Share you experiences, general FreeNas efficiency

[nattan]

Hello all,
I have been using freenas for a while ( a little over a year straight ), and I am constantly learning better more efficient ways to do things, like recently I learned you can complete file names by using "tab". I was wondering if there are any other tips or ease of use tricks to make freenas more user friendly for someone who mainly works with windows.

Id be interested to hear what you guys have learned to help save time.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

recently I learned you can complete file names by using "tab"

That works on Windows, OS X and Linux too. Should save you even more time ;)

In general, if you're using the CLI, make sure you really know what you're doing. The 'man' command is your friend, and also works very well as part of an online search. To see what I mean, type man zpool at the command line, then do the same thing as a Google search and click the first result.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Man pages don't exist on freenas so you will be stuck looking them up online. Most other os's supply man pages though.

So other cool things you can do would be modifying your shells rc file. This will allow all kinds of crazy stuff. You can create aliases, functions and call functions. On freenas the default root shell is csh so /root/.cshrc is the file location you want to modify.

 

[Bidule0hm]

They exist since a few updates :)

 

[SweetAndLow]

They exist since a few updates :)

I really should update to the new 9.3.1 builds.

 

[Bidule0hm]

They are here since a few months, I'm on 9.3.0 and I have them ;)

 

[Arwen]

I like the fact that I can do un-encrypted SSH copies. When I am simply copying over
a Linux ISO or TAR ball, using something like this is nice and fast;

scp -oNoneSwitch=yes -oNoneEnabled=yes -p SOURCE FREENAS_DEST

This would be LAN copies. If someone hacked my home network, I am in more trouble
that allowing them to see an PD ISO. The reverse also works, copying from FreeNAS. I
have that command scripted as "nscp" and "nsmv", (erase after it's copied, aka move).

Note: Even though the data is un-encrypted, we still get SSH authentication and packet
validation. So even with un-encrypted data, man in the middle attacks are not easy.

 

[NAStard]

On freenas the default root shell is csh

Perhaps I do not recall modifying the default.
On my freenas box my shell is version: ash (FreeBSD, Cygwin pre-1.7, Minix 3.1.3 ff)
according to this program called, whatshell.sh; as I was curious what shell this was.
Perhaps whatshell got it wrong? :D

 

[SweetAndLow]

echo $0 will tell you the current program running and in this case it will be your shell.

 

[NAStard]

Hey thanks!

That's very helpful to know and kinda expected as this is FreeBSD. I dunno why this distro always keeps the csh.

However, I'm glad to see that some shell programming sanity exists on the FreeBSD distro with the inclusion of bash:

Code:

/bin/bash
[root@freenas ~]# echo $BASH_VERSION
4.3.30(0)-release 

Back in '94 there was this argument that csh programming is considered harmful, by Tom Christiansen. It's a fun read.

 

[Bidule0hm]

I dunno why this distro always keeps the csh

Because it's far better than bash, even if I prefer tcsh :)