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!