they have close-to-the-source, verified knowledge about the inner workings of FreeNAS. They cover the basics of FreeNAS, how the ZFS filesystem works and lesser known facts like the differences between FreeNAS and TrueNAS. It’s an informative read, so take a look if you’re interested in first-hand pointers that will help you optimize your own FreeNAS system.

Build a Home Server with FreeNAS via DIY Tryin

Have an old desktop lying around? This episode of DIY Tryin demonstrates how you can use FreeNAS to make a home server. DIY Tryin is a show that focuses on home projects you can build and do yourself. Sure enough, the video takes you through the entire process of setting up a home server, from hardware choices all the way through installation and configuration. Hosts Patrick Norton and Michael Hand did a great job explaining the advantages of having a home NAS and using ZFS. They also took some time to show off how easy the installation process is. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’d like an easy-to-understand and entertaining tutorial that guides you through setup.

Tech Tip #2

ZFS can get cranky when there’s more than a few thousand snapshots.

Connect with Us

If you need help with your FreeNAS setup or would like to show off your configuration, share your plugins, or just talk with like-minded people, join the conversation on our community forums.
For video tutorials, check out our YouTube channel.
Want real-time updates as they happen? Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or add us to your Google+ circle!

The post A FreeNAS 9.2 RELEASE to Ring in the New Year appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.0 Release

iX Team — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 18:02:26 +0000

Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.2.0-RELEASE
Version 9.2-RELEASE of FreeBSD with performance improvements, bug
fixes, and updated software packages. For a complete list see
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/relnotes.html
USB 3.0 support is disabled by default as it currently is not compatible
with some hardware, including Haswell (Lynx point) chipsets. To enable
USB 3.0 support, create a Tunable named xhci_load, set its value to YES,
and reboot the system.
The Kernel UMA allocator is now the default for ZFS. This results in
higher ZFS performance.
ZFS will now alert the administrator for pools that are not 4K-aligned.
By default, FreeNAS will treat all disks as 4K sector (“Advanced Format”)
disks. This is a future-proof setting that allows AF disks to later
be used as replacement drives for older, legacy 512 byte sector drives
without compromising performance. The administrator can optionally disable
this 4K-by-default behavior by setting vfs.zfs.vdev.larger_ashift_minimal
to 0 in both sysctl and loader tunables.
Avahi (multicast DNS, aka Bonjour) registration of all services, include
the web service, means you no longer need to have a head on the box to know
its IP address, even for initial configuration, if the system your browser
is running on supports mDNS (e.g. a Mac or mDNS-enabled Windows/Unix box).
The default address will be freenas.local (or freenas-n.local, where n is
the # of freenas.local instances already on the local network). This can be
changed by changing the hostname in the FreeNAS system or network configuration
screens.
The built-in admin user account is no longer used and the Admin Account
removed. The first time the FreeNAS graphical interface is accessed, a
pop-up menu will prompt for the root password. Subsequent logins to the
graphical interface will require this password.
FreeNAS no longer sends daily emails when email reporting is enabled
unless actual errors or issues of concern have arisen. Simply saying
“all is well!” each and every day was causing email fatigue and obscuring
actual errors. Those wishing for daily “all is well!” reports can simply
add a cron job that does this.
The plugin system now offers in-place updates for plugins, also
segregating installed plugins from available plugins to make the UI
less cluttered.
A complete REST API has been created for FreeNAS, allowing a FreeNAS
instance to be controlled remotely. See examples/api in the FreeNAS
source repository (https://github.com/freenas/freenas/tree/master) for some
examples of this in action. Complete API docs are available in docs/api.
The “Permit Sudo” field has been added to the add and edit screens for
Users and Groups. A column in View Groups and View Users now indicates
whether or not “Permit Sudo” has been set.
HTTP and HTTPS access to the FreeNAS graphical interface are no longer
mutually exclusive. The fields “WebGUI HTTP Port” and “WebGUI HTTPS Port”
have been added to System Settings -> General.
An “Edit” button has been added to the “Hostname” field of System
Information to make the hostname easier to change.
The results from the latest ZFS scrub now appear in Volume Status.
Netatalk has been updated to version 3.1.0. See
http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/3.1/ReleaseNotes3.1.0.html for a list of
changes in this release. There are also a number of changes made to AFP
sharing as a result:
The Add Apple (AFP) Share menu has been simplified and a
“Default umask” option has been added.
The “Server Name” field has also been removed from AFP; in
Netatalk 3, this value is automatically derived from the system
hostname.
“Enable home directories” and “Home directories” options added
to AFP.
The AIO options have been removed from CIFS.
Fourteen TLS-related fields have been added to the Advanced Mode of FTP.
An “IPv4 Address” column has been added to the View Jails screen.
A shell button has been added to Jails, making it easy to access the
command line of the selected jail.
A “Create directory” checkbox has been added to the Add Storage function of
a jail so that the user does not have to first access the jail’s shell to make
sure that the directory already exists. A “Read-Only” checkbox has also been
added to this screen.
A jails templating system has been added, allowing the quick deployment of
new jails from existing templates and the ability to create custom templates.
Linux jail support has also been added and installation templates are included
for Debian-7.1.0, Gentoo-20130820, Ubuntu-13.04, Centos-6.4, Fedora-19, and
Suse-12.3.
A link to the online FreeBSD manual pages has been added to Help.
Added bxe(4) driver for Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet 10Gb PCIe adapter.
Added padlock(4) driver which provides cryptographic hardware acceleration
for VIA C3, C7 and Eden processors.
Improved performance of encrypted ZFS volumes.
The iSCSI options have been updated to ensure the GUI constraints match the
daemon constraints. In particular the GUI limited the number of sessions and
the number of connections to a low value that may need to be increased if there
are large numbers of targets or clients or both.

The post FreeNAS 9.2.0 Release appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.0-RC2 is Available

iX Team — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 23:12:07 +0000

Jordan has announced that FreeNAS-9.2.0-RC2 is available for download from http://cdn.freenas.org/9.2.0/RC2/.
Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.2.0-RC2
* Version 9.2-RELEASE of FreeBSD with performance improvements, bug fixes, and updated software packages. For a complete list see http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/relnotes.html
* USB 3.0 support is disabled by default as it currently is not compatible with some hardware, including Haswell (Lynx point) chipsets. To enable USB 3.0 support, create a Tunable named xhci_load, set its value to YES, and reboot the system.
* The Kernel UMA allocator is now the default for ZFS. This results in higher ZFS performance.
* Avahi (multicast DNS, aka Bonjour) registration of all services, include the web service, means you no longer need to have a head on the box to know its IP address, even for initial configuration. freenas.local is the default (or freenas-n.local, where n is the # of freenas.local machines already on the local network). This can be changed by changing the hostname.
* The built-in admin user account is no longer used and the Admin Account removed. The first time the FreeNAS graphical interface is accessed, a pop-up menu will prompt for the root password. Subsequent logins to the graphical interface will require this password.
* FreeNAS no longer sends daily emails when email reporting is enabled unless actual errors or issues of concern have arisen. Simply saying “all is well!” each and every day was causing email fatigue and obscuring actual errors. Those wishing for daily “all is well!” reports can simply add a cron job that does this.
* The plugin system now offers in-place updates for plugins, also segregating installed plugins from available plugins to make the UI less cluttered.
* A complete REST API has been created for FreeNAS, allowing a FreeNAS instance to be controlled remotely. See examples/api in the FreeNAS source repository (https://github.com/freenas/freenas/tree/master) for some examples of this in action. Complete API docs are available in docs/api.
* The “Permit Sudo” field has been added to the add and edit screens for Users and Groups. A column in View Groups and View Users now indicates whether or not “Permit Sudo” has been set.
* HTTP and HTTPS access to the FreeNAS graphical interface are no longer mutually exclusive. The fields “WebGUI HTTP Port” and “WebGUI HTTPS Port” have been added to System Settings -> General.
* An “Edit” button has been added to the “Hostname” field of System Information to make the hostname easier to change.
* The results from the latest ZFS scrub now appear in Volume Status.
* Netatalk has been updated to version 3.1.0. See http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/3.1/ReleaseNotes3.1.0.html for a list of changes in this release. There are also a number of changes made to AFP sharing as a result:

- * The Add Apple (AFP) Share menu has been simplified and a “Default umask” option has been added.
- * The “Server Name” field has also been removed from AFP; in Netatalk 3, this value is automatically derived from the system hostname.
- * “Enable home directories” and “Home directories” options added to AFP.

* The AIO options have been removed from CIFS.
* Fourteen TLS-related fields have been added to the Advanced Mode of FTP.
* An “IPv4 Address” column has been added to the View Jails screen.
* A shell button has been added to Jails, making it easy to access the command line of the selected jail.
* A “Create directory” checkbox has been added to the Add Storage function of a jail so that the user does not have to first access the jail’s shell to make sure that the directory already exists. A “Read-Only” checkbox has also been added to this screen.
* A jails templating system has been added, allowing the quick deployment of new jails from existing templates and the ability to create custom templates. Linux jail support has also been added and installation templates are included for Debian-7.1.0, Gentoo-20130820, Ubuntu-13.04, Centos-6.4, Fedora-19, and Suse-12.3.
* A link to the online FreeBSD manual pages has been added to Help.
* Added bxe(4) driver for Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet 10Gb PCIe adapter.
* Added padlock(4) driver which provides cryptographic hardware acceleration for VIA C3, C7 and Eden processors.
* Improved performance of encrypted ZFS volumes.
* The iSCSI options have been updated to ensure the GUI constraints match the daemon constraints. In particular the GUI limited the number of sessions and the number of connections to a low value that may need to be increased if there are large numbers of targets or clients or both.

The post FreeNAS 9.2.0-RC2 is Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

We Bring Gifts: New BTSync Plugin Rocks! FreeNAS 9.2-RC & More

iX Team — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 20:04:55 +0000

Hello FreeNAS users!

Oh the weather outside is frightful, so we’re bringing you something delightful. How does the FreeNAS 9.2-RC and a massive plugin update sound? If that’s not enough, we also have some other things we think you’ll like including an interview with Josh Paetzel, a tutorial on using git, a look back at Supercomputing 13, a FreeNAS walkthrough from Computer Power User magazine, and a few more goodies to bring you holiday cheer.
So sit back, grab a hot cup of tea, and read on! We wish you the best this holiday season and we’ll see you in the new year.
Cheers,
The FreeNAS Team

FreeNAS 9.2-RC is Now Available

The latest update to hit the net is FreeNAS 9.2-RC. With the RC out, FreeNAS 9.2-RELEASE is just around the corner. For now, here’s a quick look at some of the features you can expect in FreeNAS 9.2:

Based on FreeBSD 9.2 with added features and hardware support
Improved performance of encrypted ZFS volumes
Jails templates allow quicker deployments of copies of a model jail
Shell button added to jails – makes it easier to access the Shell from Jails
Linux jail support

Full release notes can be found here. If you’d like to try out FreeNAS 9.2-RC, the iso can be downloaded here.

Massive Plugin UPDATE

A record-breaking fifteen-plugin update was recently added to FreeNAS! This update includes several completely new plugins and changes to existing ones. The update to the Plex plugin now allows you to access it from different subnets. Be sure to check out the full list to see what new functionalities you can add to your system. Users of FreeNAS 9.1.x can manually download the plugins here. Plugins will automatically show up in the GUI of FreeNAS 9.2 and later.
Here’s a full list of the plugins that were affected:

CouchPotato	BTSync	Maraschino
Sickbeard	crashPlan	MiniDLNA
Firefly	Gamez	Mylar
Bacula-SD	HTPC-Manager	OwnCloud
Plex Media Server	SABnzbd	Transmission

Featured Plugins: BTSync

We’d like to feature one of the plugins from that update that we think you’ll find incredibly useful. The BTSync plugin for FreeNAS is brought to you by Joshua Parker Ruehlig, who wrote several other plugins for FreeNAS 8.x.
In case you haven’t heard by now, BTSync comes from the makers of BitTorrent and has been making waves for a while now. This plugin allows you to sync your files across all of your devices by sharing them using BitTorrent. No more third-party cloud-based services! With BTSync on FreeNAS, your data is saved on your devices and shared on your networks. For more information about BTSync, check out this BitTorrent blog post.

Interview with Josh Paetzel

Why is the FreeNAS logo a shark? For the official answer to that question and many more, check out the 15th episode of BSD Now! Titled “Kickin’ NAS”, the episode featured an interview with Josh Paetzel who dressed as Santa. Josh covered the past, present, and future of the FreeNAS project and spoke about the upcoming FreeNAS 9.2 release and the people on the FreeNAS team who help make the project what it is.
After the interview, Allan Jude and Kris Moore ran a demo of FreeNAS and featured its reporting and plugin features.

Tracking FreeBSD in FreeNAS by Using Git for Newbies by Alfred Perlstein

On November 7, 2013, the FreeBSD Vendor Summit took place at Yahoo! Headquarters in Sunnyvale. Alfred Perlstein gave a talk on the subject of git and afterwards, he wrote up a tutorial based on that talk so that anyone can access it.
If you’d ever like to help commit code to FreeNAS, you should give Alfred’s article a read. The things he covers are very relevant and the article includes diagrams and code examples to help you understand. A PDF version of his article can be accessed here.

Supercomputing 13 Recap

As we mentioned in the November edition of the newsletter, we had a FreeNAS booth at Supercomputing! When we got there, we found that many people were already familiar with FreeNAS and we had a lot of fun educating people about the newest features. The plugins were a huge hit and people were very impressed by our demo. And to think, that was before we brought out the free beer!
Check out our photos from Day 1 & Setup, Day 2, and Days 3 & 4 .
If you missed out on the fun and or would like to relive the event, a recap of our time can be found here.

Network World Stacks FreeNAS Against Other NAS Software

Network World reviewed FreeNAS in comparison to other free or open source NAS software. To quote: “If you’re looking for an open source solution that doesn’t limit your storage space and provides easy NAS encryption, you should look into FreeNAS.”
The article runs through the features of FreeNAS including its supported protocols and the ZFS filesystem. The full review can be read here. It’s insider-only access, but sign-up is free.

Computer Power User Magazine’s FreeNAS Walkthrough

Thanks to our friend, Michael Dexter, for sending this one in. Computer Power User Magazine recently released an article about using FreeNAS to set up a home NAS. The article is well-written and up to date for FreeNAS 9.x and later. It covers hardware and memory recommendations and even touches on FreeNAS security. Be sure to give this one a read if you’d like to gain a stronger foundation of knowledge for FreeNAS.

Tech Tip #1

If you are upgrading FreeNAS from 8.x to 9.x you can upgrade your pool from v28 to v5000, however this is not done automatically. Run zpool upgrade -a from the CLI to upgrade your pools. This step is irreversible, but it’s necessary to get some of the new features of ZFS, such as LZ4 compression.

Links of the Month

FreeNAS 9.x setup with Samba fileshares, OwnCloud, Bittorrent and Plex* via YouTube
Consumer HDs as Reliable as Enterprise Hardware via PC Pro
Setting up BTSync on FreeNAS 8 via Bittorrent Blog (PS: there’s a plugin for this now.)

*The author is using ZFS with 3GB of RAM. We recommend using 4GB at a minimum.

Connect with Us

If you need help with your FreeNAS setup or would like to show off your configuration, share your plugins, or just talk with like-minded people, join the conversation on our community forums.
For video tutorials, check out our YouTube channel.
Want real-time updates as they happen? Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or add us to your Google+ circle!

The post We Bring Gifts: New BTSync Plugin Rocks! FreeNAS 9.2-RC & More appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.2.0-RC Available

iX Team — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 20:00:03 +0000

Jordan has announced that FreeNAS-9.2.0 Release Candidate is available for download from http://iso.cdn.freenas.org/9.2.0/RC/
Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.2.0-RC
* Version 9.2-RELEASE of FreeBSD with performance improvements, bug fixes, and updated software packages. For a complete list see
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/relnotes.html
* The Kernel UMA allocator is now the default for ZFS. This results in higher ZFS performance.
* Avahi (multicast DNS, aka Bonjour) registration of all services, include the web service, means you no longer need to have a head on the box to know its IP address, even for initial configuration. freenas.local is the default (or freenas-n.local, where n is the # of freenas.local machines already on the local network). This can be changed by changing the hostname.
* The built-in admin user account is no longer used and the Admin Account removed. The first time the FreeNAS graphical interface is accessed, a pop-up menu will prompt for the root password. Subsequent logins to the graphical interface will require this password.
* A complete REST API has been created for FreeNAS, allowing a FreeNAS instance to be controlled remotely. See examples/api in the FreeNAS source repository (https://github.com/freenas/freenas/tree/master) for some examples of this in action. Complete API docs are available in docs/api.
* The “Permit Sudo” field has been added to the add and edit screens for Users and Groups. A column in View Groups and View Users now indicates whether or not “Permit Sudo” has been set.
* HTTP and HTTPS access to the FreeNAS graphical interface are no longer mutually exclusive. The fields “WebGUI HTTP Port” and “WebGUI HTTPS Port” have been added to System Settings -> General.
* An “Edit” button has been added to the “Hostname” field of System Information to make the hostname easier to change.
* The results from the latest ZFS scrub now appear in Volume Status.
* Netatalk has been updated to version 3.1.0. See http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/3.1/ReleaseNotes3.1.0.html for a list of changes in this release. There are also a number of changes made to AFP sharing as a result:
* The Add Apple (AFP) Share menu has been simplified and a “Default umask” option has been added.
* The “Server Name” field has also been removed from AFP; in Netatalk 3, this value is automatically derived from the system hostname.
* “Enable home directories” and “Home directories” options added to AFP.
* The AIO options have been removed from CIFS.
* Samba has been updated to version 3.6.21
* Fourteen TLS-related fields have been added to the Advanced Mode of FTP.
* An “IPv4 Address” column has been added to the View Jails screen.
* A shell button has been added to Jails, making it easy to access the command line of the selected jail.
* A “Create directory” checkbox has been added to the Add Storage function of a jail so that the user does not have to first access the jail’s shell to make sure that the directory already exists. A “Read-Only” checkbox has also been added to this screen.
* A jails templating system has been added, allowing the quick deployment of new jails from existing templates and the ability to create custom templates. Linux jail support has also been added and installation templates are included for Debian-7.1.0, Gentoo-20130820, Ubuntu-13.04, Centos-6.4, Fedora-19, and Suse-12.3.
* A link to the online FreeBSD manual pages has been added to Help.
* Added bxe(4) driver for Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet 10Gb PCIe adapter.
* Added padlock(4) driver which provides cryptographic hardware acceleration for VIA C3, C7 and Eden processors.
* Improved performance of encrypted ZFS volumes.
* The iSCSI options have been updated to ensure the GUI constraints match the daemon constraints. In particular the GUI limited the number of sessions and the number of connections to a low value that may need to be increased if there are large numbers of targets or clients or both.

The post FreeNAS 9.2.0-RC Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

NEW Plugins: Crashplan and OwnCloud

iX Team — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:31:55 +0000

The official Crashplan plugin is now available for FreeNAS. Crashplan is a cloud-based backup target. You can use it to back up the data on your FreeNAS to Crashplan and your data is kept safe in the cloud, making it easy to recover lost data later. The backup process takes place in the background on the schedule you set and all your data is encrypted before sending.
Check out the forum announcement for more information. This plugin requires more work to set up than the others, so make sure you’re comfortable using Linux emulation before trying the installation.
We also released a plugin for ownCloud. This plugin allows you to turn your FreeNAS box into an ownCloud server and sync your files across all of your devices. Any changes made to your files are pushed between all devices connected to a your ownCloud account. These plugins can be installed via the plugins menu of the GUI.

The post NEW Plugins: Crashplan and OwnCloud appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

OpenZFS Initiative

iX Team — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 17:02:11 +0000

FreeNAS is proud to announce our support and involvement with the OpenZFS Initiative. OpenZFS is the spiritual open source successor to the ZFS project. This formalized coalition of developers, users, and companies dedicated to the open use and improvement of ZFS will allow everyone to stay on the same page so there is no fragmentation.
The OpenZFS community was founded by members from the FreeBSD, Linux, illumos, and Mac OS X communities and includes one of the original authors of ZFS, Matt Ahrens.
The community aims to raise awareness of OpenZFS, encourage open communication on what improvements should be made, and ensure the performance and reliability of OpenZFS across platforms.

The post OpenZFS Initiative appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.1.1-RELEASE

iX Team — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 03:04:28 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is delighted to announce the general release of FreeNAS 9.1.1. This release offers small, but significant, improvements to FreeNAS 9.1.0!
A number of cosmetic issues, UI tracebacks and outright bugs (such as 32 bit plugins not working) have been addressed since 9.1 was released. A few features that were known to be broken, such as AIO in Samba3 or IPv6 in plugin jails, were also disabled to avoid people shooting their feet off.
Finally, a number of important ZFS stability fixes were also picked up from the TrueOS repo during the creation of 9.1.1-RELEASE.
Thank you for all your participation and assistance during the 9.1.1 BETA and Release Candidate process. This release benefited significantly from your suggestions and bug reports!

For a list of all bugs closed between FreeNAS 9.1.0 and FreeNAS 9.1.1, please see http://bit.ly/16cANlo

FreeNAS 9.1.1-RELEASE can be downloaded from https://www.freenas.org/download.html as well as from CDN and SourceForge.

Enjoy!

Your Friendly FreeNAS Development Team

The post FreeNAS 9.1.1-RELEASE appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.1.0 RC2 available

iX Team — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 22:25:49 +0000

FreeNAS 9.1.0 RC2 is available on the download page. RC2 is still pre-production software, please use with caution.

Plugins available in a properly configured repo may now be installed in one step, which will configure and install a plugin jail if that has not yet been done. Administrators may choose alternate repos.

The image size has been reduced to 2GB – this means upgrades from FreeNAS 8.0.1 and later are now supported. Always back up your configuration and data before performing upgrades, especially to non-production versions.

The post FreeNAS 9.1.0 RC2 available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.1.0 RC1 Available

iX Team — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 18:21:25 +0000

Alfred has announced that FreeNAS-9.1.0 Release Candidate 1 is available for download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-9.1.0/

Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.1.0-RC1

This is the first release candidate for FreeNAS 9.1.0. We have passed a great alpha and rolling beta cycle with many bug fixes and regressions fixed. At this point, only bug fixes and regressions will be addressed.

*** IMPORTANT ***

The image size increased in FreeNAS 9.1.0-ALPHA. The new size requires a 4 GB storage device. The GUI upgrade can be used to upgrade a system from BETA3 or BETA4, but upgrades from earlier releases can only be done from the CD. The other option is
to save the config, reinstall the new version, then restore the config.

Major changes:

Version 9.1-STABLE of FreeBSD with performance improvements, bug
fixes, and updated software packages.
Many improvements to the ZFS filesystem, including feature flags,
TRIM support, enhanced drive removal notification, LZ4 compression,
improved ARC memory reclamation and reliability improvements.
Improved Plugin Jail subsystem which supports multiple jails and
an enhanced UI including enhancements from PC-BSD Warden.
Improved Volume manager including auto optimization of volumes
for performance.
Improvements to the encryption subsystem.
Documentation enhancements.
Increased base image size to 3.7GB.
GUI UPGRADES FROM FREENAS 8.X ARE NOT SUPPORTED (due to image size #7)
**IMPORTANT** Backward compatibility of FreeNAS 9.1 ZFS pools with older versions of ZFS is not to be expected. Upgrade pools with extreme caution, as all ZFS pool upgrades are one-way and only FreeNAS 9.1, FreeBSD 9-STABLE, and FreeBSD 8.4 currently support this ZFS pool format.
To convert 8.* pluginjail to a 9.* pluginjail, please run the jail migration script like so (prior to configuring jails):
/root/migrate_pluginjail.sh -D
Any plugins installed will need to be updated manually, this can be done
on the services->plugins page.

The bug tracker for FreeNAS is available at http://support.freenas.org

Discussion about FreeNAS occurs in the FreeNAS forums, located at: http://forums.freenas.org as well as in the official FreeNAS IRC channel on FreeNode in #freenas.

