First let me say that I'm totally new to FreeNAS and apologize if what I'm asking has been asked and answered before.
I have been using Windows Home Server 2011 (and WHS V1) for many years as a home server and I now need to replace it as Microsoft has abandoned the product. I did look at newer versions of Windows Server (2012 and 2016) but gave up after realizing they were expensive and often did not work properly.
I use my Home Server for three things; a file server for my household network of 5 Windows PC's, 1 Mac Desktop and 1 Linux Desktop, a backup server to automate backups nightly for my home network and lastly as a media server to store and display my home movies, music and photographs.
I have 2 WHS boxes in use; primary and backup. So I took the backup WHS machine and installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server. This machine is an older Core 2 Duo with 16GB memory, 1 160GB drive for system and 3 2TB drives for backups and data. On this server I then installed Samba server and Plex Media Server and after a couple of weeks of trial and error have now gotten this machine to more or less mimic what WHS had been doing for me for years. In addition, I have been using a freely usable backup product from a company called Veeam to create and manage my backups
This is all working pretty well, but it does not offer any form of safety net for disks going bad. So that brings me to FreeNAS!
I have another identical machine that I have been trying to get FreeNAS to work on. This machine may be under powered, but it should be adequate for my testing. If I can get it working properly, then I'll upgrade the hardware.
First I have purchased 4 2TB WD Red NAS drives and installed them in the box. What I would like to do is to have these four drives set up as a RaidZ configuration for both boot and for data, but try as I might, when I install FreeNAS 11.2-U7 and tell it to use all four drives, it won't boot. The box boots via MBR. I then re-ran the install and used only the first 2TB drive for boot and everything installed fine. I was then able to boot, create a RaidZ pool out of the remaining 3 2TB drives and kind of configured the system with the shares I wanted. Not ideal, but workable.
Anyway after reading (and re-reading) the documentation here are the issues I cannot wrap my brain around:
Thanks in advance for any directions anybody can offer me
Greg
P.S. I'm not a complete newby. I spent over 40 years in IT managing big iron, PDPs and Vaxen and in later years Windows Servers, Ultrix, DEC Unix and AIX system. I have been retired for 15 years, but have kept my fingers dirty by doing small contracts over the years.
I have been using Windows Home Server 2011 (and WHS V1) for many years as a home server and I now need to replace it as Microsoft has abandoned the product. I did look at newer versions of Windows Server (2012 and 2016) but gave up after realizing they were expensive and often did not work properly.
I use my Home Server for three things; a file server for my household network of 5 Windows PC's, 1 Mac Desktop and 1 Linux Desktop, a backup server to automate backups nightly for my home network and lastly as a media server to store and display my home movies, music and photographs.
I have 2 WHS boxes in use; primary and backup. So I took the backup WHS machine and installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server. This machine is an older Core 2 Duo with 16GB memory, 1 160GB drive for system and 3 2TB drives for backups and data. On this server I then installed Samba server and Plex Media Server and after a couple of weeks of trial and error have now gotten this machine to more or less mimic what WHS had been doing for me for years. In addition, I have been using a freely usable backup product from a company called Veeam to create and manage my backups
This is all working pretty well, but it does not offer any form of safety net for disks going bad. So that brings me to FreeNAS!
I have another identical machine that I have been trying to get FreeNAS to work on. This machine may be under powered, but it should be adequate for my testing. If I can get it working properly, then I'll upgrade the hardware.
First I have purchased 4 2TB WD Red NAS drives and installed them in the box. What I would like to do is to have these four drives set up as a RaidZ configuration for both boot and for data, but try as I might, when I install FreeNAS 11.2-U7 and tell it to use all four drives, it won't boot. The box boots via MBR. I then re-ran the install and used only the first 2TB drive for boot and everything installed fine. I was then able to boot, create a RaidZ pool out of the remaining 3 2TB drives and kind of configured the system with the shares I wanted. Not ideal, but workable.
Anyway after reading (and re-reading) the documentation here are the issues I cannot wrap my brain around:
- the docs say you can create pools out of either disks or partitions. So can I create a mirrored boot pool out of partitions on the first two disks or better still create a RaidZ pool out of the first partition of all four disks and then use the rest of the partition space on the four drives to create a RaidZ pool for data?
- once the data pool has been created I want to create 3 data sets; 1 for shared data, one for client backups and one for server backups. Which leads me to the next question. Within the shared data area I need to have a number of separate areas for data storage. i.e. music, photos, video and public. Should these be created as file systems or data sets under data sets. If I create them as file systems, then when shared, they do not appear to show up under the windows "Net View \\server" command, but if I create them as data sets beneath data sets, then the "Net View \\server" sees them and the comments I've created.
- the last problem I've been having is getting the "public" share to work properly. This share be considered to be similar to the /tmp directory on a Unix like system. All users have read, write and delete privileges. Data stored here cannot be considered saveable, just temporary. The only way I was able to get this share working at all was to not designate it as a "Windows" share but instead to create it as a Unix share. Not sure if that's correct or not.
Thanks in advance for any directions anybody can offer me
Greg
P.S. I'm not a complete newby. I spent over 40 years in IT managing big iron, PDPs and Vaxen and in later years Windows Servers, Ultrix, DEC Unix and AIX system. I have been retired for 15 years, but have kept my fingers dirty by doing small contracts over the years.