Replacing Nas4Free with FreeNAS?

[Javve]

I have Nas4Free and am quite irritated by a bug it has. I really like the concept of FreeNAS and used it before Nas4Free was forked over. I am used to the interface in Nas4Free and the idea it has the CIFS service and UPNP service to be able to stream to a PS3 or other media device.

There are many times where I get the nas can't be found on network error when trying to transfer a file. Now when I try to watch a movie I am getting an error that it can't be found from the vlc player when I had just clicked it on the nas in the network.

Would I have to backup my raid in order to set it up in FreeNAS? It is not a ZFS raid. I'm running 4 gigs of ram on a dual xeon board.

Does FreeNAS 8 have the same error with networks?

Thanks....

A frustrated NAS user.

 

[ben]

Is it UFS software RAID, or UFS on a hardware RAID setup? Either way I would expect FreeNAS 8 to be able to import it, but give more information/do more research first to be sure. Frankly, you should back it up ANYWAY. UPnP is one of the first-party plugins for FreeNAS, but it's not in the base package, so it's a bit more effort to set up than in NAS4Free. As for specific network bugs... can't speak to that, so much depends on possibly tiny configuration details.

 

[Javve]

Is it UFS software RAID, or UFS on a hardware RAID setup? Either way I would expect FreeNAS 8 to be able to import it, but give more information/do more research first to be sure. Frankly, you should back it up ANYWAY. UPnP is one of the first-party plugins for FreeNAS, but it's not in the base package, so it's a bit more effort to set up than in NAS4Free. As for specific network bugs... can't speak to that, so much depends on possibly tiny configuration details.

UFS raid on two 500 GB ide drives. The NAS software is installed on one scsi drive. I will be happy when I can get scsi drives and then transfer all the files to it and have a true protected raid setup.

The case is a 2U case with 2 gigabit network ports with only one hooked. I will move the server to my room today and plug it into my 8 port gigabit switch and see hwo things improve. Right now it's plugged into a Netgear WNR2000V2 router that has 10/100 ports on it instead of gigabit. Cable modem is in the wan of the router, roomate's computer is plugged into the router, NAS is plugged into the router, then there is 50 foot crossover cable (since it works for router use) going from the router to the switch. I have a web server, a printer, and my laptop plugged into the gigabit switch.

My laptop has a gigabit port.

Is there a big benefit from using both ports on the NAS server? I will have room on the switch for both.

 

[ben]

If that's UFS software RAID 1, FreeNAS should have no problem importing the volume (the only reason it might not work is if something changed between FreeBSD 8.3 which FreeNAS uses and FreeBSD 9.1 which NAS4Free uses. I don't know of any such changes, but I'm not super-on-top of FreeBSD filesystem development.) I would suggest backing up your data and trying the import - if it fails you should be able to safely put the disks back in NAS4Free. Can that server boot from USB? If so, I'd leave the OS drive for NAS4Free alone and using these directions to make a FreeNAS boot USB drive: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Burning_an_IMG_File

You can theoretically set up LAGG with two ports but with only two drives you won't saturate even one link, so there's no real point.

 

[Onichan]

I didn't want to start a new topic, but I am having an issue with NAS4Free as well and am considering to try out FreeNAS. Though I am using RAIDZ2, but as of FreeNAS 8.3 you started using ZFS v28 which is the same as NAS4Free. Is there any reason why I couldn't just export my zpools and reimport them after I install FreeNAS? I have no way of backing up all the data prior though. Everything important will be backed up, but it wouldn't be good if I lost everything.

 

[cyberjock]

I didn't want to start a new topic, but I am having an issue with NAS4Free as well and am considering to try out FreeNAS. Though I am using RAIDZ2, but as of FreeNAS 8.3 you started using ZFS v28 which is the same as NAS4Free. Is there any reason why I couldn't just export my zpools and reimport them after I install FreeNAS? I have no way of backing up all the data prior though. Everything important will be backed up, but it wouldn't be good if I lost everything.

Nope. It should be a flawless import. The only thing that will "suck" will be that you will have to resetup the shares, permissions, etc. But you should instantly see your zpool as soon as you import it.