The post FreeNAS 9.1.0 RC1 Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 9.1.0 BETA images available

iX Team — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 17:11:27 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 9.1.0-BETA images.
Images can be downloaded from www.freenas.org/downloads. The plugin jail is now included in the install image and does not need to be downloaded separately. Plugins should be available soon.
FreeNAS 9.1.0-BETA has many major improvements:
1) Version 9.1.0-STABLE of FreeBSD with performance improvements, bug fixes, and updated software packages.
2) Many improvements to the ZFS filesystem, including feature flags, TRIM support, enhanced drive removal notification, improved ARC memory reclamation and reliability improvements.
3) Improved Plugin Jail subsystem which supports multiple jails and an enhanced UI including enhancements from PC-BSD Warden.
4) Improved Volume manager including auto optimization of volumes for performance.
5) Improvements to the encryption subsystem.
6) Documentation enhancements.
FreeNAS 9.1.0 increases the install size to just under 4GB. This should allow FreeNAS to be installed on USB sticks marketed as 4GB that are actually somewhat smaller. However, this means that GUI UPGRADES FROM FREENAS 8.X ARE NOT SUPPORTED. Upgrades must be performed from the ISO on 4GB or larger devices, or via configuration and pool export and import if the existing boot medium is too small.
ZFS in FreeNAS 9.1.0 now includes “feature flags”, which can enable optional features in ZFS. FreeNAS 9.1.0 ships with several new ZFS features, most notably LZ4 compression, which are not supported by earlier versions of ZFS. Backward compatibility of FreeNAS 9.1.0 ZFS pools with older versions of ZFS is not guaranteed. Upgrade pools with extreme caution, as all ZFS pool upgrades are one-way and only FreeNAS 9.1.0, FreeBSD 9-STABLE, and FreeBSD 8.4 currently support this ZFS pool format.
FreeNAS BETA images are non-production software and should be treated as such.
Bug reports should be filed against the appropriate FreeNAS version at support.freenas.org.

The post FreeNAS 9.1.0 BETA images available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Which FreeNAS?

iX Team — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 01:02:17 +0000

Lessons from a year in the trenches with BSD’s killer app.

I will confess that the TCP/IP stack is truly BSD’s killer app, giving us the Internet as we know it but that’s pretty old news and it’s no longer the de facto standard. Other contenders for this status are OpenBSD’s OpenSSH and Packet Filter thanks to their reach and occasionally FreeBSD for setting Internet traffic records. Today however I will argue that the single most valuable piece of BSD software to the greatest number of users is FreeNAS, the open source Network Attached Storage distribution maintained by FreeBSD-oriented hardware vendor iXsystems.

Why? For the simple reason that FreeNAS proves itself equally useful to users of Windows, Mac OS X, free and proprietary Unix, VMWare, XenServer, dlna appliances and just about anyone else who has something to store. We have developed an insatiable need for digital storage and most people probably don’t realize how fragile their storage infrastructure is until it’s too late. FreeNAS stands out from other Open Source storage appliances by bringing enterprise-class features to within the reach of just about everyone with the key feature being the ZFS “Zetabyte File System” developed by Sun Microsystems. ZFS delivers a level of data integrity protection that had previously only been available in high-end proprietary solutions. While ZFS is not perfect, it is the best all-around Open Source file system available today and of course is never a substitute for a rigorous backup strategy.

Sparing you the details, ZFS performs ongoing data integrity checks that other filesystems do not and it includes institutionalized rollback and replication. By virtue of having a “clean slate” design, ZFS does require some time to wrap your head around but FreeNAS users do not need to learn its syntax unless they choose to. This is a clue to why FreeNAS is a killer app: you can set it up in minutes but it gives you countless layers to explore down to its underlying FreeBSD/NanoBSD operating system and Django-based web interface. FreeNAS does not yet lend itself to customization but an experienced system administrator can migrate a FreeNAS configuration to a dedicated FreeBSD server without too much trouble. The HUGE advantage of FreeNAS’s FreeBSD underpinnings however is the fact that diagnosing a FreeNAS system is largely a matter of diagnosing FreeBSD. With both FreeNAS and FreeBSD getting better with every release and the introduction of the FreeNAS plugins architecture, we a dealing with not just an appliance but a platform with a growing ecosystem.

Hardware Considerations

Like just about any BSD, FreeNAS will boot on just about any hardware but you would be wise to do some careful planning in advance and be willing to invest a little money. The first two golden rules of FreeNAS should be obvious: invest in the best hard drives and storage controller your budget will allow. The third rule is to invest in at least 1GB of RAM, preferably ECC, per TB of desired storage. While only time will tell which specific hard drives are truly the most reliable, you should avoid the lowest-end consumer drives. Do your homework on the best drives currently available and note that some drive makers are now offering mid-range drives tuned for NAS use.

Not to make an endorsement, FreeNAS and FreeBSD have long had very good support for LSI controller cards and note that you want “Target” or “JBOD” mode when using ZFS, allowing ZFS to handle all redundancy features. FreeNAS is not a ZFS-only solution and will in fact allow you to create UFS arrays and even share a hardware RAID array. Each approach has certain advantages but ZFS’s portability is a very nice feature. It is by no means universally portable but ZFS is one of the most cross-platform portable file systems available. As for affordable motherboards that support ECC memory, they do exist and you need only do your homework.

The Weakest Link

Once you have FreeNAS-ready hardware, there is one thing you should know about ZFS to avoid shooting yourself in the foot: Your ZFS pool is only as strong as its weakest link. A “pool” is a ZFS storage array and is fundamentally a RAID 0-style “stripe” comprised of one or more “vdevs” or virtual devices. The most common type of vdev is ZFS’s “raidzN” which as its name implies, is like a traditional RAID array with “N” number of failable disks. That is, a raidz1 array can suffer the loss of one member disk and two for raidz2. While raidz is considered the de facto strategy for ZFS pools, the cumulative nature of the vdev model also means that creating RAID 1+0 striped arrays of mirrors is pretty straight forward. To create a RAID 1+0 ZFS array in FreeNAS, simply configure a mirror of two or more drives and add additional mirrors to it. This will have the performance advantage of no relying on calculated parity for redundancy. Herein however lies one of the greatest weaknesses of ZFS: it will allow you to add any device, including a USB key as a member vdev and removing it will compromise your entire pool. For this reason you should not think of ZFS as a safe way to cobble all of the hard drives you have lying around.

With these rules in mind, FreeNAS is remarkably forgiving and quick to set up. A Windows CIFS share can be set up in seconds by creating a Volume using the Storage: Volume Manager followed by Sharing: CIFS Shares: Add CIFS Share. Simply enable “Browsable to Network Clients” and “Allow Guest Access” and the resulting share should be visible by Windows, Mac OS X and BSD/Linux clients. You would be wise to take steps to limit access to the resulting system but this starting point will meet the needs of most SOHO users. From there the documentation is pretty straight forward about setting up more sophisticated shares such as iSCSI targets and NFS shares for use by server operating systems like XenServer, VMware and Microsoft Windows Server. Add in replication and you have an open source storage solution that was unimaginable just a few years ago.

The FreeNAS Platform

It’s no secret that some users were upset when the recent rearchitecture of FreeNAS temporarily removed some home user-oriented features but the remedy is inadvertently taking FreeNAS to a new level. While the developers could have simple replaced the missing features, they opted to build a plugins architecture that is rapidly gaining PC-BSD features such as the PBI package management system and Warden jail management system. These two features will create countless opportunities for FreeNAS as a platform for print, monitoring or database serving in addition to the much-requested multimedia serving. I can’t think of a single Linux distribution or competing NAS solution that begins to embrace this platform-centric approach.

With all this going on, the question of “Which FreeNAS?” is turning from one of which demographic will use it to identifying one of many FreeNAS systems in a given environment. There is simply much more to FreeNAS than ZFS and I have even heard of people putting it in front of proprietary NAS systems to gain missing file sharing protocols. Add in a rich set of third party software daemons through the plugins architecture and the result is an unprecedented serving platform that is useful to every category of user.

BIO

Michael Dexter has used BSD Unix systems since 1991 and wrote his first FreeBSD jail management system in 2005. He has sponsored the BSD.lv sysjail and mult multiplicity research projects and took his BSD support public with the formation of BSD Fund in 2007. Michael is now the CTO of the BSD vendor Gainframe and Editor of the BSD technical journal Call For Testing.

The post Which FreeNAS? appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

What’s New in FreeNAS 8.x

iX Team — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:59:18 +0000

This article highlights some of the new features which have been added to FreeNAS 8.x since July, 2012. These include the Plugins Jail, ZFSv28, and GELI encryption.

Since its initial release in May, 2011, the newly designed FreeNAS 8.x series has added many features that make this open source storage operating system an attractive option for everyone from home users up to large enterprise users.

The initial releases concentrated on improving the graphical administrative interface and the “core” NAS features. These core features include the ability to perform the following within a graphical interface from a web browser:

import existing UFS or ZFS RAID configurations
import existing disks formatted with FAT, NTFS, or EXT2/3
create volumes, datasets, and zvols
import existing users, groups, and permissions from Active Directory or LDAP
create Netatalk, NFS, and Samba shares and manage permissions to those shares
share data over FTP/FTPS, SSH, and TFTP
create iSCSI targets
manage cron jobs, sysctls, and loader.conf values
manage link aggregations, VLANs, and static routes
schedule snapshots, replication, scrubs, and S.M.A.R.T. tests
backup the configuration and perform upgrades

Subsequent releases added the following major features to augment the core NAS features:

8.2.0, released in July, 2012, added the Plugins Jail to allow for the installation of additional software.
8.3.0, released in October, 2012, added ZFSv28.
8.3.1, released in March, 2013, added the ability to create ZFS pools on GELI encrypted disks.

In addition to major features, each release incorporates bug fixes, new drivers, and minor features to improve the usability of FreeNAS. This article discusses some of these new features in more detail.

Plugins Jail

FreeNAS 8.2.0 introduced the Plugins Jail, which allows the FreeNAS administrator to extend core NAS functionality by installing additional applications in order to meet the needs of their specific environment. This functionality is provided through the following components:

FreeBSD Jail: provides light-weight, operating system-level virtualization. Essentially, it installs a separate FreeBSD system onto the FreeNAS host. The jail has its own hostname, IP address, user accounts, processes, and configuration. The FreeNAS implementation includes vimage, which gives the jail its own networking stack and IP broadcasting, as these are required by some file sharing applications.
PBI: the Push Button Installer format was created by the PC-BSD Project to provide a graphical front-end to the FreeBSD Ports Collection. Applications can be installed and uninstalled from a GUI interface which also provides information about which applications and versions are installed. PBIs are self-contained in that they include all the runtime and library dependencies required by the application.
Plugins: a FreeNAS plugin extends the PBI format by incorporating the installed software, as well as its configuration options, into the FreeNAS GUI. This allows the plugin to be installed, configured, started/stopped, and uninstalled, all from the FreeNAS GUI. Figure 1 shows how the FreeNAS Control Services screen indicates that three plugins have been installed. Figure 2 shows the configuration screen for the Firefly plugin.

In order to install plugins, the Plugins Jail must first be downloaded and installed. If a plugin is not available for the needed software, FreeBSD ports or packages can still be installed within the plugins jail. The only difference is that the installation, configuration, and starting/stopping of the application’s service is performed from the command line of the jail, rather than from the FreeNAS GUI.

The Plugins chapter of the FreeNAS Users Guide describes in detail how to install and manage the plugins jail, install and manage plugins, install and manage FreeBSD packages and ports, and how to make custom plugins. This chapter is available at http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Plugins.

ZFSv28

FreeNAS 8.3.0 added support for ZFSv28. This adds the following ZFS features:

RAIDZ3: this triple-parity version of ZFS RAID allows up to three disks to fail, with no restrictions on which drives fail, without losing data.
Replaceable ZIL: the ZFS Intent Log is effectively a filesystem journal that manages writes. You can increase performance by dedicating a device (typically an SSD or a dedicated disk) to hold the ZIL. If the ZIL is installed on a device and that device fails, it can be replaced without losing the pool. The only data that is lost is the last few seconds of writes which had not yet been committed to the pool.
zpool split: this command allows you to split a disk from a mirrored pool. Essentially, the pool is cloned to the disk which can then be removed and used to recreate that pool on another system.
autoexpand: this ZFS property allows the administrator to replace smaller disks with larger disks in order to increase the size of the pool. While this is not the recommended way to increase pool size, it is the only option when the hardware does not support adding more disks or controllers.
ZLE: Zero Length Encoding is a fast and simple compression algorithm which only compresses blocks that are filled with zeroes. This saves space when a thin-provisioned zvol has only used a portion of the size allocated to it.
Deduplication: is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data in order to save space. Once deduplicaton occurs, it can improve ZFS performance as less data is written and stored.

These features, including how to enable them and any caveats to doing so, are described in more detail in the Volumes chapter of the FreeNAS Users Guide: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes.

Any ZFS volume created in FreeNAS 8.3.0 or later will automatically be formatted with ZFSv28. Existing FreeNAS ZFS pools running ZFSv15 can be easily upgraded using the instructions at http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Upgrading_FreeNAS#Upgrading_a_ZFS_Pool. Upgrading a pool only takes a few seconds and does not disrupt the use of the FreeNAS system.

Encryption

FreeNAS 8.3.1, released on March 20, 2013, adds FreeBSD GELI disk encryption, allowing a ZFS pool to be created on top of the AES-256 encrypted disks. This type of encryption is primarily targeted at users who store sensitive data and want to retain the ability to remove disks from the pool without having to first wipe the disk’s contents.
The design is as follows:

This is not the encryption method used by Oracle ZFSv30. That version of ZFS has not been open sourced and is the property of Oracle.
This is full disk encryption and not per-filesystem encryption. The underlying drives are first encrypted, then the pool is created on top of the encrypted devices.
This design is suitable for safe disposal of disks independent of the encryption key. As long as the key and the disks are intact, the system is vulnerable to being decrypted. The encryption key should be protected by a strong passphrase and any backups of the key should be securely stored.
As a backup recovery method (should the passphrase be forgotten), a recovery key can be used with the encryption key to decrypt the disks.
The encryption key is per ZFS volume (pool). If you create multiple pools, each pool has its own encryption key.
If the system has a lot of disks, there will be a performance hit if the CPU does not support AES-NI. If the processor does support the AES-NI instruction set, there should be very little, if any, degradation in performance when using encryption.
Data in the ZFS ARC cache and the contents of RAM are unencrypted.
Swap is always encrypted, even on unencrypted volumes.
There is no way to convert an existing, unencrypted volume. Instead, the data must be backed up, the existing pool must be destroyed, a new encrypted volume must be created, and the backup restored to the new volume.
Hybrid pools are not supported. In other words, newly created vdevs must match the existing encryption scheme. When extending a volume, FreeNAS will automatically encrypt the new vdev being added to the existing encrypted pool.

When creating an encrypted ZFS volume, an option is available to initialize the disks with random data. This is recommended as it writes the disks with random data before enabling encryption, which can increase its cryptographic strength. However, it will take longer for the volume to be created.
Once an encrypted ZFS volume is created, the user should immediately set a passphrase on the encryption key, make a backup of the encryption key, and create a recovery key. Without these, it will be impossible to re-import or replace the disks at a later time. Figure 3 shows the options for managing the encryption and recovery keys which are added to the FreeNAS GUI for managing the volume. Details on how to use these options can be found at http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes#Key_Management_for_Encrypted_Volumes.

Miscellaneous Features

Some of the other features introduced since 8.2.0 include:

a web shell built into the FreeNAS GUI. Clicking this opens a root shell to allow for command line management of the FreeNAS system from a web browser.
support for multipath devices on systems containing dual expander SAS backplanes, SAS drives, or dual expander JBODs with SAS drives. Such hardware will be automatically configured for multipath.
an autotuning script can be used to set various loader values and sysctls based on system resources and installed hardware components.
a replication window can be set, allowing snapshots taken during the day to be replicated during the evening.
improved reporting graphs make it easier to scroll through time intervals to monitor performance trends.
ZFS ARC stats have been added to top(1).

Additional Resources

Many resources are available to FreeNAS 8.x users. They include:

the Sourceforge download page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.1/
the per-release documentation, in various downloadable formats: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page
the support page for viewing/creating support tickets and feature requests: http://support.freenas.org
the user forums: http://forums.freenas.org
the Freenode IRC channel: #freenas

Bio
Dru Lavigne is author of BSD Hacks, The Best of FreeBSD Basics, and The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD. As Director of Community Development for the PC-BSD Project, she leads the documentation team, assists new users, helps to find and fix bugs, and reaches out to the community to discover their needs. She is the former Managing Editor of the Open Source Business Resource, a free monthly publication covering open source and the commercialization of open source assets. She is founder and current Chair of the BSD Certification Group Inc., a non-profit organization with a mission to create the standard for certifying BSD system administrators, and serves on the Board of the FreeBSD Foundation.

The post What’s New in FreeNAS 8.x appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The Interview with Alfred Perlstein, VP of Software Engineering at iXsystems

iX Team — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:54:32 +0000

Alfred has been working on the FreeBSD kernel for the past 13 years. His areas of interest have been file systems, multi-processor support, performance, and stability of FreeBSD. He has alternated between CTO/VP roles at companies like OkCupid to kernel developer positions at Apple and Juniper Networks. His current role is FreeNAS project manager and VP Software Engineering at iXsystems. He continues to contribute to the FreeBSD project when time allows and encourage his team to as well. Recently, he agreed to give the interview to BSD Magazine.

BSD Magazine: Hello Alfred, could you tell us how you got into FreeNAS?

Alfred Perlstein: I had known iXsystems for many years through their support of the FreeBSD project. When it came time to purchase some storage at my previous job I naturally looked to iXsystems for a solution. We picked a FreeNAS based server and were really impressed with the software. I was so impressed with the FreeNAS project, the developers behind it, and iXsystems that I reached out to work at iXsystems so that I could work on FreeNAS as well as TrueNAS.

BSD: Tell us the story behind FreeNAS project. How it started and was it Open Source in nature from the beginning? What was and is the role of iXsystems in it?

AP: FreeNAS started with a developer named Olivier Cochard-Labbe in 2005. He wanted to convert an old PC into a NAS box for his home, but there wasn’t an easy way to do that. He worked on that for several years with a couple of other developers, using a M0n0wall-based web UI. Eventually his interest and that of the other developers waned, and one of them proposed moving FreeNAS to a Debian Linux based system instead of FreeBSD. At iXsystems, we’d been using FreeNAS for years and selling people servers that were specifically for FreeNAS, so Matt Olander decided we should step up and offer to continue BSD-based development of the project. Olivier agreed, and iXsystems began the FreeNAS 8 project, re-implementing FreeNAS using Django and FreeBSD 8. Since then we’ve brought FreeNAS up to the most recent version of ZFS and added new features like encryption and jails support.

BSD: Can you give us a couple of examples of successful stories with FreeNAS?

AP: One time we got a random call from the United Nations, looking for FreeNAS support for a system they’d built with xxxTB! Actually, that sort of thing happens all the time. Customers call in from huge organizations around the globe telling us about these giant FreeNAS installs they’ve got running critical business functions. Every story brings a smile to our faces.

BSD: Can you also describe what is the average deployment of FreeNAS and the biggest one you know?

AP: Most FreeNAS deployments are small home users, probably not more than 12 TB. This is due to most FreeNAS devices being small boxes with just a handful of consumer hard drives. Businesses will often deploy systems with over 20TB in a rackmount chassis, often for backup purposes. We’ve heard of universities, however, who have created FreeNAS deployments upwards of a petabyte.

BSD: Have there been any mishaps with FreeNAS? Any technical problems? How were they solved?

AP: Like any software, FreeNAS has gone through some challenges. Early in FreeNAS 8, it became necessary to double the size of the system image. This meant that from 8.0 to 8.0.1, everyone had to use the CD image to upgrade, or perform a reinstall and import if their install media was too small. Most of the time, we’re able to identify problems early, document and fix them, and communicate with the community very quickly what the issue is.

BSD: How about the relationship with the community? Is it possible for a community member to contribute, and how are those contributions handled?

AP: There are lots of ways for community members to help out. One great way is to produce plugins – in that case, the contributor is free to distribute the plugin however they like. We always appreciate people who help others on the forums, as well as reporting bugs or making feature suggestions. It’s also possible to submit patches, but that doesn’t seem to happen very often.

BSD: Is there official training or tutorials, for example at conferences, related to the adoption or migration to FreeNAS?

AP: Our Community Manager, Dru Lavigne, goes to many conferences and runs small classes on how to get started with FreeNAS. There is also a series of video walkthroughs available on FreeNAS.org to help people get started, along with a fairly exhaustive online manual: http://doc.freenas.org/

BSD: What is the target audience for FreeNAS? Is it suitable for enterprise or home/small office deployments? Or, both?

AP: FreeNAS is about home users first, but really anyone but businesses with the most stringent requirements will find that it suits their needs. iXsystems is a small business with a strong technical inclination, and while we worked on FreeNAS, we also made sure to include everything we would want in a storage solution. As I mentioned, we’ve used FreeNAS in one way or another to host our internal file share for years.

BSD: Is FreeNAS suitable for in-the-cloud storage or has it been already used in such a scenario?

AP: Through the plugin jail, it’s possible to install Owncloud or any similar FreeBSD-compatible tool. Owncloud lets a user upload and access their files on a self-hosted server from anywhere in the world.

BSD: Is FreeNAS based on pure FreeBSD or does iXsystems modify the kernel tree?

AP: FreeNAS uses NanoBSD to create a stripped-down image, and unnecessary drivers are excluded, such as wifi and video card drivers. NanoBSD also offers us the flexibility of a backup system image in case an upgrade fails or the user needs to revert to a previous version.

BSD: Does FreeNAS support all the platforms that FreeBSD does? What are the better architectures on which FreeNAS can run?

AP: FreeNAS runs exclusively in x86 and x86-64 architectures. 64-bit is really the target architecture for FreeNAS, due to the RAM requirements of ZFS. Users with older hardware are encouraged to run UFS based systems, although they will not experience the full utility of ZFS. There is progress being made to fix ZFS into smaller memory machines. This may be available in later versions of FreeNAS.

BSD: What is the relationship between the FreeNAS and FreeBSD projects? Does iXsystems contribute back to the FreeBSD project?

AP: iXsystems is a major sponsor of FreeBSD, and most of the FreeNAS development team are also developers of the FreeBSD project as well. Our CTO, Matt Olander, is part of the FreeBSD Marketing Team, and the Community Manager, Dru Lavigne, is a member of the board of the FreeBSD Foundation. Working on FreeNAS has helped iXsystems expose a number of bugs in FreeBSD, which we were able to fix in FreeBSD. With FreeNAS soon to move closer to the cutting edge of FreeBSD, we expect even more mutual benefit in the future.

BSD: It seems that FreeNAS storage is strongly based on ZFS. Did the inclusion of ZFS into FreeBSD drive that choice?

AP: ZFS in FreeBSD has been a great boon to FreeNAS, and is a big reason why we didn’t want it to move to Linux. ZFS is an amazing technology for storage, and when we began working on FreeNAS 8 we decided to center it around ZFS. Since then, we’ve made ZFS more accessible than ever, and even brought in improvements like the encryption option in FreeNAS 8.3.1.

BSD: Does FreeNAS cover all the features that ZFS provides, like deduplication?

AP: As of FreeNAS 8.3, FreeNAS is at ZFS v28 just like FreeBSD. This means that RAID-Z3, deduplication, and detachable ZILs are all available in FreeNAS. The web UI reflects the ZFS pool, so even if someone performs an unconventional pool configuration from the shell, that will be fully reflected in the UI.

BSD: Does FreeNAS support other less memory consuming file systems like UFS/FFS as well?

AP: Most of FreeNAS’ functions work perfectly well on UFS, which is supported in the Web UI. A handful of other filesystems are also available in the importer for read-only.

