Advice Request: Is FreeNAS Suitable For My Purposes?

[3guesses]

Hi,

I am hoping I can get some advice on whether or not FreeNAS would be suitable for my needs.

My plan is to use a spare laptop that I have as a file-server. I'll remove the DVD drive and replace it with a caddy that will allow me to have 2 HDDs (same size) installed in the laptop. I would like these to be in a RAID 1(?)/mirrored configuration, so I would like the operating system installed on (and therefore booted from) an 8+GB SD card (preferably) or a USB drive. I might also want the machine to run as an SQL database server, but otherwise it will be a dedicated file-server.

So, the issues I think I need to consider are as follows:

• The Linux OS should be lightweight/light on system resources.
• I rather doubt the HDD controller in the laptop supports hardware RAID but I believe FreeNAS can implement the disk-mirroring; it would need to be able to rebuild a drive if one had to be replaced.
• I would like the OS to be able to go into low-power/standby mode automatically after, say, 15 minutes of no activity.
• I would like the machine to wake up automatically when needed (wake on LAN?) by a client.
• I would like to be able to encrypt the contents of the mirrored drives (I have used Veracrypt on Windows XP for single drive encryption before).
• It would be good to have firewall and anti-virus software installed.
• It would be good to have software that will replicate (backup) files stored on other Windows machines on the network.

That's all the major issues that I can think of for the moment. I will be migrating the data from an XP/NTFS volume, so I think it might be easiest to format the mirrored drives as NTFS too.

The advice I'm looking for is if FreeNAS is suitable for my needs or if another Linux distro would b better. Of course any other relevant advice would be greatly appreciated. I have used desktop Linux a bit before in the past but I have principally been using XP for the last 10+ years so my knowledge of Linux is fairly limited. I am technically proficient :D

Thanks very much!

 

[m0nkey_]

My plan is to use a spare laptop that I have as a file-server.

I'll stop right here. FreeNAS was never designed to work with a laptop. I suggest you take a look at the hardware recommendations guide.

It seems that some kind of Linux distribution would be more suitable.

 

[3guesses]

I'll stop right here. FreeNAS was never designed to work with a laptop. I suggest you take a look at the hardware recommendations guide.

It seems that some kind of Linux distribution would be more suitable.

OK, thanks. The server will not be used very intesively (just to store data files, basically), so I didn't think I'd need to use serious hardware. It's a shame because reading about FreeNAS it sounds like it has some useful features. Can you suggeste which distro(s) would be suitable for me?

 

[anmnz]

Can you suggeste which distro(s) would be suitable for me?

Sorry, I think you're in the wrong place! FreeNAS runs on FreeBSD, not Linux. Your best choice of Linux distribution will directly depend on specific Linux distributions' support for the specific hardware in your laptop. And obviously that's a very long way off-topic for these forums.

What would be on-topic here would be to persuade you that if you care about your data then you want to use a much more reliable hardware setup, on which FreeNAS would be a much better choice. If you are interested in following that up, start with the hardware guide that @m0nkey_ linked to above.

 

[Stux]

Well, technically, as long as it boots, it should work quite well and meet you requirements (except for the low power stuff)but it’s very far from a normal supported situation.

 

[Jailer]

What you use is entirely up to you. Most users that come to FreeNAS do so for rock solid data integrity. The proposed build does not meet that requirement hence the several posts steering you away from FreeNAS.

FreeNAS provides a wonderful, easy to use stable platform for your data storage. But the platform is only as good as the foundation it's built on.

 

[3guesses]

I must say I'm really surprised/disappointed that FreeNAS should require such high spec hardware just to run a fairly entry-level home network file-server - when I first started work we used 486-based machines with 16MB RAM as file-servers perfectly adequately. I thought Windows was bad, but Microsoft have nothing on this!

Stability and reliability are obviously key factors for me, but so is efficiency and low power consumption. I'm not going to be using the machine to stream 1080p video simultaneously to multiple devices, so I don't really understand why I would need the hardware to support such functionality. Sledgehammer and nut spring to mind. But if FreeNAS does not support going into standby/low-power state when idle (and waking up when needed) then that seems like a major deficiency in the software and would rule it out as a possibility for me, otherwise I would be tempted to give it a go.

 

[wblock]

I must say I'm really surprised/disappointed that FreeNAS should require such high spec hardware just to run a fairly entry-level home network file-server

ZFS was designed with a set of features and requirements, primarily data integrity. Certain hardware is required to provide those features. There are no provisions to compromise the ZFS design to run on smaller hardware, probably because there are a lot of existing filesystems that already run on smaller hardware by not offering ZFS features.

when I first started work we used 486-based machines with 16MB RAM as file-servers perfectly adequately. I thought Windows was bad, but Microsoft have nothing on this!

But FreeNAS is not just a fileserver, and Windows has definitely not run on 486 systems with 16M of RAM for a long, long time. Even today, Windows filesystem data integrity does not compare with ZFS. Pretty much anything can store files. ZFS is what you use when you really don't want to lose those files.

