Beatlejuice
Cadet
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2018
- Messages
- 5
Hello Freenas folks!
As in mentioned from Austria, more exactly somewhere near the proxmox dudes if that's in anyones interest to know - not meant as advertisement ;)
So my writings might are going to be partly cryptic, due my English skills, sry for that.
I'm working in video/film biz and ofc, sooner or later, in need of storage, I somehow had do find out about ZFS & Freenas. I might had some experience in terms of video, but using Freenas or any other OS besides windumb or these vegetables ones, was an absolutly new land. (I don't count these 5 times Ubuntu/Knoppix uses i had before as experience).
So I needed a NAS. Freshed up my Hardware knowledge, learned how software raid is superior for my usecase, and that i can't use the majority of my antique never finished DIY first try's hardware. - Never came over to get an HP p411 working propperly, annoyance > need.
After scrapping together some hardware in budget, and yes some totally overkill 40gbit Mellanox adapter fitted into it. Has been a real bargain, for the price of a single 10gb-e nic, and were even the ethernet ones. But some other hardware had to be flashed. -
Welcome to the CLI!
Coming from nearly zero experience in doing stuff from commandline and beeing a little afraid of bricking my stuff, I did managed to get the lsi sas controller flashed to IT firmware. Thank's to all that guides availbale, it was a breeze.
Maybe I gained too much confidence. Due my research about ZFS, ofc i had to find about Proxmox and that you can have fun with Proxmox & Freenas at the same time. - Yeah was not my best idea, but actually a nice experience. But i did not get it working as i wished to. My thought was about passing through a gpu to a second VM for a render node to get some workload offload as my NLE should be supporting this. At the point of trying to get the gpu drivers to work, I had messed up the config totally and the need of a working NAS was just bigger than the need of this feature. - But at least I learned a lot of stuff you can do with virtual machines nowadays. - Will have a look at that again in future.
But for now, got Freenas running on barebones & w/ any issues getting the pool back to work. And damn is that thing can do some very usefully read and write performance allready :D
There's is still some stuff to adress ( I'm learning and doing that stuff in my freetime, so i tend to progress a little slowly):
- I messes up the permissions (smb), can't write to/delete some folders, but the stuff is there and i'm still having backups, so no hurry, i just named the groups and user's diffrently after moving to barebones. I could just copy paste it (the dummy way), but I actually wanna learn how to fix that the propper way.
- somehow I also managed to have my jails folder for nextcloud in my smb share, hmm not shure if that should be there
- get some spare drives, as I'm running a raidz6 pool with 6x2tb and 2 drives allready are having bad sector's bich bugs me cause they're just my new old stock 2tb drives I had laying arround
- what bugs me more is the one drives which desided to disappear once, but came up the next time i started the machine and had no issues ever since
- config the services needed, propper alarms etc.
- finding a solution to backup video data more cost efficient
- batteries for the UPS
- more ram ofc (only 16gig atm, but i like the speed gona post some quick benches below)
- an l2arc/slog devices makes no/only a little sense atm
- probably a less threaded cpu with less power draw
- the power supply is kinda loud, she said
- drink a coffee - hopefully
- bench it? a little maybe, it's anyways fast
Some additional infos, or might good to know. I have 6 empty slots in chassis for future expansion/migration/project/backup volumes. I use my Freenas box more or less as a temporary storage for my working video data, which will seperatly be backuped to its own drives, once if it's not needed anymore or kinda project based, if big stuff like raw video.
I also tend to switch it off if not needed for a period.
As mentioned the power supply is kinda an issue, cause i was thinking about using the NAS on film location. Last time i did the data wrangling, i was just too annoyed by the "workflow" they "dictated" me. We nearly got out of mags on first day and I stay for ages, cause i was copying and verifying over a laptop to external spindles, twice...
so anybody knows more silent 2U/3U power supplies, any hints welcome! As orientation, I've a pair of the really screamy ones which can go through a two drywalls easyly. If you know one which can do only a single drywall it might be silent enough xD
oh, that's quite a bunch i wrote now, hope it's readable.
Coming from "nothing", I'm quite happy now. I gained a lot of experience and feel much more confident with being able to use more of my hardwares capabilities now. Kudos to the community! (is that term appropriate? I've to look that one up) I really should have stepped earlier into the unixworld!