BSD: How does FreeNAS compare to other Unix/Linux storage solutions?

AP: FreeNAS is very good at having a core selection of stable services for NAS available and easy to configure. FreeNAS is also probably the best at offering the power of ZFS. Others are very adaptable to third-party software, and this is something we’re working on improving in FreeNAS as well.

BSD: Are there any guidelines or automated tools for migrating from other (not strictly NSD) solutions to FreeNAS?

AP: None that we currently know of, however many people have successfully used rsync to migrate data. If a user decides to create a tool, we would love to integrate it into FreeNAS.

BSD: What is the added value of using FreeNAS instead of using pure FreeBSD (or another Unix system)?

AP: Certainly ease of use. The power of FreeNAS is that you can have network storage running with advanced filesystem features as well as integration with Active Directory in very little time, all through a user friendly GUI. We have many video tutorials online as well as written documentation that can help even your most basic user get up and running in a matter of minutes. The same configuration would take an expert days if not weeks to set up on FreeBSD.

Another bonus feature of using FreeNAS is that we have a huge userbase on a specific version of FreeBSD. This allows us to maintain a level of stability specifically tailored to our use-case. We inbox only vetted fixes from FreeBSD that we know address issues our users are seeing.

BSD: FreeBSD provides mainly two technologies for disk data encryption, GELI and GBDE. Does FreeNAS have any way of encryption of the whole or a part of its storage?

AP: The most recent release of FreeNAS, 8.3.1, added a GELI-based encryption option for ZFS. This allows the on-disk data of a ZFS pool to be encrypted with a key and optional passphrase, with a recovery key option. Obviously this means that only FreeNAS or FreeBSD can import an encrypted pool, but all the other functions of ZFS including snapshot replication are unaffected. This is designed only to protect offline disks, or disks in which failed firmware prevents the deletion of sensitive data.

BSD: iXsystems provides a complete solution, both hardware and software, based on FreeNAS. What are the advantages for using such devices instead of using commodity hardware or other supported hardware?

AP: iXsystems is a hardware company with a long history of excellence. When you purchase a FreeNAS solution from iX, you can be assured that months of hardware qualification have been performed to make sure every single component is within specifications set by the CPU, motherboard, disk and controller manufacturers. By first making sure that the recommended hardware is fully compatible, then performing the FreeNAS install to your exact specifications, you can be assured that a FreeNAS solution purchased from iXsystems will be the most stable FreeNAS system that can be put together and ready to deploy out of the box.

There is also a full enterprise appliance we offer, known as TrueNAS, which provides the user full enterprise support and some additional features, like high-availability active/passive failover, for instance.

Either way, by doing business with iXsystems, you’re supporting the FreeNAS, FreeBSD, and PC-BSD projects.

BSD: Consider a scenario where several FreeNAS machines are involved, does FreeNAS support (or will support) replication/mirroring and centralized management (let’s say clustering)? Moreover, are there any plans to implement a distributed file system between FreeNAS nodes?

AP: FreeNAS already supports replication snapshots to backup servers. Since FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, any file system technology that appears in FreeBSD (and we decide will provide utility to FreeNAS users) will be included in the upcoming FreeNAS releases. At this time there are no clustering solutions. However we do have plans for a distributed backup system to help people save their data.

BSD: Apart from the “raw” storage, what are the main features that FreeNAS provides? For example link aggregation, backup of the configuration, scalability, support for different protocols, and so on…

AP: I’d say you hit all the big points of FreeNAS right here. We support link aggregation of multiple 10gigE interfaces, configuration backup is just a single click in the UI, we already have a great track record for stability, and we support multiple protocols: SMB/CIFS, NFS and AFP.

BSD: Does FreeNAS include (or will it include) the PCBSD PBI format for additional applications or are administrators required to use FreeBSD packages and ports?

AP: Yes! PBIs are supported under the plug-ins architecture (http ://doc .freenas .org /index .php /Plugins). With our next release, the entire PBI catalog of PC-BSD (http ://pcbsd .org /) will become available to FreeNAS users as well.

BSD: NAS based systems for home and domestic users often offer multimedia streaming and Peer-to-Peer features. Does FreeNAS embed any of them natively or via a third party package?

AP: One of our most popular p2p apps is Transmission. There are also a number of usenet related plugins. By leveraging the plug-in jail, just about any FreeBSD port that supports streaming can be installed and leveraged to build a media center.

BSD: Usually a home user will buy some sort of NAS hardware to plug in the network and forget about. FreeNAS requires a little extra effort, since the user has to install and configure the machine. Therefore, why should a home user decide to run FreeNAS?

AP: This is exactly why a home user would pick FreeNAS. It is an “install and forget” appliance if you want it to be. However, because it is based on the modern and powerful FreeBSD operating system, and because it is open source, and because it supports plug-ins, the possibilities for expansion are endless.

We really have a sweet spot here, the user who just wants to “set and forget” can do that, and the tinkerer can do as much tinkering as they like.

BSD: What are the differences between the community based FreeNAS solution and the TrueNAS solution proposed by iXsystems?

AP: TrueNAS takes the powerful interface of FreeNAS and puts it on a purpose-built hardware platform, with every piece tested and verified by iXsystems. Due to providing both the hardware and the software, iXsystems can guarantee a much higher level of support with TrueNAS, and the stable hardware platform also allows for features like High Availability that would be very difficult to implement in FreeNAS, due to tremendous difficulty of supporting any and all hardware the user chooses.

BSD: What is the future of FreeNAS? Could you tell us a bit about ongoing development?

Well right now two big things are happening.

First off we are moving to FreeBSD 9.1/stable. This will give us more hardware support and big performance gains. There is some talk in the FreeBSD community of virtualization coming to FreeBSD 9, so we may be able to pick that up as well.

Second, the entire project is being converted to git as I write this by our two senior engineers William Grzybowski and Josh Paetzel. Once this is complete, we will be able to leverage the abilities of a distributed SCM in order to attract more users to our project as well as help us with the ability to qualify changes in a unified build system before they are even submitted to the main project.

BSD: Why should a user migrate from another storage solution to the one based on FreeNAS?

AP: In the enterprise we find that FreeNAS performs as well as a number of solutions that are many multiples the cost of a FreeNAS machine. For people looking for enterprise support and more enterprise features we also have our TrueNAS product which competes on the same level of performance, stability and features as the major SAN and NAS offerings currently on the market, also at a fraction of the cost.

In the SOHO market we find that most of the soho solutions out there have a niche that they are good at. However, along with that you wind up with a soho based solution and all the limitations involved. FreeNAS is very fast compared to the rest of the options out there, is constantly evolving and improving, and is an open platform.

If you find yourself wishing for better performance, FreeNAS has that with the ZFS filesystem and our carefully tuned FreeBSD operating system to help you on that front. Or maybe you are wishing to move some of the applications off your desktop PC and onto the appliance so you are not interrupting services for the rest of your office or family when the family PC is “installing updates” or a new video card is being installed.

BSD: Is there anything you would like to add or tell BSD Magazine readers?

AP: I’m really excited about what is going on. We have a great 8.3 release under our belts now. Our team is the best team I’ve ever worked with. We have the users (over 8 million downloads in total). What we’re hoping for is more developers. If you have done something cool on FreeNAS, either with your configuration, or by hacking the code yourself, we really want to hear from you.

I want to thank the community, our forum members, and our developers very much for all the time they put into making FreeNAS a serious product that has had an impact on a large number of users. You guys rock.

BSD: Thank you for your time and this excellent interview.

The post The Interview with Alfred Perlstein, VP of Software Engineering at iXsystems appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Handmade NAS

iX Team — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:06:39 +0000

What you will learn…

FreeBSD setup with ZFS as root filesystem
Basic file sharing with smb, afp and ftp server
Use these as building blocks for a full fledge NAS

What you should know…

FreeBSD installation
Network configuration
Port installation & configuration

Introduction

In the past, the term NAS (Network Attached Storage) was used to be associated with large expensive network and enterprise luxurious fileserver. At that time, who would have thought that hard disk and RAM becomes a common commodity that usual folks like us will posses.

With the well known FreeNAS distribution, building a multi terabytes NAS seems to be trivial affair. But today, we’re going to talk about how to build a NAS by hand, plugging different components together using command line & FreeBSD. This article does not aims to be a comprehensive guide to build a NAS. Rather, serves as a jumpstart guide on what are the basic components that made up of a NAS. Which then the reader can plug in more components to enrich its features.

The components of the NAS we’re going to build, involves:

FreeBSD server – setup with ZFS as root filesystem using mirroring configuration
Samba – file server targeting windows client
AFP through Netatalk – file server (with time machine) targeting mac
FTP server – generic file sharing server
pf – packet filtering as firewall

Scenario requirements for this guide:

modern INTEL / AMD processor
at least 2gb of ram
at least 2 hard disk
megabit NIC or better

Disclaimer:

This guide is a walkthrough on setting up a NAS and it WILL destroy your existing data on the hard disk. You have been warned.

FreeBSD server setup

As of this writing, the FreeBSD default installer does not support ZFS filesystem layout. As such, we’ll have to hand craft the ZFS layout during the installation of FreeBSD 9.1 server. Which would allow us to learn more about the underlying works of FreeBSD root on ZFS filesystem.

First of all, get the installation CD from http://freebsd.org and boot it. Perform the installation as usual until the menu “Partitioning”, choose “Shell”.

After dropping to the shell, execute the following commands:

Listing 1a. FreeBSD root on ZFS

# gpart create -s gpt da0

# gpart add -t freebsd-boot -s 128 -l primary-boot da0

# gpart add -t freebsd-swap -l primary-swap -s 4g da0

# gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l primary-root da0

# gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 da0

# gpart create -s gpt da1

# gpart add -t freebsd-boot -s 128 -l secondary-boot da1

# gpart add -t freebsd-swap -l secondary-swap -s 4g da1

# gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l secondary-root da1

# gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 da1

# zpool create -f -m none -o altroot=/mnt -o cachefile=/tmp/zpool.cache zeetank mirror gpt/primary-root gpt/secondary-root

# zfs create -o mountpoint=/ zeetank/root

# zpool set bootfs=zeetank/root zeetank

# zfs list

# zpool get all zeetank

Type “exit” at the command prompt once the above is done. The installation should continue, extracting the necessary files to the hard disk.

What the above has done is to create a GPT partition table in the very first step. Then follow by creating a partition of size 128 Kilobytes for boot partition and a size of 4 Gigabytes for swap partition (based on 2GB ram). The rest of the hard disk space is allocated to the data area, root partition.

After the partitioning of the hard disk is done, initialize the boot area with boot code found in /boot/gptzfsboot.

The same disk layout is duplicated to the second hard disk, in order to create ZFS mirroring disk setup.

Next, create ZFS pool with the name of “zeetank”, consisting the partition “primary-root” & ”secondary-root” with ZFS mirroring. Then create a mount point to hold the root partitions and set the boot partitions to find “zeetank/root” for necessary booting files. Finally, list the disk layout we just did and double confirm it.

If typo or any misconfiguration of the disk layout happened, use the following commands for disk partition to delete and/or destroy:

# gpart delete -i 1 da0

# gpart destroy da0

The completed disk layout should look like this:

Listing 1b. Sample of partition layout

root@handmade-nas:/root # gpart show

=> 34 20971453 da0 GPT (10G)

34 128 1 freebsd-boot (64k)

162 1048576 2 freebsd-swap (512M)

1048738 19922749 3 freebsd-zfs (9.5G)

=> 34 20971453 da1 GPT (10G)

34 128 1 freebsd-boot (64k)

162 1048576 2 freebsd-swap (512M)

1048738 19922749 3 freebsd-zfs (9.5G)

Listing 1c. Sample of ZFS setup

root@handmade-nas:/root # zpool get all zeetank

NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE

zeetank size 9.44G –

zeetank capacity 0% –

zeetank altroot /mnt local

zeetank health ONLINE –

zeetank guid 7047189317064599296 default

zeetank version 28 default

zeetank bootfs zeetank/root local

zeetank delegation on default

zeetank autoreplace off default

zeetank cachefile /tmp/zpool.cache local

zeetank failmode wait default

zeetank listsnapshots off default

zeetank autoexpand off default

zeetank dedupditto 0 default

zeetank dedupratio 1.00x –

zeetank free 9.44G –

zeetank allocated 152K –

zeetank readonly off –

zeetank comment – default

zeetank expandsize 0 –

For more disk redundancy setup on ZFS, you should refer to the FreeBSD Handbook. The ZFS Administration Guide from solaris project can also serve as a good reference. (see Reference for links)

The installation should resume after “exit“. Proceed as usual on how you would install FreeBSD typically. For example, set password for root, configure network interface, setting up time zone and etc. When the menu “Manual Configuration” appears, choose “No”. On the next menu, “Complete”, choose “Live CD” instead, because there is still couple of files we need to setup. Do take note that the root partitions that we created earlier, are mounted on /mnt.

Listing 1d. xxxxxxxxx

# echo ‘zfs_enable=”YES”‘ >> /mnt/etc/rc.conf

# echo ‘zfs_load=”YES”‘ >> /mnt/boot/loader.conf

# echo ‘vfs.root.mountfrom=”zfs:zeetank/root”‘ >> /mnt/boot/loader.conf

# echo ‘/dev/da0p2 none swap sw 0 0’ >> /mnt/etc/fstab

# echo ‘/dev/da1p2 none swap sw 0 0’ >> /mnt/etc/fstab

The lines with “echo” are the necessary ZFS startup parameters FreeBSD needs to know. Next, copy the ZFS cache file onto the mounted file system in order for ZFS to boot properly: see Listing 1e.

Listing 1e. xxxxxxxxxxxx

# zpool export zeetank

# zpool import -o altroot=/mnt -o cachefile=/tmp/zpool.cache zeetank

# cp /tmp/zpool.cache /mnt/boot/zfs/

List the ZFS properties to make a visualize check. Reboot when finish:

# zpool get all zeetank

# reboot

After reboot, log into the box and make yourself as root. Fetch and extract the ports tree as necessary.

Then create a user named “bob”, so that we can log into the file sharing services that we’re going to setup. Since this user is just a common user accessing files through various services, we should stop it from login into the system through any shell. This will be covered in the section setting up FTP server later. For now, create the user:

# pw useradd -mn bob

# passwd bob

Samba File Server

The samba server that we’re going to configure, is meant for windows client file sharing. Firstly, install the port “net/samba36”. For example,

# make -C /usr/ports/net/samba36 install clean

The samba authentication method we are going to use stores information in trivial database. The password files holding user credentials are passdb.tdb & secrets.tdb, resides in /usr/local/etc/samba/.

Edit the file /usr/local/etc/smb.conf with the contents showed in Listing 2a.

Listing 2a. xxxxxxxxxx

[global]

workgroup = Private

netbios name = NAS_box_smb

security = user

encrypt passwords = yes

client lanman auth = no

log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m

passdb backend = tdbsam

load printers = no

printcap name = /dev/null

[bob]

path = /home/bob

browseable = no

writeable = yes

valid users = bob

admin users = bob

Add a user to samba trivial database:

# pdbedit -au bob

Next, start Samba services:

# echo ‘samba_enable=”YES”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf

# service samba start

If all is well, windows client can access the share named “bob” on this box.

AFP Through Netatalk

Mac can share files and backup using time machine with AFP (Apple Filing Protocol), through Netatalk file sharing service. Before starting, install the port “net/netatalk” and uncheck the option “ZEROCONF”. Unless you want to use the Bonjour function through zeroconf.

There will be a few files we will need create/edit:

/usr/local/etc/AppleVolumes.default
/usr/local/etc/afpd.conf
/usr/local/etc/netatalk.conf
/etc/rc.conf

Create the file /usr/local/etc/AppleVolumes.default with the following contents:

: DEFAULT : options:upriv,usedots

/home/bob “bob’s home directory” allow:bob options:tm

The file AppleVolumes.default tells netatalk that the share “/home/bob” can be share only with user “bob” and “Time Machine” function is available with the share.

Next, create the file /usr/local/etc/afpd.conf with these contents, which is only a SINGLE line:

– -ipaddr 0.0.0.0

This basically tell afpd to listen for incoming request in all network interface. Next, create /usr/local/etc/netatalk.conf with the below contents:

ATALK_NAME=NAS_box_afp

The settings in netatalk.conf should be pretty self-explanatory, setting up the hostname for netatalk service.

Finally, set rc parameters in /etc/rc.conf:

# echo ‘afpd_enable=”YES”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf

# echo ‘atalkd_enable=”NO”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf

# echo ‘cnid_metad_enable=”YES”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf

# echo ‘netatalk_enable=”YES”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf

That’s all for the service netatalk. Start the services by:

# service netatalk start

Remember to check /var/log/messages for error messages. The Mac clients should be able to browse this server for appletalk shares as well as using this share for time machine backups if there is not error messages logged.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

The FTP server we are going configure is to provide general file upload & sharing. We will be using the ftp daemon that comes with FreeBSD base installation, ftpd. We’ll also restrict ftp user login to it’s home directory, effectively chroot the user.

In the creation of user bob earlier, the default shell assigned is /bin/sh, which allow the user login using a shell. In order to restrict the user login through services we have configured (samba, netatalk and ftp), we should disable it’s login capabilities. For this purpose, do the following:

Listing 4. xxxxxx

# cp /sbin/nologin /usr/local/bin/ftp-login-only

# echo “/usr/local/bin/ftp-login-only” >> /etc/shells

# mkdir /home/bob/ftpdir

# pw usermod -n bob -d “/home/bob/ftpdir/./” -s “/usr/local/bin/ftp-login-only”

# echo “bob” >> /etc/ftpchroot

The above will duplicate a copy of the nologin shell from base, and list it in /etc/shells, so that ftpd would recognize it. Then, change ”bob” user profile to use the shell duplicated above and set it as home directory. Do take note of the separator “/./”, this would tell ftpd to set the “root” directory structure of the user, starting from there. Effectively preventing the user to go beyond /home/bob/ftpdir.

Next, start the ftp daemon with the following commands:

# echo ‘ftpd_enable=”YES”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf

# service ftpd start

The ftp daemon will log its messages to /var/log/xferlog by default.

Packet Filter – pf

pf is a OpenBSD firewall that is ported to the base of FreeBSD since version 5.x. It is well known for its feature, performance & syntax simplicity. For these reason, we will use it to add another layer of security to the services configure above. Put the following into /etc/pf.conf:

Listing 5. /etc/pf.conf

services_tcp=”{ 21, 22, 139, 445, 548 }”

services_udp=”{ 137, 138 }”

clients_ip=”{ 192.168.0.10, 192.168.0.11 }”

block in all

block out all

pass quick on lo0 all

pass in inet proto icmp all icmp-type echoreq

pass in proto tcp from $clients_ip to port $services_tcp

pass in proto udp from $clients_ip to port $services_udp

# for ftpd to work properly

pass in proto tcp from $clients_ip to port > 49151

The pf rules above allows the IP in “$clients_ip” accessing the services listed in $services_tcp and $services_udp. It also allow ping from all IPs, for troubleshooting purposes. Loopback interface (lo0) checked will be skipped and the default policy is to “block” both inbound & outbound traffic, if no rules are matched.

Next, start up packet firewall:

# echo ‘pf_enable=”YES”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf

# service pf start

Summary

This wraps up the guide on how to setup a NAS by hand configuring the services. This guide with the configuration above are bare minimum. Its purpose is to allow anyone that is interested to find out how to setup a NAS by poking around the system. More reading should be done and, care taken onto securing the services. Of cause, the configuration above could certainly be alter to provide more features. For an example, Samba and Netatalk users can be authenticated with LDAP as a backend. The feature rich ZFS filesystem are barely touch. Just to mention a few, various disk redundancy (mirror, striping with parity) configurations, file compression and filesystem snapshot. The ftp daemon is capable of virtual host like hosting. And pf, a full fledge feature rich firewall. There so much to talk about.

I hope this guide serves a good purpose providing a picture on how a NAS can be built. Below are some links for reference. Have fun.

References

EDWARD TAN

Edward Tan’s day-to-day job is administrating a bunch of servers running on FreeBSD. In his free time, he blogs about techie stuff at http://psybermonkey.net, learns about Perl and thinks about how to contribute back to the FreeBSD community.

About the author

The author is a big fan of using BSD operating system both as a server & desktop. He often mess with scripting languages & configuration management tools then notes it down at http://psybermonkey.net. Occasionally, he’ll talk about his learnings in BSD conference.

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From Reading to Real Life

iX Team — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:57:36 +0000

When I’ve heard that the next issue of BSD Magazine will be dedicated to FreeNAS, the idea came to my mind. I thought that we need a demo!

NetOpenServices (www.netopenservices.com) gave me the opportunity to do it. Opportunity not only in terms of hosting but also in terms of security. I’m aware that giving out the admin account has it consequences. The demo is hosted like a professional one, so there should be no problems with keeping up the host, even if it will appear popular among BSD Magazine readers.

The FreeNOS is a name for a FreeNAS 8.3.1 demo host, that you can find at http://freenos.netopenservices.org. There is no catch – you can play with all the stuff freely and you can even destroy all of the data! Everything can be done with no consequences for the rest of the hosting, since every two hours a kind of refresh of all the components is done automatically. So, every two hours all the data is erased. That’s what I call a real demo.

To play, you have a full VM with 8 Go of RAM, and 12 virtual HD of 40 Go.

Figure 1. System

The plugins system is up, with two plugins: Firefly and Transmission.

Figure 2. Plugins

For the demo, you have a user called ‘bsdmag’ to test the ‘shell’ for example.

Figure 3. Shell

I’ve put the maximum number of services up.

Figure 4. Services

I’m really impressed by the work done by FreeNAS on ZFS, so I have divided the disks into encrypted ZFS. During your tests you can change it, erase, or do whatever else you want.

Figure 5. ZFS

All who want to test it, need to send an e-mail to bsdmag@netopenservices.org only, with ‘FreeNAS – BSDMAG’ in the subject of a message to receive all the login/password details.

The demo is for all April and I’m working on extending its validity. Don’t hesitate to e-mail info@netopenservices.fr with a subject “FreeNAS demo” to explain that you would like it to be available longer.

I wish you enjoy the reading and let the show begin! Come and play with FreeNAS!

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FreeNAS: a Migration Story

iX Team — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:54:34 +0000

In 2010 I was employed as system administrator, and one of my aims was to administer the file sharing service. After having tried a few different solutions, all based on Linux and well known protocols (CIFS and Netatalk), I decided to switch to FreeNAS. And while it was an old version, and therefore without all the today’s gadgets, the choice was the right one and even years after I left the company, the other admins are able to run the machine without any problems.

This article briefly summarizes the migration process and what advantages the usage of FreeNAS provided. This is not a technical article, it is just a “tale” of how I’ve managed the migration. Please note, that the way described here could not be the best one or the one, that applies best to other scenarios.

The Context

The company was running several Linux physical servers, and in particular one for the ERP, one for the file sharing, one for the e-mail, one for the external services (FTP, Web Server) and one as gateway/proxy/firewall. There were around 200 workstations, with the majority of them made of Microsoft Windows PCs and 45 Apple Macs (as graphical workstations). All the network was wired as Gigabit Ethernet and there were three access points used by the selling agents who, in turn, were using Microsoft Windows laptops.

While the majority of the clients were sharing small-to-medium files, the graphical workstations were sharing files ranging from 50 MB to 600 MB each. Moreover, the Microsoft Windows PCs were doing frequent accesses to a lot of documents, meaning that the users were usually opening a file several times a day to add/modify the content and save it back, while graphical workstations were doing low frequency accesses to a small subset of the shared files.

While it was true that the PCs were seldomly accessing graphical files, the graphical workstations had to access (often) file shared by PCs.

Finally, all file accesses had to be authorized and granted on a per-user and a per-office policy. Luckily, all the users and their roles were already enumerated via an OpenLDAP server (the machine running the ERP).