 

[Nick2253]

But if FreeNAS does not support going into standby/low-power state when idle (and waking up when needed) then that seems like a major deficiency in the software and would rule it out as a possibility for me, otherwise I would be tempted to give it a go.

If power savings is a critical design tenant for your system, then I would agree that FreeNAS is not for you. In particular, I'm assuming you're looking at HDD spin-down when you say this. And, again, the design behind ZFS (and therefore FreeNAS) is first and foremost about data integrity and reliability. So regularly spinning down and spinning up hard drives is not something that you want to do in a high-reliability application.

 

[3guesses]

ZFS was designed with a set of features and requirements, primarily data integrity. Certain hardware is required to provide those features. There are no provisions to compromise the ZFS design to run on smaller hardware, probably because there are a lot of existing filesystems that already run on smaller hardware by not offering ZFS features.

Are you sure it's the data integrity that requires such a high hardware spec and not a high level of performance?

But FreeNAS is not just a fileserver...

But all I want is a file-server. It sounds like FreeNAS can't be configured to switch off more advanced features. As I said, sledgehammer-nut.

... and Windows has definitely not run on 486 systems with 16M of RAM for a long, long time. Even today, Windows filesystem data integrity does not compare with ZFS. Pretty much anything can store files. ZFS is what you use when you really don't want to lose those files.

It was actually OS/2, not Windows. The data integrity that ZFS offers makes it attractive but not its minimum spec requirements; then again it would be safer to drive the kids to school in a tank rather than a family saloon.

 

[3guesses]

If power savings is a critical design tenant for your system, then I would agree that FreeNAS is not for you. In particular, I'm assuming you're looking at HDD spin-down when you say this. And, again, the design behind ZFS (and therefore FreeNAS) is first and foremost about data integrity and reliability. So regularly spinning down and spinning up hard drives is not something that you want to do in a high-reliability application.

On a high-availability system, I would agree to an extent. But my server will be idle for hours on end, possibly even a couple of days on occasion. The 2 mirrored drive set-up is there to deliver a high level of reliability and availability, plus their contents would be backed up elsewhere on a regular basis. I'm not trying to run a commercial datacentre. I keep coming back to those words: sledgehammer, nut.

 

[m0nkey_]

Sir, you're welcome to try. However we've seen on numerous occasions people with the same set-up, only to return a couple months later saying their pool is no longer available with all data lost. I just don't want you to be another casualty.

I wish you well on your endeavor.

 

[Nick2253]

I keep coming back to those words: sledgehammer, nut.

What may feel like only a nut to you is a much more significant concern for many. Personally, I have lost irreplaceable data, and I will never let that happen again. The marginal cost of using ZFS is peanuts compared to the weight of losing pictures and videos of a loved one that I will never get back. If it were up to me, I'd pick a bigger sledgehammer if I could.

My story is one that I've seen too many times here. I had the pictures on a mobo soft-raid mirror, and they were being backed up to a cloud service. I had my backup configured to wake my computer up at night, back up the data, and then put the computer back to sleep. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, my backup software stopped doing this, and I went on my merry way for over a year without backups. When a drive died, I was notified properly, but the other drive turns out was also bad (but not detected as such by the motherboard), and I was only able to restore some of my data.

That feeling of having to tell your family that this stuff is gone is terrible. For something less touchy-feeling, how about trying to navigate an audit with the IRS without any of your tax documents? Trying to justify expenses without receipts, trying to prove income without W2s for companies now out of business? I've seen that scenario happen to my friends.

Not every tool is appropriate for every problem. And if you're only looking for an entry-level home file server, then FreeNAS is probably not the right tool for you. But just because all you see are nuts, does not mean that a sledgehammer is a useless tool.

 

[3guesses]

Sir, you're welcome to try. However we've seen on numerous occasions people with the same set-up, only to return a couple months later saying their pool is no longer available with all data lost. I just don't want you to be another casualty.

I wish you well on your endeavor.

Thanks, although I have to say I find it quite frightening to hear that pools can simply disappear. The software either offers data integrity or it doesn't; that anecdote would suggest it doesn't.

Anyway, I've decided I'm going to try a set-up using ZFS on Ubuntu (which I have played with before) or on FreeBSD (which I haven't ever used). I'm currently edging towards FreeBSD as I always like new experiences...

 

[3guesses]

What may feel like only a nut to you is a much more significant concern for many. Personally, I have lost irreplaceable data, and I will never let that happen again. The marginal cost of using ZFS is peanuts compared to the weight of losing pictures and videos of a loved one that I will never get back. If it were up to me, I'd pick a bigger sledgehammer if I could.

My story is one that I've seen too many times here. I had the pictures on a mobo soft-raid mirror, and they were being backed up to a cloud service. I had my backup configured to wake my computer up at night, back up the data, and then put the computer back to sleep. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, my backup software stopped doing this, and I went on my merry way for over a year without backups. When a drive died, I was notified properly, but the other drive turns out was also bad (but not detected as such by the motherboard), and I was only able to restore some of my data.