Cheers J
As in mentioned from Austria, more exactly somewhere near the proxmox dudes if that's in anyones interest to know - not meant as advertisement ;)
So my writings might are going to be partly cryptic, due my English skills, sry for that.
I'm working in video/film biz and ofc, sooner or later, in need of storage, I somehow had do find out about ZFS & Freenas. I might had some experience in terms of video, but using Freenas or any other OS besides windumb or these vegetables ones, was an absolutly new land. (I don't count these 5 times Ubuntu/Knoppix uses i had before as experience).
So I needed a NAS. Freshed up my Hardware knowledge, learned how software raid is superior for my usecase, and that i can't use the majority of my antique never finished DIY first try's hardware. - Never came over to get an HP p411 working propperly, annoyance > need.
After scrapping together some hardware in budget, and yes some totally overkill 40gbit Mellanox adapter fitted into it. Has been a real bargain, for the price of a single 10gb-e nic, and were even the ethernet ones. But some other hardware had to be flashed. -
Welcome to the CLI!
Coming from nearly zero experience in doing stuff from commandline and beeing a little afraid of bricking my stuff, I did managed to get the lsi sas controller flashed to IT firmware. Thank's to all that guides availbale, it was a breeze.
Maybe I gained too much confidence. Due my research about ZFS, ofc i had to find about Proxmox and that you can have fun with Proxmox & Freenas at the same time. - Yeah was not my best idea, but actually a nice experience. But i did not get it working as i wished to. My thought was about passing through a gpu to a second VM for a render node to get some workload offload as my NLE should be supporting this. At the point of trying to get the gpu drivers to work, I had messed up the config totally and the need of a working NAS was just bigger than the need of this feature. - But at least I learned a lot of stuff you can do with virtual machines nowadays. - Will have a look at that again in future.
But for now, got Freenas running on barebones & w/ any issues getting the pool back to work. And damn is that thing can do some very usefully read and write performance allready :D
There's is still some stuff to adress ( I'm learning and doing that stuff in my freetime, so i tend to progress a little slowly):
- I messes up the permissions (smb), can't write to/delete some folders, but the stuff is there and i'm still having backups, so no hurry, i just named the groups and user's diffrently after moving to barebones. I could just copy paste it (the dummy way), but I actually wanna learn how to fix that the propper way.
- somehow I also managed to have my jails folder for nextcloud in my smb share, hmm not shure if that should be there
- get some spare drives, as I'm running a raidz6 pool with 6x2tb and 2 drives allready are having bad sector's bich bugs me cause they're just my new old stock 2tb drives I had laying arround
- what bugs me more is the one drives which desided to disappear once, but came up the next time i started the machine and had no issues ever since
- config the services needed, propper alarms etc.
- finding a solution to backup video data more cost efficient
- batteries for the UPS
- more ram ofc (only 16gig atm, but i like the speed gona post some quick benches below)
- an l2arc/slog devices makes no/only a little sense atm
- probably a less threaded cpu with less power draw
- the power supply is kinda loud, she said
- drink a coffee - hopefully
- bench it? a little maybe, it's anyways fast
Some additional infos, or might good to know. I have 6 empty slots in chassis for future expansion/migration/project/backup volumes. I use my Freenas box more or less as a temporary storage for my working video data, which will seperatly be backuped to its own drives, once if it's not needed anymore or kinda project based, if big stuff like raw video.
I also tend to switch it off if not needed for a period.
As mentioned the power supply is kinda an issue, cause i was thinking about using the NAS on film location. Last time i did the data wrangling, i was just too annoyed by the "workflow" they "dictated" me. We nearly got out of mags on first day and I stay for ages, cause i was copying and verifying over a laptop to external spindles, twice...
so anybody knows more silent 2U/3U power supplies, any hints welcome! As orientation, I've a pair of the really screamy ones which can go through a two drywalls easyly. If you know one which can do only a single drywall it might be silent enough xD
oh, that's quite a bunch i wrote now, hope it's readable.
Coming from "nothing", I'm quite happy now. I gained a lot of experience and feel much more confident with being able to use more of my hardwares capabilities now. Kudos to the community! (is that term appropriate? I've to look that one up) I really should have stepped earlier into the unixworld!
Cheers J