Due to the above requirements, I decided to implement a NAS solution that had to:

connect to the OpenLDAP server in order to authenticate the users;
provide a per-office share as user(s) workspace;;
provide a way to do automatic backups at the fastest speed as possible;
provide a way to specify exactly which user(s) can access which document(s);
be as much as reliable as possible;
had an easy way to add extra disk space on demand.

The motivation that pushed me to choose a NAS dedicated system were that as time passed by, the sharing service got more and more complex with the need to deal with different operating systems and versions, as well as different platforms, file formats, and so on. While Open Source software like Samba and AppleTalk served well the scope, I was also looking for a more integrated solution and, most notably, something easier to use, without having to give away flexibility and stability. The “ease to use” point was motivated by the fact that I needed to share the NAS configuration with other adminitration profiles, and while I felt (and still feel) comfortable with the command line, others do not.

Migrating to FreeNAS

The choice was, as readers can imagine, to adopt FreeNAS. The reason behind that was that the company had already migrated some of the servers from Linux to FreeBSD-based solutions: the first was, in fact, the gateway/firewall appliance that was running pfSense; then it came the external server that migrated to FreeBSD to provide both Web and FTP; then a few internal workstations (mainly by the IT employees). Therefore, choosing a FreeBSD system for the NAS seemed a natural step, and since I wanted to have something dedicated and integrated, the FreeNAS project seemed to me the right one.

Of course, the decision was lead to several factor related to FreeBSD and FreeNAS, and in particular:

a low startup cost;
the stability of the system;
the availability of ZFS as file system;
the compatibility with the main sharing technologies (CIFS, AppleTalk);
an easy to use interface for administration.

In the following all the above will be motivated.

A Low Startup Cost

Luckily, the company I was employed for, was already used to the Open Source solutions, and did not want to get locked into vendors’ products if possible. And luckily, FreeNAS is a solution that does not impose a vendor lock-in, is free (that is at zero cost) and does not require a lot of resources to run. This allowed me to implement a NAS solution exploiting good, but cheap, hardware and with a no-cost at all for the software.

The Stability of the System

One thing I noted while working with both Linux and FreeBSD machines was that the latters were running smoothly for a longer time. Usually, keeping up-to-date a FreeBSD machine resulted in a simpler task than keeping up-to-date a Linux one, and this was particularly true also because the company was running different Linux distributions, each one with its own update policies, release schedules, and internal mechanisms. In other words, the FreeBSD machines were all behaving coherently. Finally, FreeBSD had proven to run longer without hanging or needing reboots than Linux on the same (old) hardware. Of course, while this strictly depends on both the Linux distributions, versions, the hardware and the administrator(s) skills, the above was true in such context.

The Availability of ZFS as File System

Two features of ZFS were particularly attracting to me for this job: the availability of snapshotting and the integrated volume manager.

On the other Linux machines we had to play with partitions and mount point each time a new disk was added, and that was due to the error of not setting up a volume manager from the beginning. With ZFS the problem disappeared.

Moreover, the idea of snapshotting was appealing to me because it allowed me to implement an automated backup up system transparent to the user. In fact, it often happened that a user started modifying a large graphical file just to discover it has made a wrong job and has to start over. Forcing the users to learn a revision control system was too complicated, therefore I decided to made snapshots on a regular schedule just to help the users to recover “damaged” files. On the other hand, the users were informed that after a certain amount of time snapshots would have been made persistent, that means no history was more available.

Just for the sake of clarity, beside the snapshotting, there was a regular backup technique.

The Compatibility with the Main Sharing Technologies

Having a heterogeneous environment and having to grant simultaneous access to Unix/Linux machines, Apple OSX computers and Microsoft Windows PCs required to have deep support for several sharing protocols and technologies. While one of my aims was to reduce protocol overlapping choosing, if possible, a single one to ease of administration, the fact that FreeNAS does support CIFS, AppleTalk and NFS allowed me to be prepared to switch to the best protocol available depending on the other side machine.

An Easy to Use Administration UI

Usually Unix administrators are tied to the Command Line Interface (CLI), and to some extent they also believe that using a GUI is a childhood proof. However, not all administrators are Unix ones, and this was the case: the company had one Microsoft Windows administrator and an Apple (Junior) one, both with no or little Unix skills. I decided that apart from the need for them to acquire some Unix skills, they had to be enabled to participate in the NAS management to both reduce the my overhead and make a better usage of the resources (in this case, people) available.

Being FreeNAS shipped with an excellent Web UI, I was able to let my colleagues to take part in the configuration phase and to grow up to the point they were able to create and manage shares, crontab and backup scripts, and users’ privileges without any further help. In this way, I needed mainly for the harder tasks and low level configuration, while they were able to do day-to-day maintanance.

The Migration

There was around 1 TB of data to be migrated from one Linux server, and another 400 GB to be consolidated to the FreeNAS installation. In fact, while the main project was to move only the Linux file shared part (the former), reviewing the sharing status reveled that other stuff need to be placed on the FreeNAS system (like, files and folders user have shared among their workstations without informing us, like, the latter).

Being the total size of data not that huge, I was able to migrate everything within hours, and in particular, during night. However, I did not run a single migration, but proceeded with different steps.

In the beginning, I set up the FreeNAS machine using an USB stick to boot, to not waste even a single byte on the hard disks. After the initial required setup (network interfaces, admin password, etc.) I connected the FreeNAS to the OpenLDAP server to get out of the box all the accounts. And this was really simple thanks to the great tools FreeNAS provides.

After that, I decided to remotely mount the already available shares into the FreeNAS, and to “republish” them on the network, so that the FreeNAS was effectively doing a proxy for the shares. Thanks to the fact that the FreeNAS and the original server were accessing the same account database, I did not have any problem about the permissions. My choice at this point was to republish shares using only the CIFS protocol, in order to have a simpler situation than using a per-client protocol.

I ran few tests for a week to ensure that everything was working fine, even if performances were not good due to the fact that the FreeNAS machine was not servicing local data.

After that, I implemented a local-based backup, that was a set of scripts to do regular backups of the FreeNAS and its content over a part of the FreeNAS itself, as well as to the central backup machine. This was the only phase were I needed to get to the FreeNAS CLI, since we had to deal with shell script development. More in detail, I had to do some “tricks” to place scripts on the USB stick and to be able to install a few other tools out of the ports. However, as soon as the scripts were in place, I took back the Web UI to place them in the crontab table.

Having the FreeNAS machine acting as a proxy, and the backup ready to work, I did start the migration of the clients so that they were redirected to the FreeNAS server instead of the original Linux NAS one.

I deployed a ZFS file system with roughly one per office/user file system, setting up quotas and assigning ownership and permissions.

Finally, I migrated all the data, using rsync on a regular base for a couple of pass, so to reduce the total copy overload. The migration was performed during a weekend to reduce the problems with live data and to avoid having to disconnect the users.

So Far, So Good!

While the above migration could seem even too long for such a mid amount of data, I preferred to do it in that way because it was my first experience with FreeNAS in an enterprise environment. It is worth saying I did not have any particular problem to complete the migration, and the system was very stable and rock-solid.

During the time I added a few extra features to our FreeNAS machine, like the aggregation of the two on-board network cards, as well as regular updates of the whole system, without incorring in any downtime.

The last time I had the opportunity to check the FreeNAS machine it was running from a year without any particular problem, and remember I’m talking about a machine tused in day-by-day work but that us, the administrators, were forgetting to have!

The only problem I ran into was tied to the USB stick I used as root filesystem: one day I was physically moving the machine from one place to another just to discover that the USB stick was unable to boot the machine anymore. It was, however, a ‘no pain situation’ since I had another ‘clone’ USB stick from which I started the machine.

Conclusions

My experience with FreeNAS is nothing but good on every aspect. It is worth noting that the effort done by the FreeNAS team to provide a clean, usable and easy to understand Web UI is really important in my opinion: while “real” Unix system administrator will always be able to fire up a console and see what it is happening under the hood, having a good UI allows other people to jump into the admin side. Of course this does not mean that everyone is automatically skilled as an administrator, but means that the admin burden can be scattered among different people with different skills. This was my experience indeed: thanks to the UI other not-Unix administrators were able to be tought quickly and perform many routinely tasks on the FreeNAS configuration.

Today, even years after I left the company, the other admins are still able to keep the FreeNAS box up-to-date and to run it without any particular problem, and this is the proof of the stability of the system itself.

Physical or Virtual?

In the last years the virtualization has been strongly advocated, and today is quite common to find whole servers virtualized onto a single hardware machine. It may sound strange that the described FreeNAS server was implemented as physical instead of virtual, but the reason for that was to keep the total cost as low as possible. As described in the “A Low Startup Cost” section, the company was already in the mood of the Open Source and commodity hardware mindset, and therefore instead of investing money in a huge super cluster, the company preferred to buy and assemble “small” and cheap servers. This also granted the company to implement replication solutions quite easily.

About the author

Luca Ferrari lives in Italy with his wife and son. He is an Adjunct Professor at Nipissing University, Canada, a co-founder and the vice-president of the Italian PostgreSQL Users’ Group (ITPUG). He simply loves the Open Source culture and refuses to log-in to non-Unix systems. He can be reached on line at http://fluca1978.blogspot.com

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FreeNAS – Detachable Storage has Come of Age

iX Team — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:40:19 +0000

While regular readers of this column will appreciate that I am long in tooth (the corollary being that I am short in memory) – I still remember 8 inch 1.2MB floppy disks that would only hold less than 1MB under CPM.

My first I.T. task before I jumped ship form electronics to computing was diagnosing an elderly CPM based word processing system that had 5.25 inch floppy drives and an equally mature Enhanced Small Disk Interface (ESDI) hard drive. Based on the old ST506/412 interface originally devised by Seagate Technology, in the early 80’s ESDI was a common sight for the field engineer. While I cannot remember the exact capacity of the drive, it was only double digit Megabytes – if that. After a time examining the system, it was clear that the hard disk was either encountering a large number of consecutive bad sectors or had suffered a head crash, as the endless “Skip Retry Ignore” prompt testified.

It wasn’t until I moved from the electronics environment to I.T. that I encountered the 8 inch drives. Attached to some arcane piece of big iron, these drives were well past their sell by date as demonstrated by the protective layer of dust that gathered around the front bezel and indeed the door handle that was used to secure the floppy disk in place and lower the heads onto the media. Oh, how in these days the demons of bad sectors, corrupt media, and dirt used to haunt the I.T tech – a backup floppy with a year or two accounting data could be destroyed by a well aimed fingerprint onto the media itself. Saying that, with a scalpel, a sacrificial carcass from a new floppy disk and some industrial alcohol the data often could often be recovered. The old school trick of holding the media up against a bright light would allow the technician to see if the drive heads had come in contact with the media, and if no light showed through, a gentle clean with a non-abrasive lint-free tissue often cured the problem. While magnetic drop-outs did occur, more often than not physical contamination was the cause of many issues (including dirty drive heads).

This progression and evolution of floppy media continued through 1.44MB and 2.88MB and onwards, until the time came for the hard drive and CDROM drive to become ubiquitous. I remember a fellow engineer proudly demonstrating his new CDROM drive, and commenting on how flawlessly the proprietary software had installed under Windows 3.1. Suddenly, attached media had grown up and the availability of an encyclopedia on the desktop via this shiny platter (which at the time seemed almost indestructible) was revolutionary. Yet the concept of quickly expandable mass online storage hadn’t really been adopted in the commercial environment – yes we had dedicated servers, but these only handled certain network protocols. If you wanted TCP/IP the stack itself was not included in the commercial Operating Systems of the time, so you were strictly limited in flexibility.

While the concept of Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been available for a long time (the original 3com 3server originally shipped in 1985), the idea of a separate network appliance didn’t really take off until the late 90’s. The market up until this point for storage expansion was dominated by Direct Attached Storage (DAS). Servers were often purchased with plenty of redundant internal and slot pace for expansion, and adding an additional SCSI card and drive combination at a later date was fairly trivial. However, this was not always an ideal solution, as the server would need to be taken offline for the installation of the hardware, and even if the server had an external SCSI interface, hot-plug technology was still a long way off in the small / medium sized business sector.

The first truly innovative device that I encountered was the Cobalt Qube, which offered a wide array of functionality and user interface options. Initially designed to be fan-less, the Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages (MIPS) based architecture only required 20 Watts of power to run, but a fan was added due to customer expectation that a quality device would require one. Running a modified version of Redhat Linux, the device hit the streets at $1000. Everything was available via either the command line via SSH or Telnet, or a more sophisticated interface was available via the web interface. This is where a NAS based appliance offers great benefits to the network administrator – just plug and go, no formatting required – just copy your data across if required.

The big question in the free software community at the time was why? With a bit of tuning, any Linux / BSD distribution could offer this functionality but the unique selling point of the Qube was the support and the elegant design of both the user interface and the hardware itself. Appealing to a market sector that wanted a “plug and play” solution was critical, yet it was still just a pre-configured box. This is where FreeNAS truly offers the best of both worlds, a downloadable ISO for those that want to use custom hardware and an appliance for those that just want to plug and go.

The ability to plug in a dedicated appliance via a network cable and reach it via CIFS, SMB, NFS, FTP, SSH or RSYNC blows wide open traditional closed commercial environments. This is mass storage for the masses, whether it be the small business, the netizen with a large collection of downloads, or as a backup solution. As FreeNAS is very light, it is ideal for installing on older hardware, and provided the target box has > 6GB of RAM, the security and additional functionality of ZFS is available facilitating snapshots.

The bottom line is this – products like the award winning FreeNAS offer complex functionality driven by proven technology that is available free to anyone that is willing to download and install an ISO. As an appliance, the FreeNAS mini is also available off the shelf from iXsystems. That indeed, is technological evolution in action – power, choice and flexibility.

BIO

Rob Somerville has been passionate about technology since his early teens. A keen advocate of open systems since the mid eighties, he has worked in many corporate sectors including finance, automotive, airlines, government and media in a variety of roles from technical support, system administrator, developer, systems integrator and IT manager. He has moved on from CP/M and nixie tubes but keeps a soldering iron handy just in case.

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Creative Integrations: Workflow Improvements with FreeNAS and TrueNAS

iX Team — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:32:23 +0000

“We’ve deployed FreeNAS and TrueNAS at several client locations and the visual effects people are loving the TrueNAS system and how easy it is to manage.”
-Tim Nagle, Owner of Creative Integrations

Creative Integrations
Creative Integrations is a full service engineering/integration firm that specializes in post-production, recording, animation, and broadcast facilities. With over a decade of experience, Creative integrations helps their clients design, improve, and streamline workflows.
The company is owned and operated by Tim Nagle, with experience on many sides of the industry from engineering, production, post-production, music and broadcast all over North America and Europe. Creative Integrations offers a proactive, technical view of the landscape customers are faced with and works with clients to find the most effective, economical solutions available in the current market place. With offices in Dallas, TX and New York City, NY, Creative Integrations is positioned to fulfill the needs of any project on schedule and on budget.

The Storage Challenge
Creative Integrations is always on the lookout for new solutions that can help their customers improve operational efficiency. While at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in April of 2012, Time Nagle discovered FreeNAS as an open source unified storage operating system. Tim had a client with an existing NAS, but the client didn’t have anyone to administer it. Although Tim could do it himself, the time investment needed to learn his customer’s storage platform would cause delays and keep him from other critical duties. It would also mean constant additional oversight.
Improved Workflow on Open Standards
The solution was clear for Creative Integrations. They completely rebuilt their client’s backup server with FreeNAS for a fresh start. As a result, workflow improved greatly, throughput increased significantly and and workers found the intuitiveness of the FreeNAS interface easy to use. After the success of the initial deployment, Creative Integrations converted the other NAS server to FreeNAS and set it to run nightly replication over Rsync, preserving critical data automatically and providing the client with extra peace of mind.

“I heard about FreeNAS at a conference and realized it was an immediate necessity for one of my clients. They had an existing NAS system that was not being used to its full potential. After I rebuilt their backup system using FreeNAS, their workflow improved by probably 5 times what they were able to do do previously. This was largely due to the increases in throughput and the ease of management of the FreeNAS platform.”
– Tim Nagle

TrueNAS in the Media Production Environment
One of Creative Integrations’ clients, a children’s hospital in Ft. Worth, TX, started a hospital TV station for the patients to watch and participate in. They wanted to build a FreeNAS system for their multimedia storage, so Creative Integrations helped consult them on which hardware would be the most compatible with their operating system and use case. During this process, they contacted iXsystems and found that the TrueNAS appliances were already using the exact kind of hardware Creative Integrations was considering.
TrueNAS also came with commercial level support, which was something that any enterprise can ill afford to do without. Having expert level assistance during deployment and in the production environment can mean the difference between minutes and hours of downtime and are an extra line of security for a business’s critical data. The professionals at iXsystems provide Creative Integrations with timely support throughout the lifetime of their TrueNAS appliances.

“The support was really it. I can handle a lot of this, but as soon as I get in over my head, I need to have someone I can call. I love forums, but the problem is I usually get more than one answer. When a system is in production, it becomes critical to get a prompt, unambiguous response.”
-Tim Nagle

Scalable Storage in a Post-Production Environment
Another of Creative Integrations’ customers, a full-service post production studio in Dallas, needed centralized storage to house all their media, so they turned to TrueNAS. iXsystems provided them with a 36-bay solution with dual, 6-core Xeon processors, 96GB of RAM, and two 10GbE, 4-port cards. These ports were configured with LACP and connected to a 24-port Netgear SXM7724 10GbE switch which serves all of the main client editing stations and utility computers. Non-production employees and the audio system are connected through a 24-port GSM7252 1GbE switch due to lower throughput needs.
This system serves eighteen users– twelve of them requiring high bandwidth. It shares primarily over AFP, with CIFS used as a separate login system for inter-office access. The client uses their TrueNAS system to send projects, store media, and even render media out to the storage servers. The TrueNAS appliance eliminated the bottlenecks associated with using spinning disks to locally store data. With separate login systems, access to their critical media storage is limited to authorized production users only, adding an additional level of data security.
Over time, the client started running out of memory on their TrueNAS system and needed to expand. iXsystems provided Creative Integrations with a 45-bay expansion shelf, adding another 135TB of raw capacity to the initial 70TB. In total, they have 158TB of usable storage running RAID-Z, single disk parity with ZFS, with disks grouped into 5 drive vdevs (LUNs). They were able to introduce the additional storage into their operation quickly and without any hang-ups.

“There was one point where we were getting really low on storage space and it was getting a bit uncomfortable. Adding on an expansion shelf was a very quick transition and I know I can just get another the next time we are running low on data. It’s nice to know that I won’t have a huge headache on my hands every time we need to scale up.”
-Tim Nagle

Flexible Solutions for any Media
Both FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been critical in improving the operations of a growing number of clients for Creative Integrations. FreeNAS provides an open source storage platform for its customers to use in their media environment. TrueNAS has additional features that provide extra data security with additional features and commercial grade support from the developers that bring the world FreeNAS. Both platforms provide the functionality, performance, and stability any organization needs to improve operational efficiency, and Creative Integrations looks forward to utilizing both in the future.
About iXsystems
iXsystems builds rock solid enterprise-class server and storage solutions. All of our products are assembled, tested, and shipped from our company headquarters in Silicon Valley. Technical support is provided in-house by the same engineers that build the systems. Thousands of companies, universities, and U.S. Government departments have come to rely on iXsystems’ customer-first commitment to excellence. iXsystems champions the cause of Open Source technology by dedicating extensive resources to several FreeBSD community projects: FreeNAS, PC-BSD, FreeBSD, and TrueOS.
BIO
Mark VonFange is the Professional Services Manager at iXsystems, providing oversight and coordination of its FreeBSD, PC-BSD, and FreeNAS support and development services. The Professional Services Team provides services ranging from mission critical support to software and firmware development to private consultation. Mark also develops internal and external documentation for division sales and marketing.

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FreeNAS Issue of BSD Magazine

iX Team — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:19:58 +0000

BSD Magazine, the leading publisher of BSD news and articles, is proud to present a special FreeNAS edition. In this monthâ€™s issue, readers can find a collection of insightful FreeNAS articles from iXsystemsâ€™ FreeNAS development, marketing and support teams, as well as beta-testers. Dru Lavigne, John Hixson, Mark VonFange, Annie Zhang, and Alfred Perlstein all contributed to the latest issue.

With the recent FreeNAS 8.3.1 release, there are plenty of new features to talk about. Readers can find articles on plugins, disk encryption, ZFSv28, and much more. FreeNAS users share their own experience with the open source project, whether it be in a business environment or for casual home use.

To download the free online PDF of the FreeNAS issue, visit BSDMag.org. Printed copies of the issue will soon be available for purchase from the FreeBSD Mall.

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FreeNAS 8.3.1-RELEASE-p1 is available

iX Team — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:22:00 +0000

WARNING: FreeNAS 8.3.1-RELEASE-p1 has been found to be fatally flawed. Please download FreeNAS 8.3.1-RELEASE-p2 instead.

Josh Paetzel has announced FreeNAS 8.3.1-RELEASE-p1:

FreeNAS 8.3.1-RELEASE-p1 made it’s way to SF Friday of last week. It fixes a couple of small issues and provides a few small updates.

Serial numbers of disks are shown in the GUI.

Fixed a bug where extending an encrypted pool with more drives could blow away the encryption key.

Samba 3.6.13 (That seems to be missing from the rel notes, I’ll investigate later)

Downloads are here: ~~http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.1/RELEASE-p1/~~

Release notes are here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.1/RELEASE-p2/README/download

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Store free or die hard (drive)

iX Team — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:01:00 +0000

This was originally posted at Spiceworks.com as part of their Spotlight on IT series.

Back in 2010, my company had a single server dedicated to each task in the office. It sounded great in concept, but we seemed to almost constantly be fighting down time from failed components or slow system speed because of the age of the equipment. While weighing the options on how to proceed with the necessary upgrades, we bit the bullet and purchased the VMware Essentials Plus bundle. It was on sale and offered us the failover and HA on the compute clusters that we needed. We did not, however, go for the full â€œstandardâ€ bundle, which would have given us Storage vMotion. As a small business, we must carefully balance the cost with the perks of any given package and the storage vMotion just didnt make the cut. But, by building out our storage platform using FreeNAS, we have been able to largely replace the need for that purchase.

Our storage network is as follows:

2x Dell 2950 Gen2 â€” 16GB Ram (boots FreeNAS from flash)â€¨
32GB SSD in first server for SSD write caching to 8x1TB external SATA 7200 RPM HDDsâ€¨
6x 2TB 7200RPM SATA in RAID5 on perc6/i controller in second serverâ€¨
2x Cisco 2960 24-port Gbit switchâ€¨
1x per server Intel Pro1000 Dual-port Gbit NIC (PCI-e add-on card)â€¨

By using the Intel add-on cards purchased on the used market, we were able to gain redundancy on the network layer, using one port from the Intel and one port from the on-board Broadcom routed to each switch and using iSCSI with MPIO to gain the speed boost. By doing this, each server has two routes and two NICs per route to talk on. In the event that any switch or port fails, it has a backup port that is already transmitting.

We have not, as of yet, made use of the HA option that FreeNAS offers. When we are in a position to purchase replacement servers for the main computer nodes, I will push the current CPU nodes down to the storage level and configure two for HA and the third for the backups. Until then, we have a single primary iSCSI LUN that boots all the servers and a second server that currently only has a NFS share on it to receive the backups.

When trying to figure out IOPS and what kind of performance we needed out of our storage, it was not nearly as straightforward as we thought it would be. Based off our pre-VMware configuration, we estimated 400 IOPS, so on the first configuration we had 5x 2TB 7200 RPM drives in a hardware RAID5. We quickly found this to be insufficient, but it was a numbers game trying to balance the cost of drives with the performance we wanted/needed to serve our staff and our customers. The current iteration is using FreeNAS with 8x 1TB HDDs and a 32GB SSD as a â€œzil/logâ€ drive. By having the SSD in the mix, we are able to cache the writes to the drives while giving instant access to the reads for the most part. Adding the SSD alone has resulted in a significant improvement in the performance of our storage platform. I couldnâ€™t recommend anyone going without a SSD knowing how cheap they are to purchase now.