That feeling of having to tell your family that this stuff is gone is terrible. For something less touchy-feeling, how about trying to navigate an audit with the IRS without any of your tax documents? Trying to justify expenses without receipts, trying to prove income without W2s for companies now out of business? I've seen that scenario happen to my friends.

Not every tool is appropriate for every problem. And if you're only looking for an entry-level home file server, then FreeNAS is probably not the right tool for you. But just because all you see are nuts, does not mean that a sledgehammer is a useless tool.

That would just seem to prove the point that an untested back-up is no back-up at all. But I do sympathise with your loss. I'm guessing you didn't try a commercial data recovery provider?

 

[Nick2253]

That would just seem to prove the point that an untested back-up is no back-up at all.

That is just the most basic form of the problem. However, you assume too much if you think that "testing" backups fixes everything.

When I initially set up the backup system, I ran through a full gamut of tests, including bare metal restores, and was very confident everything was working. I also had a script set up monthly to regularly pulled down from the service and check it against a test directory, confirming that files existed on the backup. The error was a simple oversight: part of my backup script updated the test files in my test directory with random data, and the restore check confirmed that these files matched. Well, when the backup script stopped working, those files never changed, so my restore check script just kept falsely reported that everything was fine.

My point is that you cannot always rely on your setup. It's easy to overlook how something can break until it breaks. My setup was "fool-proof": I had regularly changing data, and was constantly checking it against my backup service. I assumed the weakness was the backup service, and build a robust test against that weakness. Even in the case where the entire Windows scheduler went offline, I would have been fine: the regular emails I got from my restore check service would have stopped, and I would have know. The failure that I missed was that just that one task would fail. It's painfully obvious to me now, but I never saw that problem when I set everything up.

Today, I have regular email notifications from my backup service and my restore check script. I do manual checks of the backup every month. I've expanded the restore script to do more robust testing. And even with all that, I'm sure I'm missing something. For example, how robust really is my script? Or, what happens if my backup service suddenly goes offline? Am I really ready to handle simultaneous failures?

Before, I was doing everything "right": I had "RAID" for redundancy, I had online "backups", and I was "checking" them. Frankly, I was probably doing better than at least 80% of people out there. But it's not enough. Today, I have the wisdom that I wish I had back them: data isn't robust, it's fragile.

 

[danb35]

The software either offers data integrity or it doesn't; that anecdote would suggest it doesn't.

Nonsense; the software can't account for all possibilities. It can't fix, say, the catastrophic failure of two mirrored disks at about the same time. It can't fix people encrypting their pools and then losing the keys. But when run on suitable hardware, it's quite stable indeed.

It's true that the bar for "suitable hardware" is quite a bit higher than it was 20 years ago. Them's the breaks. It doesn't need to be expensive (I haven't been following the new market closely recently, but for quite a while last year, you could buy a pretty decent turnkey server, new, for around US$200 in the HPE Proliant ML10), but it really should have ECC RAM, a decent disk controller, a decent network controller, etc., none of which are common in consumer gear.

 

[3guesses]

Before, I was doing everything "right": I had "RAID" for redundancy, I had online "backups", and I was "checking" them. Frankly, I was probably doing better than at least 80% of people out there. But it's not enough. Today, I have the wisdom that I wish I had back them: data isn't robust, it's fragile.

Personally, I would say you were doing better than 99% of people out there. It sounds like INCREDIBLY bad luck that there was one small flaw in your backup procedures and you managed to fall through that hole (I still stand by my comment that your back-up was untested, even if you believed that it was being tested). If that were to happen to me, I think I would become absolutely paranoid about my backup system...

 

[3guesses]

Nonsense; the software can't account for all possibilities. It can't fix, say, the catastrophic failure of two mirrored disks at about the same time. It can't fix people encrypting their pools and then losing the keys. But when run on suitable hardware, it's quite stable indeed.

So how exactly is 8GB RAM going to fix the catastrophic failure of two mirrored disks at the same time? You have missed my point: either the software provides data integrity or it doesn't. Data integrity doesn't depend on the hardware set-up: what you are referring to is resilience. I don't need mission-critical levels of resilience, but I do require data integrity (ie data not being corrupted).

 

[3guesses]

BTW, just in case anyone is interested, I have been looking at various set-ups for my fileserver. I started by looking at FreeBSD and TrueNAS but wasn't impressed by their lack of user-friendliness. I then moved onto Ubuntu 17.04 (which supports ZFS) which I found too resource-heavy, progressed to lightweight Ubuntu-based distros Puppy Linux 7.5, Slax 9.4 and Lubuntu 18.04, the last of which I really liked, and am now looking at antiX 17.1 which is Debian-based. I am expecting to go with Lubuntu or antiX, and I will possibly install both on my laptop so that I can switch between the two of them.