Basic initial configuration

[turick]

The parts for my new machine are on the way as discussed in this thread. After it's built, I just need to have a very basic set up. I wanted to double check my understanding to make sure I have this right in my head. The purpose of my NAS is 2 fold. 1) Very small storage area for various documents for people in my family and 2) Constant usage streaming tv shows/movies. At any given time, there are 1 - 4 people streaming at a time, although it's typically not more than 3.

I have 4 WD 2TB Red drives. I will put these in a single VDev using RAIDZ1. This will be the only VDev in my zpool. Up until now, I have kept my "Documents" and "Library" volumes separate, however, I'm not entirely sure if I can create two zpools from my single VDev. Is this possible? I will not use ZIL or L2ARC.

For my basic setup, I think this is all I will need to get up and running, correct?

The next step is, I have a 1TB NTFS USB external hard drive with all of my backed-up documents and a 3TB EXT3 USB external hard drive backup with all of my media. I assume I'll be able to attach the EXT3 drive directly to FreeNAS to copy the files over, but I'll have to connect the NTFS drive to a separate Windows machine to restore them. Is this correct? Is there some sort of utility built into FreeNAS to help move the files over, or would a straight up copy suffice?

Thanks in advance!

 

[DrKK]

Turick:

One or more disks make a vdev, one or more vdev's make a pool. You are going to create one pool, which consists of a single vdev, which consists of 4x2TB drives in RaidZ1 configuration.

So I think what you want, if I'm reading you correctly, is to create a "dataset" for the documents and/or library volumes.

Like I said, your best bet here is to get VMWare Player (for free), and practice installing a make-believe FreeNAS in it. Try to set it up the way you're talking about.

Would it be helpful for me to make a document on "How to Play/Practice with FreeNAS in VMWare Player"?

 

[Dusan]

Would it be helpful for me to make a document on "How to Play/Practice with FreeNAS in VMWare Player"?

May I suggest VirtualBox here (https://www.virtualbox.org/)? In comparison with VMWare Player it also allows you to clone & snapshot your VMs (you can even snapshot a running VM). It's very handy when experimenting. If you are not sure about some action, snapshot the VM, try the action and if it didn't work as intended just restore the VM to the snapshotted state.

 

[turick]

Sure, a guide would be helpful. I created a virtual machine with vmplayer, set up 4 drives, but when it launches past the FreeNAS menu, it tells me it can't work out which disk it's booting from and can't load 'kernel'. I'm willing to give virtualbox a try too.

 

[turick]

Just got everything up and running in virtualbox.

 

[turick]

So the configuration seems pretty straight forward. Not entirely sure the best strategy for users and permissions... when it comes to my library I just want it wide open. I guess I could restrict writing to a single user, just need to make sure Media Center Master doesn't have an issue with it. It'll be nice setting up stricter users/permissions on the documents data set.

I tried installing the backup plug in, but the installation won't complete on my VM for some reason. My only other question really is just the best way to restore my data. Would the backup utility be a good option? Or just a straight up copy from the console?