Looking back at the notion of using a vendor-supplied solution, I compare our setup to a Dell PowerVault iSCSI SAN because it is as close as I can get to a comparable system. The Dell costs $5,379 according to their website. Below is a breakdown of where our money was spent on our setup.

Cisco sSwitches: $1,100 perâ€¨
Dell 2950 Gen2 â€” repurposed (free for this project)â€¨
1TB HDDs â€” $60 per (eight total)â€¨
32 GB SSD â€” repurposed after a failed desktop SSD upgrade project (thatâ€™s another storyâ€¦)â€¨
2TB HDD’s â€” $150 per (six total)â€¨
5x Intel pro1000 NIC â€” $35 per
SGI/Rackable SE3016 â€” $150

Total cost: $3,755

So for roughly $1,600 less than the cost of one piece of hardware without any drives, we were able to purchase two switches, 14 HDDs, and five dual-port gigabit NICs. We got lucky in that we had recently knocked out the last of the remaining physical servers and were able to repurpose them for use in the storage platform, which cut a bit from the cost of the project but not as much as you might expect.

At this time, I am able to find SuperMirco servers for around $300 with 2x quad core 2.6 Xeons, 16GB ram, and a 2U case with six drive bays. Assuming you donâ€™t have any spare servers, add another $600 to your price and you have a total for your setup.

One note for those thinking of doing FreeNAS with ZFS: Make sure you have enough RAM. FreeNAS has retailed recommendations on their Wiki and it is not something I suggest you ignore. (Trust me, I tried on my home rig before loading it at the office.)

Assuming you were to spend the money to populate it with 12 (out of 24 bays) 2TB drives specified in their web page, you would have to shell out $419 per drive to the tune of $5,028 for a total of 24TB total storage. Compare this price to the NewEgg price of $109.99 or $1,319.88 total, and you have a very significant price savings without a hit on realistic performance especially if you utilize a small SSD as a zil drive. If you find you still want a bit more, you can always add in a larger SSD as a read cache, at which point your drives would be largely independent from your noticed performance.

At this point you can truly customize your solution using FreeNAS (or similar products) and get exactly what you need out of your box without having any of the extra â€œfluffâ€ that comes with vendor-provided solutions and results in a higher cost for what could very well turn out to be an inferior product. I have played with a number of the solutions offered by the open-source community and I prefer FreeNAS (as you might have guessed) because of the ease of setup and the overall interface. It is simple and easy to understand.

For those of you out there that are well versed in BSD, you will note that by using a wrapped product, you are losing out on the system updates until FreeNAS pulls them into their product but in the year and a half that we have been using open source solutions, I have used both direct and packaged solutions and have not come across one that I would recommend like I do FreeNAS.

As you look out on the landscape of open source VS closed-source and new VS used, please remember that it takes millions upon millions of dollars to market something coming from one of the top vendors and that cost will always be wrapped back into their products. If Google can use consumer grade equipment in their datacenters to replace enterprise equipment and use that money to build in redundant circuits, why cant we? I personally would rather have three redundant servers that die once a year than one server that dies once every two years that takes my entire business to its knees. In this day of technology, we simply cant afford to be down and our customers cant afford it either. This fact does not, however, mean that we have to shell out $50,000 to build out a cluster of three servers with redundant datastores, redundant switches, and a bunch of features we donâ€™t want or need just to tell management that we bought stuff with a warranty.

In small business, we are the first and last stop on the blame train, so why not take the time to learn some new tech and put those new skills to work at your company making it a more redundant environment?

Rob Fauls
IT Director
Southern Freight, Inc.

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FreeNAS 8.3.1 is Released!

iX Team — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:02:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.3.1-RELEASE.

Images and plugins can be downloaded from the following site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.1/RELEASE/

FreeNAS 8.3.1 is based on FreeBSD 8.3 with version 28 of the ZFS filesystem, and features volume based encryption for ZFS.

There have been no major changes between 8.3.1-RC1 and RELEASE, mostly bugfixes and minor usability improvements to the GUI. See the release notes for a complete list: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.1/RELEASE/README/download

Please familiarize yourself extensively with the encryption features of FreeNAS before using them. Doing the wrong thing can end up in a state where the volume is hidden behind very difficult to break AES 256 encryption.

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes#ZFS_Encryption

Many modern CPUs feature hardware support for encryption. If hardware support is available FreeNAS will use it. In these cases the overhead of encryption will be negligible. For systems without hardware encryption acceleration the performance impact will vary based on the number of disks being used in the encrypted volume.

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FreeNAS 8.3.1-RC1 is Available

iX Team — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:26:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.3.1-RC1.

Images and plugins can be downloaded from the following site:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.1/RC1/

This is the first and only release candidate planned for the final version of FreeNAS 8.3.1-RELEASE.

FreeNAS 8.3.1 is based on FreeBSD 8.3 with version 28 of the ZFS filesystem, and features volume based encryption for ZFS volumes.

There have been no major changes between 8.3.1-BETA3 and RC1, mostly bugfixes and minor usability improvements to the GUI. See the release notes for a complete list.

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Joshua Parker Ruehlig’s FreeNAS plugins

iX Team — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 19:12:00 +0000

The FreeNAS team would like to highlight the efforts of Joshua Parker Ruehlig from the FreeNAS Forums who, in the true spirit of open source, recently published several new plugins for FreeNAS.

Joshua had already been using sickbeard and Sabnzbd on a windows-based NAS. When he found out about the plugin system in FreeNAS, Joshua started to experiment.

Since then, hereâ€™s a list of all the plugins he has developed:

headphones – music downloading for sabnzdb
gamez – video game downloading for sabnzbd
lazylibrarian – automated ebook downloading
sabnzbd – usenet automation
sickbeard – internet personal video recorder
maraschino – frontend for XBMC
couchpotato – media search automation

The plugins that Joshua created can be found at http://freenas.synergames.com//browse.php?action=browse&userid=7&folder=amd64.

For release information, please refer to the notes here: [Release Thread] SAB / SB / CP / HP / Maraschino / LL / Gamez

Support information is available here: [Support Thread] SAB / SB / CP / HP / Maraschino / LL / Gamez

Weâ€™d like to thank Joshua again for contributing plugins to the FreeNAS project. FreeNAS would be nothing without the support of its wonderful community. If youâ€™d like to make your own plugins, why not check out the official documentation? Weâ€™d love to hear about your progress on the Plugins forum.

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FreeNAS 8.3.1-BETA3 is Available

iX Team — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:01:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 8.3.1-BETA3. This is the last planned public beta of 8.3.1 as it moves towards the final.

FreeNAS 8.3.1-BETA3 can be downloaded from the following location:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.1/BETA3/

FreeNAS 8.3.1 adds ZFS volume encryption to the features available in FreeNAS 8.3.0. BETA3 has a number of bug fixes and feature requests based on community feedback and testing of the first two beta releases, as well as feedback and bug fixes from FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE-p1.

There are no further betas planned as FreeNAS 8.3.1 marches towards the final release. At this point there will be no additional features added to 8.3.1.

Virtio drivers have been added to the image. For this BETA they default to off, which makes them a bit difficult to use.

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FreeNAS 8.3.1-BETA2 is Available

iX Team — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 18:21:00 +0000

Josh has announced the availability of the FreeNAS 8.3.1-BETA2 images to Sourceforge:

Things went fairly well in the first beta and I’m shooting for 8.3.1-R by the end of the month, so here’s another BETA to give things a spin. At this point things are looking to be in good shape, I’m calling this a BETA because I’m very conservative, and because encryption can go wrong in such grand fashion. I’d rather this image wasn’t used for critical or production use. Make sure to have backups!

That being said we have no reports of anyone losing data because of bugs in the encryption code, nor have we had any issues with it in our internal testing. (4 months give or take). If you find any bugs in this BETA, please report them to support.freenas.org.

Enhancements

Add a feature to initialize disks with random data.
Add the iconv option to rsync.

Bugfixes

Fix a bug that was preventing multiple destination address for SMART from working.
Create an empty /var/db/pkg to silence warnings from the SNMP service.
Fix a bug that was preventing the default scrubs from running. ZFS scrubs are very I/O intensive, and this update will fix many instances where the default monthly scrub wasn’t running. It’s recommended to check the scrub schedule and be aware of it’s impact on FreeNAS.
Disable the ZFS encryption option when extending a volume. The system will automatically match the encryption state of the existing pool.
Commit changes to ataidle immediately rather than requiring a reboot.
Fix a bug that prevented creation of RAIDZ volumes.
Fix a bug that prevented stopping the CIFS service.

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FreeNAS 8.3.1 Beta 1 is Available

iX Team — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:44:00 +0000

The images for FreeNAS 8.3.1-BETA1 are available on sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.1/BETA1/

This is a BETA! I am very emphatic about this because this is the first image available with ZFS volume encryption. Up to this point we’ve been pretty good about preserving ZFS volumes, not matter what happens to the OS or configuration.

With this image all bets are off. When encryption goes wrong it usually takes your data with it.

This image is a BETA, it is not suitable for production use, it is not suitable to put data on that you care about even if you are NOT using the encryption functions.

There’s no way to migrate an unencrypted volume to encrypted or vice-versa.

If your processor supports the AES-NI instruction set you should see very little if any degradation in performance when using encryption.

Aside from the encryption, the iscsi target was updated, so target reloading needs testing, and samba was updated, so shadow copies needs testing.

See the release notes for a complete list of changes.

The docs and screenshots for this should be updated by next week.

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FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE-p1 Available

iX Team — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 01:54:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE-p1. Images and plugins can be downloaded from here.

FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE-p1 is a bugfix release for FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE.Â The main bug it addresses is the display of a “Welcome to nginx” page instead of the WebUI which occurs sporadically in some situations. If you are running 8.3.0-RELEASE and haven’t encountered this bug there may be very little reason to upgrade.

There have been no major changes between 8.3.0-RELEASE and RELEASE-p1, mostly bugfixes and minor usability improvements to the GUI. See the release notes for a complete list.

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FreeNAS at LISA

iX Team — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:41:00 +0000

There will be a FreeBSD booth in the exhibition area of LISA, to be held at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina in San Diego, CA. Exhibition hours are Wednesday, December 12 from 12:00â€“19:00 p.m and Thursday, December 13 from 9:30â€“14:00. Registration is required for this event, but is free for the exhibition area.

We’ll be giving out copies of FreeNAS and PC-BSD as well as some cool swag. There will also be an iXsystems booth with some cool hardware running FreeNAS/TrueNAS.

If you are in the San Diego area, drop by and say hi!

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FreeNAS 8.3.0 Users Guide

iX Team — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:25:00 +0000

The 8.3.0 Users Guide is available for download in the following formats:

Â Â Â EPUB
Â Â Â HTML
Â Â Â PDF

For those who would like to assist the project financially, a Kindle version is also available for purchase from Amazon. The ASIN is B009Z245ZU and this version is text-to-speech enabled. If you are outside of North America, check the Amazon website for your region.

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FreeNAS at MeetBSD California

iX Team — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:27:00 +0000

MeetBSD California takes place this upcoming weekend, November 3-4 at Yahoo! in Santa Clara, CA. Josh Paetzel will be presenting “FreeNASâ„¢: Storage for Open Source” on November 3 and several members of the FreeNAS team will also be attending the conference.

This event requires registration ($75USD).

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FreeNAS 8.3.0 is Released!

iX Team — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:04:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE.

Images and plugins can be downloaded from the following site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.0/RELEASE/

FreeNAS 8.3.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.3 with version 28 of the ZFS filesystem. This is a major milestone in FreeNAS development, bringing in the plugin system with ZFS version 28. Development of the FreeNAS 8.2 branch has come to a halt, as both ZFS version 15 as well as FreeBSD 8.2 are no longer supported.

There have been no major changes between 8.3.0-RC1 and RELEASE, mostly bugfixes and minor usability improvements to the GUI. See the release notes for a complete list: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.0/RC1/README/download

The bug tracker for FreeNAS is available at http://support.freenas.org

Discussion about FreeNAS occurs in the FreeNAS forums, located at: http://forums.freenas.org as well as in the official FreeNAS IRC channel on FreeNode in #freenas.

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FreeNAS 8.3.0-RC1 is available

iX Team — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 22:36:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-RC1.

Images and plugins can be downloaded from the following site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.0/RC1/

This is the first and only release candidate planned for the final version of FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE.

FreeNAS 8.3.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.3 with version 28 of the ZFS filesystem.

There have been no major changes between 8.3.0-BETA3 and RC1, mostly bugfixes and minor usability improvements to the GUI. See the release notes for a complete list: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.0/RC1/README/download

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FreeNAS at FSOSS

iX Team — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:52:00 +0000

There will be a presentation “Introduction to FreeNAS 8.3” at FSOSS to be held in Toronto, Canada on Friday, October 26. The link to the presentation will be made available at bsdevents.org.

In addition, each attendee will receive a FreeNAS CD in their registration pack. Registration is required for this event.

The presentation slides are available here.

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FreeNAS at EuroBSDCon

iX Team — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:37:00 +0000

Several members of the FreeNAS team will be at EuroBSDCon to be held in Warsaw, Poland on October 18-21. There will be a booth in the expo area which will hand out FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA2 CDs as well as cool swag.

Dru Lavigne will give a half-day workshop “Introduction to FreeNAS 8.3” on Thursday, October 18 beginning at 10:00.

John Hixson will present “FreeNAS System Architecture” at 12:10 on Saturday, October 20.

FreeNAS users may also be interested inÂ Martin Matuska’s presentation “Tuning ZFS on FreeBSD” at 10:55 on Sunday, October 21.

Registration is required for this event.

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New Video on Configuring Plugins

iX Team — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 12:53:00 +0000

Another instructional video has been uploaded to Youtube. This video demonstrates how to configure the Transmission, Firefly, and MiniDLNA plugins on FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA2 to work together as a streaming media platform.

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FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA3 is Available

iX Team — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:35:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA3. This is the last planned public beta of 8.3.0 as it moves towards the final.

FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA3 can be downloaded from the following location:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.0/BETA3/

This BETA includes a refactoring of the Active Directory and LDAP integration. It has a rework of serial port support, adding the ability to set the serial port speed. The NFS sharing was refactored in BETA2 with an eye towards maintaining compatability with sharing schemes set up in previous FreeNAS releases. The refactored sharing is more powerful and flexible than previous releases, while enforcing the OS based rules. Support for the LSI “skinny” RAID controllers was added, including the 9265/9285.

Upgrading an existing ZFS pool is a one way street, once the upgrade is done it is not possible to use older versions of FreeNAS, nor is it possible to downgrade your pool. This upgrade can be done by running zpool upgrade from the CLI, it is not done automatically via the upgrader, nor is there a way to do the upgrade from the GUI.

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FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA2 is now available

iX Team — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:58:00 +0000

8.3.0-BETA2 is now available for download and testing. Some of the changes for this upcoming release include:

ZFSv28 adds deduplication, RAIDZ3, improved snapshot support, and a removable log device.

Based on FreeBSD 8.3 which updated and added some new drivers as described in the FreeBSD 8.3 Release Notes.

Reporting graphs now provide buttons for navigating to different points in time.

Automatic redirect from http:// to https:// when accessing the administrative GUI when SSL is enabled.

Add support for HighPoint 27xx cards.

Add the CARP module to the build. The CARP module is not loaded by default and high availability must be configured manually from the command line. More information about CARP can be found in the OpenBSD FAQ.

Add a begin and end time for Replication Tasks.

Add the ability to specify the SSL certificate and private key to be used for encrypting FTP connections.

Add a memory device as an option when performing a GUI upgrade.

In Active Directory configuration, add checkboxes for: Use default domain, UNIX extensions, and Verbose logging.

Add additional SNMP MIBs.

Add the ability to update the Plugins Jail without deleting installed plugins.

Disable Nagle’s algorithm in order to provide better LAN network performance at the expense of WAN performance.

Add AES-NI hardware support for the Intel Core i5/i7 processors that support this encryption set. This support speeds up AES encryption and decryption.

A host name database field has been added to Global Configuration, allowing entries to be added to /etc/hosts.

A complete list of changes is available in the Release Notes on the download page.

The documentation on the wiki is mostly up-to-date for 8.3.0 and will improve over the next few days.

Beta testers should report any bugs so that they can be fixed in time for release.

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FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA1 is Now Available

iX Team — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:03:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA1. This is the first public release of the 8.3.0 branch of FreeNAS, which upgrades the underlying base systemÂ of FreeNAS to FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p7. This update brings with itÂ Version 28 of the ZFS filesystem, as well as a number of updates to the drivers and utilities in the base system.

FreeNAS 8.2.0 brought with it the ability to install plugins; thisÂ functionality is present in FreeNAS 8.3.0 as well. At the moment, upgrading the plugin jail to the version included with FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA1 will causeÂ plugins to stop working and will require reinstallation and reconfigurationÂ of all plugins to resume normal operation. Our recommendation at this time is to avoid upgrading working components of the plugin system.

ZFS Version 28 includes several features such as the ability to detach a dedicated ZIL device, triple parity RAIDZ, and deduplication. There areÂ numerous caveats to using deduplication, please do some research into theÂ possible caveats of using dedup before enabling it.

Upgrading an existing ZFS pool is a one way street, once the upgrade isÂ done it is not possible to use older versions of FreeNAS, nor is it possible to downgrade your pool. This upgrade can be done by running zpool upgrade from the CLI, it is not done automatically via the upgrader, nor is there aÂ way to do the upgrade from the GUI. Instructions can be found in this section of the upcoming 8.3 Users Guide.

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FreeNAS at Texas LinuxFest

iX Team — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:02:00 +0000

We’ll be giving out FreeNAS 8.2-RELEASE CDs, brochures, and cool swag at the FreeBSD booth during Texas LinuxFest. The booth is #37 in the Red Oak Ballroom of the Norris Conference Center in San Antonio. The expo is open on Saturday, August 4 from 10â€“6. Registration is required for this event and costs $20 or $50.

Dru Lavigne will give a presentation on FreeNAS 8.3 atÂ 11:20.

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FreeNAS 8.2 Released!

iX Team — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 17:26:00 +0000

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE.

FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE is the first release on new branch of code that incorporates tighter integration between the ZFS command line and the FreeNAS GUI. This release also features the ability to run arbitrary services and interact with them through the FreeNAS GUI in a FreeBSD jail. This jail allows a wide range of third party software to be run on top of FreeNAS, using the PBI format from PC-BSD or FreeBSD packages or ports, as well as official FreeNAS plugins.

Additional features include:

Support for iSCSI target reload.
GUI support for SAS and FC multipath hardware.
Webshell accessible from the FreeNAS web interface.
ZFS scrubs are configurable from the GUI.
A newer web toolkit is used in the GUI, enabling use of mobile browsers.
An autotuning script tunes ZFS for the hardware it’s running on.

Getting FreeNAS:

For 64 bit capable hardware

The FreeNAS images are at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.2.0/RELEASE/x64/
The plugins and plugin jail are available at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.2.0/RELEASE/x64/plugins

For 32 bit hardware

The FreeNAS images are at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.2.0/RELEASE/x86/
The plugins and plugin jail are available at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.2.0/RELEASE/x86/plugins

Documentation:

http://doc.freenas.org has been updated with the finished 8.2.0 documentation, A PDF/HTML version will be available Tuesday July 24th.

Release Notes:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.2.0/RELEASE/README/download

Press Release

iXsystems.com

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FreeNAS 8.2.0-RC1 Available

iX Team — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 19:22:00 +0000

The development team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 8.2.0-RC1. Be sure to read the Release Notes in the download directory for your architecture, especially if you are upgrading from a previous version.

Barring any major bugs in this release candidate, RELEASE should be just around the corner. If you find any bugs, be sure to report them so that they can be fixed in time for RELEASE. 8.3 is expected to be released shortly after 8.2-RELEASE, bringing along all of the ZFS v28 goodness. So it looks like July will be a busy month for FreeNAS users.

The docs are mostly up-to-date with RC1 and will improve next week, especially the section on Plugins. We’re aiming to publish the 8.2 Users Guide a day or so after 8.2 is released.

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FreeNAS 8.2.0-BETA4 Available

iX Team — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 16:26:00 +0000

It’s been nearly a month between betas and there have been several hundred commits in between. The development team is pleased to announce that FreeNAS 8.2.0-BETA4 is available for immediate download.

There has been a complete refactoring of the plugin networking stack, to allow greater flexibility and functionality. We’ve added the ability to upgrade plugins, as well as the plugin jail itself. There have been numerous bug fixes and improvements over previous beta releases.

The documentation for plugins is mostly caught up for BETA4 and will improve over the next week or so.

IMPORTANT:

The GUI upgrade format changed in 8.2.0-BETA3 from xz to txz. If you are attempting to do a GUI upgrade to 8.2.0-BETA4 from 8.2.0-BETA3, use the .txz version of the GUI_Upgrade
file. If you are upgrading from any other previous version, use the .xz file.

If you find a bug, please create a support ticket using these instructions.

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Upgrade to 8.0.4-p3

iX Team — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 13:02:00 +0000

All FreeNAS 8.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to 8.0.4-p3 which was released yesterday. This release update addresses this critical privilege escalation vulnerability.

8.0.4-p3 install and upgrade images are available from the 8.0.4 SourceForge page. Instructions for upgrading are in the FreeNAS Users Guide.

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FreeNAS Presentation at BayLISA

iX Team — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:43:00 +0000

Joseph S. Atkinson will give a “Short Topics” talk on the FreeNAS plugins framework at the next BayLISA meeting on June 21 at 19:30. This month’s meeting will take place at LinkedIn, 2025 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA. Pizza and drinks will be provided.

If you can attend the meeting, please RSVP first using this link.

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Upgrade to FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-p2

iX Team — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:27:00 +0000

FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-p2 has been released and all users of the 8.0.x series are encouraged to upgrade to this patchset as it addresses 2 security vulnerabilities:

CVE-2012-2111: this Samba vulnerability affects FreeNAS systems when the CIFS service is enabled. This vulnerability could allow an authenticated user to grant themselves the “take ownership” privilege. This privilege is used by the smbd file server to grant the ability to change ownership of a file or directory which means users could take ownership of files or directories they do not own.
FreeBSD-SA-12:01.openssl: this OpenSSL vulnerability affects all FreeNAS systems as OpenSSL is built into the operating system. This vulnerability can result in a denial of service attack against the system.

Before upgrading, backup your configuration in System -> Settings -> General -> Save Config. If you are upgrading from a release earlier than 8.0.4, be sure to read the Release Notes first.

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Presentation and Booth at NWLF

iX Team — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:56:00 +0000

LinuxFest NorthWest is this weekend at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA. James Nixon will be giving a presentation on FreeNAS. There will also be a FreeBSD booth which will be handing out FreeNAS CDs and cool swag. This is a free event, so if you’re in this part of the world, drop by and say hi!

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FreeNAS 8.2.0-BETA3 is Now Available for Testing

iX Team — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:58:00 +0000

FreeNAS 8.2.0-BETA3 is now available for download and testing. The plugin architecture has changed significantly since BETA2 and the wiki documentation will be updated over the next week or so as this beta’s plugin architecture is tested and documented. If you find outdated wiki documentation, either be patient or create a wiki account in order to assist with the documentation. If you find a bug in BETA3, please submit a ticket after reading the section on how to submit a bug report.

The other significant change in this beta is the patch to support istgt (iSCSI) reload. Note thatÂ target reload is supported for adding and removing (but not changing) targets on the fly. Since the Logical Unit Controller (LUC) is used for this, reload will not function if the LUC is not enabled.

The forum announcement containing the release notes for BETA3 is here.

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Upgrade Now if You’re Using CIFS

iX Team — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:59:00 +0000

If you are using CIFS/Windows shares on your FreeNAS 8.0.x system, you are urged to update to 8.0.4-RELEASE-p1 immediately.

Earlier this week, a vulnerability was discovered in Samba that allows remote code execution as the root user from an anonymous connection. All versions of Samba were affected. You can read more about the vulnerability here.

Since FreeNAS uses Samba to provide CIFS/Windows shares, unpatched systems are susceptible to this vulnerability. 8.0.4-RELEASE-p1 contains the necessary patch and is available for download here. Instructions for upgrading FreeNAS are in section 4.6 of the Guide.

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FreeNAS at ILF

iX Team — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:08:00 +0000

There will be a FreeNAS presentation at Indiana LinuxFest on Saturday, April 14 in Indianapolis, Indiana. We will also be giving out FreeNAS CDs at the BSD booth in the expo area.

If you are interested in learning more about FreeBSD administration (the operating system FreeNAS is based upon), there is an all day course on FreeBSD for Linux System Administrators on Friday, April 13.

There is no cost to attend either the course or the conference. Pre-registration is encouraged so that you don’t have to wait in line to register when you arrive.

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FreeNAS Presentation at NLUUG

iX Team — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:53:00 +0000

Michael Dexter will be giving a presentation entitled The FreeNAS Storage Platform: A minute to learn, a lifetime to master at NLUUG’s Spring conference. This event will be held in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands on April 11th.

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FreeNAS 8.2-BETA2 Available for Testing

iX Team — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:18:00 +0000

FreeNAS 8.2-BETA2 is now available for testing. There are many changes between the 8.0.x and 8.2 branches. The 8.2 documentation has been updated with the new screenshots and the new functionality is mostly documented, but is still a work in progress. If you find any bugs in the beta, please search support.freenas.org to see if a ticket has already been created and create one if one does not already exist.

Notable changes from the release notes:

The 8.2 branch of FreeNAS introduces many functional changes when compared with the 8.0.x releases.

ZFS can be manipulated from the CLI, and changes for supported items tracked by FreeNAS will be reflected in the GUI. zvols, datasets, and entire volumes can be created, destroyed, or manipulated on the CLI and will be propagated to the GUI.

The GUI now supports active-passive multipath capable hardware, which targets mainly SAS drives on dual expander backplanes. Any multipath capable devices that are detected will be placed in multipath units which are then exposed to the GUI, and the parent devices will be hidden.

Plugins are now available. Third party modules can be added to FreeNAS which will persist across upgrades and can be manipulated and configured from the GUI. Documentation on using and creating plugins is available at http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Plugins_Configuration. BitTorrent, DLNA/uPNP, and iTunes plugins are available as of this writing.

The GUI now includes a webshell, which allows you to access a root shell from within a web browser.

The “Create Volume” modal was renamed to “Volume Manager”.

Extending existing pools is more intuitive than it was previously; selecting multiple disks for a storage volume is now done via a multiselect widget instead of checkboxes to improve ease of use when creating volumes.

ZFS volumes can now have periodic scrub tasks configured for them; the default is set to 35 days to be consistent with the OS default.

An autotuning script is now available — disabled by default. It sets various tunables and sysctls based on system resources and components. The predetermined values are exposed through the GUI from the Sysctls and Tunables panes.

A newer web toolkit is used, which behaves better with modal dialogs and more intuitively in general when compared with older versions. It also has better browser compatibility, including compatibility with Android / iOS mobile devices!

Â A more responsive service state detection mechanism was added to improve FreeNAS interoperability in VM software (VMware, VirtualBox, etc).

The post FreeNAS 8.2-BETA2 Available for Testing appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 8.2 Presentation and CDs at NELF

iX Team — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:50:00 +0000

NorthEast LinuxFest will be held in Worcester, MA on March 17. Dru Lavigne will be giving a presentation on the upcoming 8.2 release and FreeNAS 8.0.4-RELEASE CDs will be given away at the FreeBSD booth in the expo area. Registration is free for this event and there will be an after-party at a local pub. Not a bad way to spend St. Patrick’s Day if you’re in the NorthEast.

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8.0.4-RELEASE is Available

iX Team — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:16:00 +0000

FreeNAS 8.0.4-RELEASE and FreeNAS-8.0.4-multimedia are now available from the Sourceforge website. 8.0.4 is primarily a bug fix release, meaning that there will not be a published 8.0.4 version of the Users Guide. Instead, use the 8.0.3 Users Guide plus the 8.0.4 Release Notes (available on the download page).

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FreeNAS DVDs in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia

iX Team — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:46:00 +0000

On Saturday, March 3, in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, Martin Wilke (FreeBSD Developer, Ports Management, Security Officer), will give a presentation about FreeBSD development and share his experience on how he became a FreeBSD Developer. FreeNAS DVDs will also be given away at this event.

The event will be held at Old Town White Coffee, Bangsar South from 14:00-17:00. You can RSVP on Facebook.

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8.0.4-RC1 Available for Testing

iX Team — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:37:00 +0000

8.0.4-RC1 is available for testing. Please report any problems by creating a ticket at http://support.freenas.org with the version set to 8.0.4-RC1. At this point, the 8.0.x branch is fairly mature andÂ 8.0.4-RELEASE should appear very shortly.

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FreeNAS DVDs at Open Source Days

iX Team — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:58:00 +0000

This year’s Open Source Days will take place at Copenhagen Business School (in Denmark) on March 10 and 11. Sven Esbjerg will be bringing a supply of FreeNAS 8.0.3 DVDs to give away–you can find him in the “hallway track”.

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New Video: FreeNAS 8.0.3: FTP Configuration

iX Team — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:53:00 +0000

A new instructional video on configuring FTP is now available on the FreeNAS YouTube channel.

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PLUG Advanced Topics: FreeNAS 64-bit

iX Team — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:57:00 +0000

Michael Dexter will present “Hands-on FreeNAS” at next week’s PLUG meeting in Portland, OR. The presentation will look at the issues relating to building your own 64-bit new hardware system and explore ZFS resource usage. Details regarding the event are here.

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8.0.4-BETA2 Available for Testing

iX Team — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:02:00 +0000

8.0.4-BETA2 is now available for testing. The change notes and downloads are available from Sourceforge.

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Vote for FreeNAS!

iX Team — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:19:00 +0000

FreeNAS is in the running for the Sourceforge March Project of the Month. Take a minute to vote for FreeNAS.

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FreeNAS on FLOSS Weekly

iX Team — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:56:00 +0000

In episode 198 of FLOSS Weekly, Simon Phipps interviews James Nixon from the FreeNAS Project.

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FreeNAS 8.0.3 Users Guide Available

iX Team — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:18:00 +0000

The FreeNAS 8.0.3 Users Guide is now available in the following formats:

This version addresses the changes between FreeNAS versions 8.0.2 and 8.0.3 and adds two new chapters to cover the new Loaders and Sysctls functionality.

This will be the last documentation in the 8.0.x series and the next published version will be for the much anticipated 8.2 version of FreeNAS.

Contact me if you are interested in translating the 8.0.3 Users Guide.

If you wish to assist in polishing the documentation for 8.2, see the documentation wiki.

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FreeNAS at SCALE

iX Team — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:46:00 +0000

We’ll be handing out DVDS of FreeNAS 8.0.3 at the FreeBSD booth during SCALE, to be held next weekend at the Hilton LAX in Los Angeles, CA. If you’re in the area, drop by to pick up some cool swag and to chat about FreeNAS.

Registration for the expo area is $10.

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FreeNAS Google+ Page

iX Team — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:22:00 +0000

For those of you on Google+, there is now a FreeNAS page.

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FreeNAS 8.0.3 RC1

iX Team — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:31:00 +0000

The first release candidate for FreeNAS 8.03 is now available for testing. Before installing or upgrading to RC1, take the time to read the cautionary notes in the announcement. Please report any bugs to the support website or testing mailing list.

This release includes the following enhancements and bug fixes. See the announcement for the complete list.

reduced footprint
added tunable / sysctl support so settings that affect kernel behavior persist across upgrades
bump samba from 3.5.11 to 3.6.1
bump netatalk to 2.2.1
NFSv4 ACL support
fix email regressions so that non-SMTP authentication based emails work again

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FreeNAS at LISA

iX Team — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:35:00 +0000

There will be a FreeBSD booth during LISA in Boston, next Wednesday and Thursday (December 7â€“8). Weâ€™ll be giving out FreeNAS 8.0.2 DVDs, cool swag, and answering BSD and FreeNAS related questions. Entrance to the exhibition area is free, but you do need to register first. If youâ€™re in Boston, stop by booth #408 and sayÂ hi!

iXsystems will also have a booth at #305 if you’d like to check out some TrueNAS hardware and meet some of the FreeNAS developers.

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FreeNAS Presentation at FSOSS

iX Team — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:52:00 +0000

The annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium provides a venue to share the latest trends in open source. It is an event aimed at bringing together industry, developers, educators and the community and any other interested parties to discuss open source, open web, and academic/industry partnerships. It will be held in Toronto, Canada from October 27-29.

During FSOSS, Dru Lavigne will be giving a presentation FreeNAS 8: Open Source Storage for the Enterprise. In addition, conference attendees will receive a FreeNAS 8 and PC-BSD 9 DVD in their conference bag.

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Announcing FreeNAS-8.0.2-RELEASE

iX Team — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:41:00 +0000

The FreeNAS team is pleased to announce FreeNAS 8.0.2-RELEASE. This can be considered a minor release that fixes a few of the more glaring issues in 8.0.1-RELEASE.

Major changes since 8.0.1-RELEASE:

The email subsystem was not working correctly in 8.0.1-RELEASE, which resulted in the system not being able to send mail, as well as disfunction of the alerting system in the GUI.

Changes since 8.0.1-RELEASE:

– Allow decimal numbers for a dataset quota. (r8728)

– Fix setting recursive ACLs. (r8270)

– Start proftpd after ix-ssl to use the correct SSL cert. (r8246)

– Use wildcards in cron and rsync jobs instead of listing all values. (r8214, r8211)

– Fix case in iSCSI targets to match the behavior specified by RFC 3722. (r8120)

Known Issues:

CHAP doesn’t work with GlobalSAN initiators on OS X.

Upgrades from FreeNAS 0.7 aren’t supported.

The installer doesn’t check the size of the install media before attempting an install. A 2 GB device is required, but the install will appear to complete successfully on smaller devices, only to fail at boot.

The installer will let you switch from i386 to amd64 architecture and vice-versa, but some files, such as the rrd files used by the statistics graphing package are architecture dependent.

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Latest Video

iX Team — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:10:00 +0000

The latest FreeNAS video, Backups in Depth, is now available on Youtube and Vimeo.

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FreeNAS 8.0.1-RELEASE and Documentation Released

iX Team — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 14:04:00 +0000

FreeNAS 8.0.1 was released yesterday. The forum announcement containing the changes since RC2 is here.

The press release highlights some of the new features of 8.0.1.

The 8.0.1 User Guide has also been released. The links to the HTML, PDF, and ODT versions are available at doc.freenas.org. The front page of the documentation wiki has been reorganized to make it clear where the documentation is for .7x users, for the current release of the operating system, and for the development of the upcoming 8.1 documentation. The EPUB version should be available early next week and the Kindle version should show up in Amazon by Tuesday.

You can download FreeNAS 8.0.1 from Sourceforge. If you are upgrading, be sure to read the section on Upgrading first.

NOTE: If you are currently running a nightly, save your configuration and perform a new install as upgrades from nightlies are not supported. After installation, you can auto-import your volumes and restore your configuration.

The post FreeNAS 8.0.1-RELEASE and Documentation Released appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS Videos on TooSmart Guys

iX Team — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:37:00 +0000

The Too Smart Guys show has created a series of FreeNAS videos:

The post FreeNAS Videos on TooSmart Guys appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 8.0.1-RC2 Available

iX Team — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:22:00 +0000

FreeNAS 8.0.1-RC2 has been released. From the Release Notes:

This is Release Candidate 2 for FreeNAS 8.0.1….hopefully the last stepping stone to FreeNAS 8.0.1-RELEASE.

*** IMPORTANT ***

The image size increased in 8.0.1-BETA3.Â The new size requires a 2 GB storage device.Â The GUI upgrade can be used to upgrade a system from BETA3,Â BETA4, or RC1 but upgrades from earlier releases can only be done from the CD. The other option is to save the config, reinstall the new version, then restore the config.

Major changes:

– The mail subsystem has been rewritten due to major interop issues with the previous implementation of the mail subsystem and various mail server setups (including gmail).Â This was done by removing msmtp and replacing it’s functionality with python code. (r7756, r7757, r7758 )

– The iSCSI target daemon (istgt) has been updated to address interoperability issues with VMWare ESXi 5.0 (r7530, r7652, r7817)

Changes since 8.0.1-RC1

– Fix a bug where a failed upgrade after a config was uploaded was resulting in the system “reverting” to using the uploaded config instead of the previous running config. (r7535)

– Save config now uses a hostname/date combo in the file name. (r7567)

– Fix a bug with replacing devices in place. (r7575)

– Add a confirmation password field for dyndns. (r7576)

– If the webgui can’t bind to the address specified in the GUI bind to the wildcard.Â Set an alert if this is done. (r7562, r7563, r7570, r7579)

– Add a save debug button in the system -> advanced GUI to ease collecting diagnostic information when shell access isn’t configured. (r7592)

– Allow an interface to accept tagged and untagged packets. (r7604, r7609)

– Improvements to ataidle. (r7648)

– Reverse the list for ipv4 netmask. (r7663)

– Fix openldap authenticating against servers that require SSL/STARTTLSÂ (r7685)

– Build python with a larger stack size.Â This should solve intermittent django stability issues (r7689)

– Move the USB 3 driver to a module so it can be disabled for hardware that has issues booting with the module enabled. (r7691)

– Allow the iSCSI extent file browser to show files. (r7695)

– Allow iSCSI extents to be used by one target->extent mapping. (r7697)

– Restrict the iSCSI target name to values allowed by the target and the RFC covering iqns. (r7698)

– Restart collectd properly when volumes are created or destroyed. (r7704)

– Make timezone changes take effect immediately in django. (r7720)

– Use the file browser for editing iSCSI file extents. (r7728)

– Ensure that the selection for an iSCSI file extent is a file and not a directory. (r7729)

– Allow auto-importer to work when there are zpools that contain subsets of each other’s names.Â eg: tank and tank2 (r7732)

– Update django to 1.3.1 to address multiple security vulnerabilities. (r7745)

– Fix a bug where the system would attempt to change permissions from an unknown user to root:wheel. (r7762)

– Disable building the weekly locate database. (r7765)

Errata:

CHAP doesn’t work with GlobalSAN initiators on OS X.

Upgrades from FreeNAS 0.7 aren’t supported.

The post FreeNAS 8.0.1-RC2 Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Using Life Preserver to Backup PC-BSD to FreeNAS 8.0.1

iX Team — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:36:00 +0000

The September issue of BSD Magazine has an article describing how to backup the home directories on a PC-BSD system to FreeNAS 8.0.1 using Life Preserver. The article is on page 10-14 of the magazine, which is available as a PDF for free download. A PDF of just this article is also available on Slideshare.

The post Using Life Preserver to Backup PC-BSD to FreeNAS 8.0.1 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS-8.0.1-RC1 Released

iX Team — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:01:00 +0000

Josh announced the availability of FreeNAS-8.0.1-RC1 last night. From the announcement:

I’m pleased to announce that FreeNAS-8.0.1 Release Candidate 1 is available for download.

Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.0.1-RC1

This is the first release candidate for FreeNAS 8.0.1. At this point, we are no longer including new features or functionality into 8.0.1. From here on out, only bug fixes and regressions will be addressed.

*** IMPORTANT ***

The image size increased in 8.0.1-BETA3. The new size requires a 2 GB storage device. The GUI upgrade can be used to upgrade a system from BETA3 or BETA4, but upgrades from earlier releases can only be done from the CD. The other option is to save the config, reinstall the new version, then restore the config.

Major changes:

– There is no longer a default password. The GUI can be accessed without a password until one is set. The root shell user also does not have a default password, which means that logins by root from the console or via ssh are impossible until this is done. The edit password field for the GUI admin user contains a checkbox to set the root shell user password to the same value.

– The GUI incorporates an alert system in the form of a stoplight that is visible from every page in the GUI. If the light is red or yellow clicking on it will open a window with the condition that is causing the alert. On new installs the light will be red due to their being no password set for the GUI. Also, when there are no alerts a Green Light is displayed. Clicking the Green Light opens a blank dialog.

– Netatalk 2.2 is included, which provides support for Time Machine backups to OS X Lion clients.

– Deleting ZFS volumes is now really an export operation, which means that a “deleted” volume can be imported via the volume importer until the member disks are reused in a new volume. The GUI contains options for wiping the disks if you really want the volume to be non-recoverable, as well as an option for not cascading the deletion of a volume to shares based on that volume.

– The system now supports disabling the creation of a swap partition on every device in a volume. Furthermore, since L2ARC and cache devices are generally small, high speed, and more expensive $/GB than the main storage drives, swap to these devices is always disabled.

– UFS volumes support setting arbitrary mount points, this can be leveraged to move /var to a persistent storage device.

Changes since 8.0.1-BETA4

– Rework the stats gathering daemon to pull volume information from the database and exclude all other volumes. This should fix issues where systems with large numbers of snapshots were filling up /var as the system would try to collect stats on each snapshot.

– Support for remote syslog servers.

– Rework and improvement in snapshot replication tasks.

– iSCSI file extents use the directory browser.

– Support multiple lagg interfaces properly.

– Bulk manipulation of snapshots.

– Ability to specify a bind address for the webGUI.

– Add support for alias IPs on interfaces.

– Add support for the RocketRaid 4322 and 4321.

– Add the user info to allow anonymous FTP setups to work properly.

– Fix disk replacement in RAIDZ volumes.

– Add iozone and iperf to the base system.

– Add sge network driver.

– Update to Samba 3.5.11 version, plus security fixes.

– Fix the NTFS volume importer.

– Add the ability to specify the port the webGUI uses.

– Add sym driver to the build.

– Add wget to the base system.

– Add iperf to the base system.

– Raise default blocksize and fragment size for UFS to 32K and 4K.

– Add some shell customizations and aliases to make the default shell more useful.

– Add uplcom to the kernel.

– Add an SNMP module in that provides a number of useful MIBs.

Errata:

iSCSI doesn’t work with VMWare ESXi 5.0. An update to the iSCSI target software that addresses this issue will be available before 8.0.1-RELEASE.

CHAP doesn’t work with GlobalSAN initiators on OS X.

Upgrades from FreeNAS 0.7 aren’t supported.

The post FreeNAS-8.0.1-RC1 Released appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

OLF Institute Course: FreeBSD for Linux System Administrators

iX Team — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:56:00 +0000

Though it doesn’t deal directly with FreeNAS administration, this course may be of interest to some of you as it describes the differences one experiences when going from a Linux system administration environment to a FreeBSD one.

The course “FreeBSD for Linux Administrators” is one of the courses being offered at the OLF Institute as part of the Ohio LinuxFest. This one day course will be held on Friday, September 9 in Columbus Ohio. The course description and cost are detailed on the OLF Institute’s website.

The post OLF Institute Course: FreeBSD for Linux System Administrators appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 8 Nightly Snapshots

iX Team — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 14:45:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Josh announced the availability of nightly snapshots. The FreeNAS Guide describes these snapshots as follows: Â

Upgrading to a Nightly Snapshot

Changes to FreeNASâ„¢ occur daily as developers address the bugs and enhancement requests reported by FreeNASâ„¢ users. A new version that incorporates these changes is automatically built every day and is available for download as a “nightly”. If you wish to install or upgrade to the very latest version of FreeNASâ„¢ (i.e. the version that addresses all fixed bugs up to today’s date) or you need to upgrade to a version that incorporates a fix you are waiting for, you should download the latest nightly version. Â

NOTE: it is possible that a recently implemented change will not work as expected or will break something else. If you experience this, take the time to add a comment to the applicable support ticket so that the developer’s can address the problem.

Nightly builds are available as either an ISO or as a full_install.xz. If you are upgrading from an earlier version of FreeNASâ„¢ 8.x, see the section on Upgrading FreeNASâ„¢ for instructions on how to upgrade.

The post FreeNAS 8 Nightly Snapshots appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

RSS Feeds for FreeNAS 8 Forums

iX Team — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:18:00 +0000

The FreeNAS 8 Forums now have the following RSS feeds, making it easy to see new threads in your favourite RSS reader:

http://forums.freenas.org/external.php

http://forums.freenas.org/external.php?type=RSS2

The post RSS Feeds for FreeNAS 8 Forums appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA4 Available

iX Team — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 23:07:00 +0000

The fourth beta of FreeNAS 8.0.1 is now available for testing. If you test this beta and find any bugs, please report them on the freenas-testing mailing list. From the Release Notes:

This is the last BETA planned for the 8.0.1 release cycle. This line was present in the BETA3 release notes as well.Â BETA3 contained several fairly significant bugs, and a patch release was planned to address them, unfortunately due to a myriad of issues that patch release was delayed enough that doing another beta made more sense than any sort of patch.

*** IMPORTANT ***

The image size increased in 8.0.1-BETA3.Â The new size requires a 2 GB storage device. The GUI upgrade can be used to upgrade a system from BETA3 to BETA4, but upgrades from previous releases can only be done from the CD.Â The other option is to save the config, reinstall the new version, then restore the config.

Changes since 8.0.1-BETA3:

ACLs and UNIX file system permissions work properly on both UFS and ZFS volumes. Because the ACLs needed by windows and UNIX are mutually exclusive the GUI now prompts for which system you will be using and sets permissions appropriately.
Â
Changes to link aggregations which resulted in a regression in functionality have been reverted.Â There was a workaround to the issue in BETA3.Â A migration has been added to the system to clear the workaround.Â If you are upgrading from something other than BETA3 you don’t need to do anything.Â If you are upgrading from BETA3, and BETA3 broke your link aggregations BETA4 will fix things.Â If BETA3 broke your link aggregations and you applied a workaround the migration should revert the workaround and things will work properly.Â If upgrading to BETA4 causes link aggregations to stop working the best solution is to delete and recreate them.
Â
BETA3 completed the change from hard wiring device names in the database to using identifiers.Â iSCSI device extents were not changed properly.Â This BETA addresses that issue.
Â
A method was accidentally deleted from the middleware that prevented smartd from running.Â This has been resolved.

ZFS snapshots are now exported to CIFS shares and are visible in Windows as shadow copies.Â How you access these varies between Windows versions.
Â
Many improvements have been made to replication that increase it’s speed and robustness.
Â
The CD upgrade now preserves all of /data instead of select files.
Â
Fix a bug in the graph generation script which would allow the graphs of deleted volumes to persist.
Â
Fix a bug in UFS volume creation, where newly created UFS volumes would only show after a reboot.
Â
Add tmux to the system.Â Just like GNU screen in functionality only BSD licensed and actively maintained.
Â
Add dmidecode to the system.Â This can provide very useful hardware diagnostic information.
Â
Updated the version of Intel NIC drivers to handle Intel’s latest round of hardware.
Â
Add support for Marvell MX2 SATA controllers, sold with some WD 3TB drives.
Â
Make netatalk (AFP) compatible with OS X 10.7

The post FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA4 Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA3 Available

iX Team — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:35:00 +0000

The third beta of FreeNAS 8.0.1 is now available for testing. If you test this beta and find any bugs, please report them on the freenas-testing mailing list.

From the README:

This is the last BETA planned for the 8.0.1 release cycle.

*** IMPORTANT***

The image size has been increased from 1GB to 2GB. As more features have been added to the system it has crept towards the max size. The translations have brought this to a head, the current image just barely fits in 1GB, but the translation effort is about 50% finished. Since an image size bump is inevitable, it’s happening now. Due to this size change the system now requires a 2GB device to install to. Furthermore, the GUI upgrade is not possible. Booting from the CD will work to do the upgrade, otherwise save config, reinstall, restore config is the recommended upgrade path.

Changes since 8.0.1-BETA2:

Several issues relating to permissions with CIFS shares have been resolved.
Setting permissions from windows using either AD or not should work properly.
A bug that was preventing folder renames from windows was fixed.
Samba has been updated to 3.5.9
Drive replacement in volumes now works properly.
iSCSI allows targets to be created with no extents, which eases adding targets to an already configured system.
Deleting a volume now turns the screen red much like shutdown to alert user they are doing something potentially destructive.
Django sessions have been removed from the database and into /tmp
Importing ext2 volumes now works.
Timezone issues have been fixed.
Some fixes for the SATA driver have been backported from FreeBSD STABLE, this should resolve an issue where certain systems had issues detecting disks.
GEOM_RAID has been ported from FreeBSD STABLE, allowing the system to use Intel matrix RAID and some other BIOS RAID solutions.
SNMP was not validating it’s config settings properly, and was only restarting properly at system boot.Â This has been resolved.
Disk sizes match between the GUI and the console.
A bug in pw preventing users with home directories from being created was fixed.
Anonymous AFP has been fixed, as well as time machine.

The post FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA3 Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

How to Install FreeNAS 8 Video

iX Team — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:54:00 +0000

A video on how to install FreeNAS 8 in a virtual emulator is now available on the FreeNASTeam Youtube Channel as well as Vimeo. This will be the first in a series of instructional videos.

The post How to Install FreeNAS 8 Video appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 0.7.2.6694 Sabanda Released!

iX Team — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:14:00 +0000

The FreeNAS Development Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 0.7.2 Sabanda. This is the Final release of FreeNAS 0.7.2 it improves its functions and the translations of the WebGUI. many things are updated and stability is improved.
We hope you like it just as much as we do!

Download page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-7-Stable/

Upgrade Notes
=============

– Before upgrade you must always backup your configuration file, your
system disk and all your data (if possible).
– DO NOT use firmware upgrade if your installed FreeNAS revision is lower
than 0.7.2(5175).
– If your version is after 0.7.2(5175), you can upgrade it by any ways.
– If your version is lower than 0.7.2(5175), and you install by option #1
(no data in the boot disk), and there is space of at least 128MB in the
boot disk, you can upgrade it from LiveCD. Otherwise, a new installation
is necessary. (This procedure formats the boot disk.) And, you must
remove the mount point of the boot disk, and add it again.

Other Notes
===========

– The system requirements are changed. The minimum space to install:
OS disk: 128MB(120MiB), Mem: 384MB for embedded.
OS disk: 400MB(380MiB), Mem: 256MB for full.

Downgrade Notes
===============

– Downgrading from 0.7.2 to any version lesser than build 0.7.2(5726) is not
supported.

Release Notes for FreeNAS 0.7.2 (Sabanda) Stable rev.6694 – 12-06-2011
=============

Major changes:

– Upgrade to FreeBSD 7.3-p6.
– Upgrade unison to 2.40.61.
– Upgrade bsnmp-ucd to 0.3.2.
– Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.14.
– Upgrade smartmontools to 5.41.
– Upgrade php5 to 5.3.6.
– Upgrade transmission to 2.22.
– Upgrade samba to 3.5.8.
– Increase image size to 72MB, mfsroot to 180MB.
– Increase default install size embedded to 120MB, full to 380MB.
– Increase default swap size to 256MB.
– Increase memory disk for firmware upgrade to 128MB.
– Create 4KB aligned data partition on the boot disk.
– Upgrade arcconf to 6.50.18579.
– Upgrade cdialog to 1.1.20100428.
– Set kern.hz=100 when running on virtual machine and kern.hz>100.
– Add virtual machine guest support (open-vm-tools/vbox-additions).
– Upgrade inadyn-mt to 02.24.36.
– Upgrade bash to 4.1.011.
– Upgrade istgt to 20110529.
– Upgrade msmtp to 1.4.24.
– Upgrade nano to 2.2.6.
– Upgrade gzip to 1.4.
– Upgrade tftp-hpa to 5.0.
– Introduce iSCSI boot/install feature (isboot 0.2.4).
– Upgrade 3ware driver to 9.5.3.
– Upgrade proftpd to 1.3.3d.
– Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.28.
– Upgrade iperf to 2.0.5.
– Upgrade ataidle to 2.5.1.
– Upgrade nut to 2.61.
– Upgrade rsync to 3.0.8.
– Upgrade aac driver to 2.4.1.
– Upgrade iscsi to 2.3.1.

Minor changes:

– Add “Czech”, “Korean”, “Slovak” and “Portuguese (Brazil)” translations.
– Add multiple CPUs usage.
– Add AIO WebGUI for CIFS/SMB service.
– Remove /var/tmp symbolic link.
– Support Advanced Format 4KB sector. (UFS/GPT data partition only)
– Set fsck enable by default at Disks|Mount Point|Add.
– Set kern.geom.debugflags when formating.
– Modify Tuning values.
– Add ability to disable File Manager.
– Make three backups of configuration when writing new one.
– Add amdtemp module. (FR 2992462)
– Add ability to probe on-die digital thermal sensor.
– Enable disk quotas of kernel option.
– Remove a useless partition.
– Add ability to mount ‘a’ partition on MBR/UFS.
– Add variables to change upload directory of lighttpd.
– Disable fsck on MBR/UFS mount point due to 4KB alignment. You need
re-enable it after upgrading.
– Add wireless firmware modules.
– Add logical block length for iSCSI target.
– Add ability to disable/enable for iSCSI target.
– Add unused extents to the list in iSCSI target edit mode.
– Add kernel module directory (/boot/modules).
– Set Large read/write by default (Services|CIFS/SMB|Settings).
– Add crypto accelerator driver (hifn, safe, ubsec).
– Move upload directory to /var/tmp/ftmp from /ftmp.
– Change iSCSI initial parameter.
– Add new parameter of istgt 20100522.
– Add minimum set of zfskerntune feature.
– Add Hyper-V reboot issue patch.
– Add ZFS pool with 4KB sector support.
– Add ZFS cache and log device support.
– Improve parameters for Samba 3.5.x.
– Improve Active Directory support.
– Display Device model on ‘Status|Disks and Disks|Management’.
– Improve automatic firmware check “Embedded” installs.

Bug fixes:

– Fix wrong validation when WINS is enabled.
– Fix missing /var/tmp in full installation.
– Fix upload fail when firmware upgrade.
– Fix AIO checkbox is not disabled if samba is disabled.
– Fix fail to update index.php if some value is undefined.
– Fix control of Ctrl+Alt+Del if console menu is disabled (BR 2976816).
– Fix the document link on Services|Rsync|Server|Settings (BR 2997828).
– Fix fail to connect SSH if ActiveDirectory is enabled (BR 2821715, 2898371).
– Fix UPS support for Megatec USB UPSs fails (BR 3079159).
– Fix Unable to create ZFS datasets with . or / in the name by WebGUI (BR2934275).
– Fix Remote root vulnerability in exec_raw.php.
– Fix SSL/TLS, test e-mail did not work correct (BR3306572).
– Fix the usage of AFP service.
– Fix Blocklist functionality transmission.

Regards,

FreeNAS Development Team

The post FreeNAS 0.7.2.6694 Sabanda Released! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA2 Available

iX Team — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:15:00 +0000

The second beta of FreeNAS 8.0.1 is now available for testing. If you test this beta and find any bugs, please report them on the freenas-testing mailing list.

From the README:

This is the second of three planned betas in the 8.0.1 release cycle.

Most of the changes from BETA1 are bug fixes. In particular several bugs have been fixed in the migrations from 8.0-RELEASE. The system was not relabeling ZFS volumes to use the new devicename-independent naming scheme correctly in BETA1. Also the database migration scripts in BETA1 do not migrate NFS shares properly.

Changes since 8.0.1-BETA1:

The upgrade/migration scripts have been improved. In previous versions failure of the database upgrade was easy to miss, and it could leave the system booting to single user mode with error messages that had nothing to do with the root issue. This has been rectified. If a database migration does fail, the error message will be clear as to what happened, also the system will save diagnostic information that can be used by the developers to recover from the failed migration as well as make changes to prevent the issue from affecting users in the future.

iSCSI has been improved. The SCSI serial number can be set on a per target basis. This fixes an issue where MMIO was seeing different FreeNAS server as the same device. Multiple IPs can also be specified per portal.

The ssh daemon now logs to /var/log/auth.log

Several fixes have been incorporated into the volume import procedure.

Several fixes and improvements have been made to the remote replication process.

The system handles the timezone setting better.

CIFS now defaults to AIO enabled.

The post FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA2 Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA1 Available

iX Team — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:45:00 +0000

The first preview of the upcoming 8.0.1-Release for FreeNAS is available for testing. If you test this beta and find any bugs, please report them on the freenas-testing mailing list.

From the announcement:

Since the release of FreeNAS 8.0 it has seen widespread use and testing. We’ve been hard at work fixing the issues users have encountered and reported, as well as continuing to add functionality to FreeNAS 8.

This is a Beta release of what will be in 8.0.1-Release, at this point the system is for the most part feature complete and ready for wider testing.

Changes from 8.0-Release:

Upgraded software stack across the board. New version of django, dojo, istgt and many many other software upgrades.

The new version of istgt fixes issues people were having in a Hyper-V environment.

Vastly improved remote replication, with much better error notification as well as the ability to recover from failure situations.

Device names are no longer hard wired in the database. The system will keep track of drives as they shift device names, thus preventing drive reordering from confusing the GUI and allowing a drive that is already used to be shown as available.

Users can now be given an email address, making them more useful for use in cron jobs.

The ability to add cron jobs via the GUI is now present.

rsync jobs can now be created via the GUI. Additionally the system can act as an rsync server.

Shares are now done at the filesystem level instead of the volume level, allowing more flexibility to CIFS as well as UFS based shares.

The ability to add ZFS zvols has been added, they are now eligible to share as device extents in iSCSI.

The ZFS volume importer handles existing volumes with datasets better than the volume importer in 8.0-R did.

A bug that prevented network interface graphs from being generated was fixed.

It is now possible to set the MTU of lagg and vlan interfaces in the GUI.

System -> System Information now shows the available RAM.

Translations are now hooked up. You can check the status of a translation here. The GUI will use translations when possible when the language is changed in System -> Settings -> Advanced.

The GUI can show django tracebacks without the use of debugging tools such as firebug by selecting Show Tracebacks in case of fatal errors in System -> Settings -> Advanced.

The CLI menu on the console contains options to reset the GUI password as well as reset the system to factory defaults.

Active Directory now works properly with w2k8.

Errata:

It is believed that anonymous access via AFP is non-functional.

An issue with the iSCSI target software prevents initiators from seeing multiple LUNs per target properly.

Usage of this Beta:

Depending on your use case, this Beta may fix critical bugs that were present in 8.0-Release making it unusable. For instance the drive renumbering issue or the ability to set an MTU on a VLAN may have rendered 8.0-R a non-option. In that case, this Beta is a good alternative. On the other hand, it has not undergone the testing that 8.0-R went through, nor has it seen much exposure to a wide variety of use cases, so in a situation where 8.0-R is working well it’s advisable not to upgrade.

Upgrades from all public releases of 8.0-X are supported and should work, whether an 8.0 Beta release, RC or 8.0-Release. Upgrades from arbitrary SVN revisions built from the public repo may not work properly due to database migration issues.

The migration tool for FreeNAS 0.7 is not included in this Beta, although it will be included in 8.0.1 at some point.

The post FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA1 Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Introduction to FreeNAS 8.0 Article in June BSD Mag

iX Team — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:23:00 +0000

The June 2011 issue of BSD Mag has an article “Introducing FreeNAS 8.0” on pages 14-18. You can download this issue for free here. The publisher has also made this article available as a separate PDF which is available here.

The article describes:

* the reasons behind the redesign
* differences between .7 and 8.0
* an overview of the graphical interface
* FreeNAS 8.0 resources

The post Introduction to FreeNAS 8.0 Article in June BSD Mag appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

New FreeNAS 8 Forums

iX Team — Fri, 27 May 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Until now, FreeNAS 8 forum discussions took place in a sub-forum of the Sourceforge FreeNAS forums. This was confusing to users as it wasn’t always clear if the information in the rest of the forums was applicable to 8 or only worked on earlier versions of FreeNAS.

FreeNAS 8 now has its own dedicated Forums at an easy to remember URL: forums.freenas.org. If you wish to post information or ask questions about FreeNAS 8, please use the new forums. FreeNAS .7 users should continue to use the existing forums.

The FreeNAS 8 Guide has been updated with links to each category in the Forums.

At the moment, the Forum categories are English only but we would be happy to add language forums upon request. To request that a language be added, leave a comment or drop me an email.

The post New FreeNAS 8 Forums appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS Review on Sourcetrunk

iX Team — Wed, 25 May 2011 16:53:00 +0000

Dimitri Larmuseau, host of the Sourcetrunk podcast, recently took FreeNAS 8-RC5 for a test drive. The result is a 40 minute review (not counting the first 4 minutes where he discusses beer) that is available in MP3 and OGG formats at the Sourcetrunk website.

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FreeNAS 8 Documentation

iX Team — Thu, 19 May 2011 23:51:00 +0000

FreeNAS 8 documentation is a work in progress and is steadily moving along. The documentation has been moved from the old wiki to a new wiki which can be accessed from the Documentation page of the website. Please update your bookmarks accordingly and point people to the new location as the old one is now stale.

At the moment, the 8.0 Guide is fairly usable as it contains screenshots for each GUI menu and tables for each configurable option (most of which have some sort of description). This provides a framework to start with but it still definitely needs contributions to fill out the “when” to do something, provide more understanding of how various services work, usage tips, and real-world scenarios with configuration examples. If you would like to contribute to an area that you have expertise in, create a wiki login and add your writeup. Don’t worry if your English or writing ability is not perfect; we get an email for every edit and can clean up contributions for readability and technical accuracy.

Once the official FreeNAS artwork is available, a version of the FreeNAS 8.0 Guide will be “published” in various formats (PDF, epub, kindle, html). The plan is to release an updated version of the Guide with each version of FreeNAS moving forward. As the documentation matures, the “released” Guide will match the features that came with that release and the wiki version will be considered the “CURRENT/HEAD” area for updating the documentation to reflect the features being added to the next release.

We’re still working on configuring and testing the translation plugin for Mediawiki. If you have experience configuring this extension for another project and can help out, definitely let us know as we could use your help! In theory, this extension lets translators know when the English version is modified so that they can translate the new material.

In the mean time, the translation plan is as follows: once the timeline for 8.1 release is known, a documentation freeze date will be included. The wiki will be “frozen” (meaning all changes will be ignored until after release) to give time for translators to translate and for the published version to be formatted and converted to various formats in time for release.

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FreeNAS 8 is Ready for Localization

iX Team — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:28:00 +0000

Are you interested in seeing the menus in the FreeNAS 8 graphical administrative interface localized to your native language? If so, we are looking for translators!

A Pootle server has been setup for FreeNAS 8 localization and all of the text strings have been imported into the server. Pootle is an easy way to find out the status of a language’s localization and provides an easy to use translation editor that can be accessed from any browser.

You’ll find the FreeNAS 8 Pootle server here. There is a page in the FreeNAS 8.0 Guide to get you started on localization. A translators mailing list has also been created; if you’re interested in helping out with localization, subscribe to that list so you can interact with other translators.

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Security Alert: All users need to upgrade to the latest release (0.7.2.5543)

iX Team — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 08:19:00 +0000

All users need to upgrade their FreeNAS to the latest stable (0.7.2.5543).
If you can’t upgrade: Restrict WebGUI acces from trusted IP addresses.
Thanks to Brian Adeloye from Tenable Network Security for reporting this vulnerability.

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FreeNAS 0.7.2.5462 Sabanda Released!

iX Team — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:36:00 +0000

The FreeNAS Development Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 0.7.2 Sabanda. This is a maintenance release of FreeNAS 0.7. it improves it’s functions and the translations of the WEBGUI. Also we did add 2 new translations and give it some new features.

New Features
==========

– Samba 3.5.5.
– AIO settings from the WEBGUI.
– AMD CPU on-die digital thermal sensor.
– Advanced format 4kb sector (UFS/GPT data partition)
(data partition in the boot disk is always aligned to 32KB)
– Virtual machine guest support (VMware and Virtialbox)

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/

The FreeNAS Development Team.

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FreeNAS 8 alpha: How to use it

iX Team — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:09:00 +0000

Since FreeNAS 8 binaries snapshots are available, here is a little HOW-TO with one disk shared by CIFS.
Simplified steps

log on the webgui with login “admin” and password “freenas”
Declare the disk
Create a “group” (single) using previously declared disk
Create a volume (mount point) using previously created group
Enable a share service
Add a share corresponding to the service previously enabled

Detailed steps with screen-shots:

Go in Disk: Add disk
Add your hard drive:
Go in Disk: Group disk
Create a “single” group type:
Go in Disk, Create Volume
Enter the detail of this Volume (mount point):
Go in Services, CIFS/SMB
Enable CIFS by Checking ON and clicking on save:
Go in Services, CIFS/SMB, Add share
Create your CIFS share by entering the name of your share, a description and the name of the volume you want to share, then click on save:

Share available with CIFS 🙂

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iXsystems’ FreeNAS snapshot

iX Team — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:24:00 +0000

Yesterday, iXsystems upload a snapshot of their new FreeNAS release on the SVN.
The new FreeNAS is based on nanoBSD, then here are all the steps for generate the disk image of this release (from a FreeBSD 8.1 amd64).
Refer to the README file for more information.

cd /usr/src/tools/tools/nanobsd
svn co https://freenas.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/freenas/experimental/ix freenas

cd freenasÂ

Then for build the 64bit release:

sh ../../nanobsd.sh -c freenas64.conf

Of for build the 32 bit release:

sh ../../nanobsd.sh -c freenas32.conf

The resulted disk image will be found in:
/tmp/YOUR-LOGIN/obj.freenas64|32/_.disk.full

(Don’t forget to copy the disk image in other place and before a reboot if you have the ‘clear_tmp_enable=”YES”‘ in you rc.conf!)
Cross-compilation of a 32bit release should be possible, but didn’t works for the moment (stop during compile of ports/net/unison).

The generated image can only boot from the first IDE device (/dev/ad0s1a) because of original nanoBSD script limitation (removed in BSDRP).

If you would test it from an USB key, first step is to copy it on your key (/dev/da0 for this example):

dd if=_.disk.full of=/dev/da0 bs=128k

And we need to adapt it, first by setting glabel on each partitions:

glabel label cfg /dev/da0s3

glabel label data /dev/da0s4

glabel label freenas /dev/da0s1a

Then mount the root filesystem of the FreeNAS:

mount /dev/label/freenas /mnt

And add this line to boot/loader.conf (it’s a FreeBSD 8.1 boot from usb Â«featureÂ»):
kern.cam.boot_delay=10000

Modify the etc/fstab like that:
/dev/label/freenas / ufs ro 1 1
/dev/label/cfg /cfg ufs rw,noauto 2 2
/dev/label/data /data ufs rw 2 2

And at last, modify conf/default/etc/remount too:

mount -o ro /dev/label/cfg

Unmount the key:

umount /mnt

Now you can try to boot from your usb key (login: root, no password).
FreeNAS is configured as DHCP client, you can try to connect to the very experimental WebGUI, but as wrote in the readme, this first snapshot is only a testing of the Â«baseÂ» system.

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BSDay 2010 (Nantes,France)

iX Team — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:51:00 +0000

Hi,

there is a BSDay at Nantes (France) the 1st june 2010.
We will present pfSense, FreeNAS and FreeBSD ZFS.

Free entry (no registration required) !

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Solutions Linux / Open Source 2010 (Paris)

iX Team — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:14:00 +0000

I will be on the FreeBSD stand during the 3 days of Solutions Linux / Open Source 2010 in Paris (16-17 and 18th march).
Meet me here !

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FreeNAS ready for the next step !

iX Team — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:50:00 +0000

Hi all,

FreeNAS needs some big modification for removing its present limitation (one of the biggest is the non support of easly users add-ons).
We think that a full-rewriting of the FreeNAS base is needed. From this idea, we will take 2 differents paths:

Volker will create a new project called “‘OpenMediaVault” based on a GNU/Linux using all its experience acquired with all its nights and week-ends spent to improve FreeNAS during the last 2 years. He still continue to work on FreeNAS (and try to share its time with this 2 projects).
And, a great surprise:Â iXsystems, a company specialized in professional FreeBSD offers to take FreeNAS under their wings as an open source community driven project. This mean that they will involve their professionals FreeBSD developers to FreeNAS! Their manpower will permit to do a full-rewriting of FreeNAS.

Personally, I come back to actively work in FreeNAS and begin to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8.0 (that is “production ready” for ZFS).

The post FreeNAS ready for the next step ! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Community Choice Awards 2009 – Your vote is needed

iX Team — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:09:00 +0000

FreeNAS has been nominated as Community Choice Awards 2009 finalist in the following categories

Best Project
Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything

You can vote for FreeNAS by clicking on the picture below

Your project, FreeNAS, is a finalist in these

categories:

Best Project

Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything

The post Community Choice Awards 2009 – Your vote is needed appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Sourceforge CCA 09: Vote for FreeNAS!

iX Team — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:28:00 +0000

Thanks to all for your votes on this first round !

FreeNAS has been chosen as a finalist in the categories:

Best Project
Most Likely to Chang the Way You Do Everything

Now, the “second round” is open : Vote for FreeNAS !!

You can found on youtube a personal video for motivate the voters.

The post Sourceforge CCA 09: Vote for FreeNAS! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Misc articles about FreeNAS

iX Team — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:33:00 +0000

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/26686-REVIEW-FreeNAS
http://thaed.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/building-a-32-tb-server-a-thought-experiment/

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FreeNAS book available

iX Team — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:27:00 +0000

You can find a great book about FreeNAS here. Thanks to Gary Sims.

The post FreeNAS book available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

AMD64 build for 0.7 available

iX Team — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:43:00 +0000

Finally a AMD64 build from FreeNAS 0.7 is available. It can be downloaded in the ‘Nightly Build‘ section.

The post AMD64 build for 0.7 available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Actual state of FreeNAS development

iX Team — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:12:00 +0000

Right at the moment we had some problems with systems running >= 2GB RAM. It is not possible to boot FreeNAS on this systems. To solve the problem the current workaround is to reduce RAM to 1GB. I will keep an eye on this problem.

ZFS integration has been done in 0.7, so it is possible to create pools and datasets via WebGUI. The integration of ZFS is not really seamless because of the new workflow ZFS uses, e.g. it is not necessary to mount the disks manually as it has to be done when using ‘normal’ disks/filesystems.

Till 0.69/0.7 revision 3468 the following changes has been done:
– Included access restrictions WebGUI for mount points, so it is possible to define access rights for each mount point.

– Removed ACPI in kernel, using kernel module instead. Hopefully this will fix misc problems on some systems that do not like ACPI.

– LiveCD creation scripts has been improved, maybe this will also fix some boot problems on misc systems.

– VLAN and LAGG support has been included

– WLAN WEP/WPA should work now

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Big thanks to Vault Networks

iX Team — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:19:00 +0000

Vault Networks choose to sponsorize the FreeNAS community by offering a big hosted server.
I’m installing VMware server on it

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Actual state of FreeNAS 0.7

iX Team — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:15:00 +0000

The migration to FreeBSD 7.0 was more easy that planned.
I’ve still one problem to solve with the circular log rotating patch, but it’s works…
Now I’m working on migrating the internal configuration of disk/geom volume: I will use the idea of Volker for storing real disk and geom drive.
Here is the actual state:

Migrate to FreeBSD 7.0: 80% done (need to fix the clog problem and adapt iSCSI initiator that is now include in FreeBSD)
Migrate the internal disk/geom management and config file: 40% done (lot’s of internals function to change)
Review all the disk/mount point management WebGUI: 0%
Adding gjournal, ZFS and gvistor: 0%

Here is an idea about the new approach of manasge disk/geom class :

Disk: This mandatory step will permit to add a physical disk (ATA, SCSI and HW RAID) and to choose use it directly (by formatting or keeping existing data) or to put it in a Â«available poolÂ». If the user choose to use it directly, the disk will be formatted and mounted (the mount part will be transparent to the user: no more Â«mountÂ» page)
Virtual disk (or other name… need to define): This optionnal step will permit to create graid5, geli,gstripe, ZFS, etc…. using the disks in the Â«available poolÂ», and propose to use this new virtual disk directly or to re-put the virtual disk to the Â«available poolÂ» (for creating encrypted graid5 volume, or RAID 1+0, or any combinaison you want).
Share: This mandatory step will permit to create a share on a selected disk and to set user/group permission and quotas on it (this step will transparently create a directory on choosen disk).

The post Actual state of FreeNAS 0.7 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Begin to port FreeNAS on FreeBSD 7.0

iX Team — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:04:00 +0000

I’m back 🙂
And start to works on FreeNAS 0.7 release that wil include bigs changes:
1. Migrate to FreeBSD 7.0 (yes… with ZFS)
2. Full review of the Web Interface, especialy rewrite the disk management/mount point process for pemetting real share configuration (with pemission and quotas support).

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FreeNAS on “c’t special Netzwerke” CD

iX Team — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:48:00 +0000

FreeNAS is mentioned in on of the biggest german computer magazines. Have a look here.

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New FreeNAS article in german PC magazin

iX Team — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:23:00 +0000

Have a look here.

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FreeNAS video workshop in german PC magazin

iX Team — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:11:00 +0000

Today i found a video workshop in a german PC magazin. Have a look here:
Video 1
Video 2

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FreeNAS 0.685b released

iX Team — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 13:12:00 +0000

After a long time and hard work we’ve released a new beta version of FreeNAS. It includes many new features and hopefully less bugs than the previous version.

You can have a look on the changes here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=151951&release_id=523100

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Convertion to sysvinit nearly completed

iX Team — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:58:00 +0000

The boot code currently used in FreeNAS has been nearly completely converted into shell scripts. This has been done to use the FreeBSD sysvinit system and to make FreeNAS working more like FreeBSD. This enables us to provide the ability to use the FreeBSD package system without any big code changes. Because of the FreeNAS system architecture this is only possible on the new harddisk installation option that will be provided with 0.685b.

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IPv6

iX Team — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:44:00 +0000

Internet IPv6 migration seem very slow (in US and Europe), then here is my little contribution to this big task:
By continuing to improve the upgrade process of the new ‘full’ release, I’ve start on adding IPv6.
The actuall FreeBSD kernel used in FreeNAS support allready IPv6, the only change is to permit to configure IPv6 from the console and webGUI. This first step will be very easy.
The next step will be to check that all services (CIFS, FTP, etcâ€¦) can use IPv6 too.

Working on user validation input for IPv6, I’ve discovered an excellent PHP Filter Functions.
PHP provide a function for validing email/url/IPv4/IPv6/etc…. This will simplify a lot the FreeNAS code!!

At the BarCampNantes, Iâ€™ve meet Bertrand Florat (the project manager of the open source software Jajuk) .
And he gives me lotâ€™s advices for managing an open source project, and the more important: To read this book Producing Open Source Software: How To Run Sucessful Free Software Project.

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SF.net 2007 Community Choice Awards

iX Team — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:02:00 +0000

The SF.net Community Choice Awards are back for 2007.

You can vote for your favorite software 😉 by clicking on this link:
(SF.net account needed)

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BarCamp at Nantes (FR)

iX Team — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:55:00 +0000

Hi all,
There is a BarCamp at Nantes (in France) friday (the 8th june), and I will be present.
If you want to speak about managing an open source project (in french), you’re welcome!

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Refactor services code and integrate sysvinit

iX Team — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 23:23:00 +0000

Currently i’m thinking about how to replace the current services php init code by using FreeBSD’s init system. This will make it easier to start/stop/restart services the Unix way.

The post Refactor services code and integrate sysvinit appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

New experimental installation mode

iX Team — Mon, 28 May 2007 22:42:00 +0000

Iâ€™ve just added a new method for installing FreeNAS: Itâ€™s a real â€˜installâ€™ method that no more use the RAM drive.

For preparing these change, Iâ€™ve begin to rename the platform name:

Here are the new platform names:

FreeNAS-i386-liveCD: For the CD-ROM release (using a RAM drive)
FreeNAS-i386-embedded: For the classical .IMG release (using a RAM drive)
FreeNAS-i386-full: For the release installed with the new method (real install)

These new name will permit to add â€˜amd64â€™ release, or other architecture.

I think that it will be complex to add an â€˜upgrade featureâ€™ with the â€˜fullâ€™ release, but possible.

Now I need to fix all bugs that I’ve added with these changes (I’ve just found that firmware upgrade doesn’t work with the ’embedded’ for example).

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Samba/CIFS performance initiative

iX Team — Thu, 24 May 2007 17:33:00 +0000

After recoding most the FreeNAS build scripts now we are able to add original FreeBSD patches into our ports. Due this i’ve added the Samba patches in the hope of increasing its performance.
My current results are between 8.5 and 9.1 MB/s on a 100MBit network connection. Maybe my switch is a bottleneck, so i hope to get a 1000MBit soon.

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Last day in Ottawa for BSDCan 2007

iX Team — Sun, 20 May 2007 13:43:00 +0000

It was my first BSD conference, and it was very interesting.
This conference permit to meet lotâ€™s of people from the *BSD world:

– Pawel Jakub Dawidek (The GEOM guru) presented his actual work for porting ZFS under FreeBSD 7.0 and it was an incredible demonstration!!! (I never see ZFS in action before).
Pawel confirm me that ZFS and RAID-Z feature will simplifier a lot the FreeNAS disks management by adding a powerful Volume Management tools into FreeBSD.
=> As soon as FreeBSD 7.0 will be available, FreeNAS will migrate on it for using ZFS!
But Pawels work alone for this task, and he need other developers: Then if you know C programming, filesystem and optionally FreeBSD, please help him on this big task!

– Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler (the pfSense guys). Talking with them permit to learn a lot about their experience from pfSense. They have created a company for professional services on m0n0wall and pfSense too (this permit to reassure some company about using these open source firewalls).
Iâ€™ve learn that pfSense use only the WebGUI of m0n0wall, and all the base system is create using FreeSBIE. I understand now why there are so differences between the core of m0n0wall and pfSense.

– Marko Zec did an excellent demonstration of the Network stack virtualization with FreeBSD. He shows us how, from one FreeBSD server, create 10 routers (including routing between) in less than 5 seconds 😉

– George Neville-Neil gives an interesting lesson about security with IPv6.
Bad news, IPv6 seems to have the same security problem as IPv4: And he does a demonstration with NDP poisoning (same as ARP poisoning on IPv4).
Good news: There are peoples who are testing IPv6 a lot, and when it will be fully used, these problems should be resolved.

– Andrew Clunis permit me to play a little with a prototype of a One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). But I canâ€™t participate to its presentation because I was giving the FreeNAS presentation at the same time.

And there were lotâ€™s of other events that I canâ€™t participate (there are 3 conferences in at the same times): The Varnish HTTP accelerator (Poul-Henning Kamp), PC-BSD (Matt Olander), Portsnap (Colin Percival), How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman), etcâ€¦.

The post Last day in Ottawa for BSDCan 2007 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Preparing BSDCan2007

iX Team — Tue, 15 May 2007 19:36:00 +0000

There is a long time that I didnâ€™t post hereâ€¦. Hopefully Volker is very active on the FreeNAS code and on this blog 🙂

Iâ€™m preparing my travel to Ottawa for BSDCan2007. I will try to put some photos and day-to-day comments about this event and conferences.

I will present this paper about FreeNAS: I hope that my spoken English will be understandable 🙂

About FreeNAS actual work: Iâ€™ve replaced geom_raid5 module by a new release.I found a little bug that crash the system when trying to remove inexistent disk to an inexistent raid5 volume (for example â€œgraid5 remove nonexistentvolume ad12â€ crash FreeNAS ).
Arne fix this bug in few minutes, and it will be include in the next release.

There is a high performance geom_raid5 module (TNG) too, but I will wait more test about his module before to replace the actual by FreeNAS.

Iâ€™ve meet a big temporary limitation by choosing to use GPT for formatting drive: The actual version of the FreeBSD gpt tools doesnâ€™t permit to increase the size of a GPT partition.

Then I canâ€™t use the cool features of geom_raid5: Adding a disk to an existing geom_raid5 volume , or replacing each disk one-by-one by bigger disk. All this step works great when working directly on the graid5 volume (â€œ/dev/raid5/bigdriveâ€ for example) because it doesnâ€™t use partition, and need only a â€˜growfsâ€™. But if you create a MBR partition on it (â€œ/dev/raid5/bigdrives1â€ for example), you need to modify the partition size before to use growfs.

Hoppefully, Marcel Moolenaar are working on a replacement of the gpt tools that will support GPT partition re-size.

I must now fix some bugs on the actual working release (regarding the mount tools about graid5 volume) and I must create a new method for installing FreeNASâ€¦ And this step is an hard step!

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Loader bootmenu

iX Team — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:50:00 +0000

Today i’ve added a loader bootmenu. I think this is a nice feature for error diagnostics. It is also possible to disable ACPI with a finger tip, do some advanced diagnostics on the loader prompt, enabling debugging, …

The post Loader bootmenu appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Under the hood

iX Team — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 07:35:00 +0000

Currently i’m doing much code reviews which hopefully results in better and stable code. Through this reviews i’ve found a lot of errors which have been fixed immediately. Also i want to concentrate my development for the next time to improve the FreeNAS PHP engine (the scripts behind the WebGUI :-)), there is much to do, e.g cleanup code, reduce duplicate code, …

The post Under the hood appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

NTFS

iX Team — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:12:00 +0000

Yesterday i’ve upgraded the NTFS support, now we are using fusefs-ntfs v1.417 and fusefs-libs v2.6.3. There is only one problem in the WebGUI that we will hopefully fix soon.

The post NTFS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Current state

iX Team — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:48:00 +0000

Yesterday i’ve added a nice bootsplash to make the booting process a little bit nicer 🙂
I’ve choosen a low resolution (640×480) to make sure it will be displayed on nearly every display and to keep the mem cosumption as low as possible.

Also Olivier and i thinking about how to integrate plugins and additional kernel modules into FreeNAS. One option is to provide a harddrive installation that enables the user to add plugins and additional drivers (kernel modules).

I’ve added the plugins infrastructure (on client and build scripts) already and there is also the first plugin available: lcdproc (without GUI, will be added soon). A WebGUI to administrate plugins will be available soon, too.

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At Last: FreeNAS 0.684b is out

iX Team — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:35:00 +0000

Iâ€™ve found two little bugs just before release it, but itâ€™s not very important bug:

When pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, the rc.shutdown script doesnâ€™t work (http://pastebin.ca/417482)
The French accent are not correctly displayed: Iâ€™ve have the character â€˜e in the place of Ã¨ and ^o in the place of Ã´.

Iâ€™ve added the QEMU image too (excellent free virtualization tools).

I will try to debug the FreeNAS AMD64 release one day too.

Still not resolved the file permission problem (I must improve my file permission knoledge under FreeBSD before).

My 5 years old PC is dying: I will try some iMac this week-endâ€¦

The post At Last: FreeNAS 0.684b is out appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

File permission problem

iX Team — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:56:00 +0000

Dan just found a bug on the ‘rev 688’ of FreeNAS:

Here are some command enter by a simple user (not root, not in the wheel group):

> mount
/dev/md0 on / (ufs, local)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
/dev/raid5/BigDiskp1 on /mnt/big_share (ufs, local, soft-updates, acls)
/dev/ad0s1 on /cf (ufs, local, read-only)
> ls -alh
total 20501
drwxrwxrwx 3 root wheel 512B Mar 27 23:36 .
drwxrwxrwx 3 root wheel 512B Mar 27 23:33 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 root operator 512B Mar 26 23:54 .snap
-rw——- 1 root wheel 20M Mar 27 23:36 swap_file
> rm swap_file
override rw——- root/wheel for swap_file? y
> ls -alh
total 5
drwxrwxrwx 3 root wheel 512B Mar 27 23:55 .
drwxrwxrwx 3 root wheel 512B Mar 27 23:33 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 root operator 512B Mar 26 23:54 .snap

Yes…. a simple user can delete a ‘600’ file !
Then I try with system file:

> ls -alh /var/etc/master.passwd
-rw——- 1 root wheel 899B Mar 27 23:36 /var/etc/master.passwd
> rm /var/etc/master.passwd
override rw——- root/wheel for /var/etc/master.passwd? y
rm: /var/etc/master.passwd: Permission denied

Now I must found the difference between this two files…
Why can I delete the swap_file ??

The post File permission problem appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

0.684b is very close

iX Team — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:03:00 +0000

Iâ€™ve found the problem with openssh-portable : It seem that openssh-portable havenâ€™t the same default value as the FreeBSD sshd implementation. It needs the line â€œPasswordAuthentication yesâ€ on the sshd_config file.

And Iâ€™ve added some messages about umouting drive that are used by swap file or iSCSI target and other little fix and prevent to format â€œused in a software raid driveâ€ disk.
Now the code seem ready for 0.684b 😉

User documentation is updated about the last features added: Only one choice for UFS (screen shot updates), and permit to use an USB key for storing configuration when using FreeNAS CDROM.

Iâ€™ve tried the just created FreeNAS-amd64 release CDROM, but my QEMU crash when I boot the CDROMâ€¦ there should be a bug somewhere on the make.sh with the amd64 release 🙁

Successful booting my software modified XBOX with the FreeBSD release (xbox-6stable-20060821.iso) .But Iâ€™ve just seen that the XBOX have only 64MB of RAMâ€¦ And FreenNAS need a minium of 96MB 🙁

For solving this 64MB problem I think that I should add a new install process for hard drive: It should no more use the method as flash device (using a RAM drive), but being installed directly on the hard drive (this will permit to simplify user modification of FreeNAS too). But this task is complex and will not be planned for the 0.684b. pfSense seem to use this method: I should check their code. This install method will permit to create a real SWAP partition too (permit to solve the â€˜not enough RAMâ€™ for fsck problem).

Iâ€™ve meet a problem since Iâ€™ve replace mini_httpd with lighttpd (there is a long time) : On the exec.php page the output of some commands (help option or error message) are no more display, but are send to the error.log of lighttpdâ€¦ Perhaps this problem is solved on the pfSense project.

The post 0.684b is very close appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Add recovery tools and improve performance under VM

iX Team — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:03:00 +0000

Yesterday I did a big mistake: Iâ€™ve upgrade my NAS server with a non-tested release of FreeNAS. And this release had a big bug that prevent me to start it again 🙁

The process for recovery my system is quite simple:
1. Boot from a working FreeNAS CDROM
2. Mount the partition where is installed the bugged FreeNAS
3. Copy the config.xml from this partition to a tmp directory (in the RAM drive)
4. Unmount the partition
5. Re-install a working release of FreeNAS on this partition
6. Re-mount the partition where is now the working release
7. Copy the backuped config.xml from the RAM drive to this partition
8. reboot the computer

I choose to automated this process and add this tool as option on the install menu of FreeNAS (the install menu is now displayed only when booting from CDROM).

I found an interressant post on the forum that link to this cool blog:
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/vmware.html
This article explains how to increase the performance of FreeBSD under a VM machine by replacing the network drivers and changing one kernel parameter.
Changing a network driver is not users transparent (because they must re-configure their LAN interfaces)â€¦ But I should not forget to add this mention in the 0.684b release notes:
If your FreeNAS is using a â€œlncâ€ interface, plug a keyboard/screen on your PC before to start the upgrade because you will have to reconfigure your LAN interface for using the new â€œleâ€ driver!

I’ve installed FreeBSD on my laptop too (removed ubuntu)… This will permit to play with my aironet card and WPA one day.

I’ve still not added the code for protecting to format a disk used in a RAID volume 🙁
I think to hide them for the format option, but it’s more complex that I thought.

The post Add recovery tools and improve performance under VM appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Using USB stick to save configuration.

iX Team — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 12:28:00 +0000

I have added a new feature to use a USB stick to save the configuration when booting FreeNAS from CD. Alternatively a floppy disk can be used also.

The post Using USB stick to save configuration. appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Disable openssh-portable

iX Team — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:52:00 +0000

I’ve disabled the openssh-portable package again because of ssh login failures.
The original sshd shipped with FreeBSD6.2 is used instead, but this one has no HPN patch.

The post Disable openssh-portable appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

LDAP will not be working for the 0.684b

iX Team — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:55:00 +0000

Here is the actual state of the day about my works.

RSYNC bug fixed : I forgot to add the hidden â€˜idâ€™ value (corresponding to the entry number) in the web form.

FAT32 and EXT2 formatting: Iâ€™ve remove the BSD label creation for these filesystem (it was an old bug created when I didnâ€™t understand what was BSD label).

New problem founded with the Openssh-portable port: I meet the same problem as Volker. I canâ€™t use SSH anymore: after entering my username Iâ€™m disconnected. I’m using the latest CVS code…

I found new features to be added:
– FreeNAS donâ€™t use the background filesystem check for UFS. This is important to be added I think (because FreeNAS us Softupdate).
– I need to simplify the hard drive formatting page by proposing only one UFS type (I should impose using gpt) and let the user to choose only itâ€™s â€˜minimum free space thresholdâ€™ between 8% and 0%.

It seem that LDAP feature will no be working in the 0.684b release. I don’t have time for setting up a OpenLDAP server on my FreeBSD.
And I must release this version soon: This will permit me to work on my paper about FreeNAS for the BSDCan2007.

The post LDAP will not be working for the 0.684b appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Install problem fixed

iX Team — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 09:40:00 +0000

My previous problem encounter when using the latest FreeBSD 6.2 code was fixed:
Replaced the defective FreeBSD 6.2 gzip binary by the gzip port.
Now I can install and upgrade my FreeNAS again.
I hope that the FreeBSD team will fix this problem on gzip (imported from NetBSD).

This week, If I got enough time, I will try to:
– Testing the possibility of creating ext2 filesystem that Volker just added.
– Fix the exisiting bug (that Dan discovered on the working 0.684b about RSYNC)
– Try to install an OpenLDAP server for testing the actual LDAP authentication feature that I’ve added but not tested.

The post Install problem fixed appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Can’t no more install FreeNAS

iX Team — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:52:00 +0000

(First post!)

Since the last week, I can’t install FreeNAS on my virtual machine (same problem under KQEMU and VMware).
When booting from the CDROM (or upgrading from WebGUI) I meet this error message (try to install it in both mode):

gunzip: error writing to output: Broken pipe
gunzip: img file: uncompress failed

Then, from the shell I’ve try to install it manually:

# mkdir /mnt/cdrom_fr_0507
# mount -t cd9660 /dev/acd0 /mnt/cdrom_fr_0507
# /usr/bin/gunzip -S “” -c /mnt/cdrom_fr_0507/FreeNAS-generic-pc.gz | dd of=/dev/ad0 bs=512
dd: /dev/ad0: Invalid argument
1278+1 records in
1278+0 records out
654336 bytes transferred in 0.917600 secs (713095 bytes/sec)

It seem ok but I don’t remember if the message “dd: /dev/ad0: Invalid argument” is a normal message.

Then I check the fresh hard drive:

# mkdir /mnt/tutu
# mount /dev/ad0a /mnt/tutu
# ls -alh /mnt/tutu/
ls: boot: Bad file descriptor
ls: conf: Bad file descriptor
total 15291
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 512B Mar 18 16:11 .
drwxrwxrwx 4 root wheel 512B Mar 19 00:03 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 root operator 512B Mar 18 16:11 .snap
-rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 15M Mar 18 16:11 mfsroot.gz

It seem that the IMG file is not correctly ‘dd’ on the hard drive (Bad file descriptor for the boot directory).

Then I checked the IMG file on the CDROM (using another drive ad1 for testing it):
# fdisk -I /dev/ad1
******* Working on device /dev/ad1 *******
fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found
fdisk: Geom not found
# newfs /dev/ad1s1
/dev/ad1s1: 99.9MB (204560 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048
using 4 cylinder groups of 24.98MB, 1599 blks, 3200 inodes.
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
160, 51328, 102496, 153664
# mkdir /mnt/testing
# mount /dev/ad1s1 /mnt/testing/
# cp /mnt/cdrom_fr_0507/FreeNAS-generic-pc.gz /mnt/testing/
# cd /mnt/testing/
# gunzip FreeNAS-generic-pc.gz
# mdconfig -a -t vnode -f FreeNAS-generic-pc -u 1
# mkdir /mnt/check
# mount /dev/md1a /mnt/check/
# ls -alh /mnt/check/
total 15293
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 512B Mar 18 16:11 .
drwxrwxrwx 6 root wheel 512B Mar 19 00:07 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 root operator 512B Mar 18 16:11 .snap
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512B Mar 18 16:11 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512B Mar 18 16:11 conf
-rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 15M Mar 18 16:11 mfsroot.gz

No problem on this IMG file.. the problem seem coming from the “dd” command…

The post Can’t no more install FreeNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

FreeNAS – TrueNAS – Welcome to the Open Storage Era

TrueNAS vs FreeNAS (and why you should upgrade!)

FreeNAS is now known as TrueNAS CORE

Why Are FreeNAS and TrueNAS so Popular?

What Are the Differences Between FreeNAS and TrueNAS?

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

Cross-Site Disaster Recovery with TrueNAS

WD Red Plus drives are “Coke Classic”

What’s Old is New Again

What’s New is Now Old

Confused yet?

What about the FreeNAS Minis?

And, the “Red SMR” Drives? Will those ever be compatible?

Some upside!

New-New TrueNAS Logo Unveiled

Thank you for removing ‘Free’ from the name

We’ve Gone Full Corporate

The Abstract Shark Fin?

Setting Up Windows iSCSI Block Shares on TrueNAS & FreeNAS

What is iSCSI?

Basic Information

Creating a ZVOL

Configuring iSCSI

Enable iSCSI Service

Access Data on iSCSI share from Windows

Open Source Infrastructure is Recession-Proof

Open Source Economics

Choose your own Destiny

iXsystems is an Open Source partner for tough times

Understanding How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe

You Can Influence the TrueNAS CORE Roadmap!

TrueNAS CORE is the new FreeNAS

TrueNAS CORE is the New FreeNAS

TrueNAS CORE Features

Onward to TrueNAS CORE!

Still the Best Free NAS

Setting Up Users, Permissions, and ACLs on FreeNAS

Setting up a FreeNAS group and user account

Setting up Permissions (for non-SMB datasets)

Setting up ACLs (for SMB datasets)

iXsystems Introduces New TrueNAS Security Hub

How to Set Up Windows SMB Shares on FreeNAS

FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying

The Benefits

What to Expect

Two Names Become One

TrueNAS CORE: always open, always Free NAS

TrueNAS Enterprise: the best value in enterprise storage

The TrueNAS 12.0 Preview

Next Steps

Warning! Active Directory Security Changes Require TrueNAS and FreeNAS Updates

Critical Information for Current FreeNAS and TrueNAS Users

Introducing the FreeNAS Mini E+ and All-Flash Minis

Plex Permissions in FreeNAS 11.3

FreeNAS Plugins Development

Requirements

Creating Each Component

Git Repo Initialization

Upload the Files to the Git Repo

Test the Plugin via the CLI

Test the Plugin via Web Interface

Adding the Plugin to the Community Repository

Resolving Common Issues

Plugin Maintenance

How To Back Up Google Drive to FreeNAS

How To Enable Wireguard on FreeNAS 11.3

The Official FreeNAS Hardware Guide

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Storage Device Considerations

Spinning Disks

SATA NAS Disks

Nearline SAS Disks

SAS Disks

SATA and SAS Flash Storage SSDs

NVMe

Hybrid Storage & Flash Cache (SLOG/ZIL/L2ARC)

Self Encrypting Drives

USB Hard Disks

Boot Devices

**Still the Best Free NAS**