Sitting at the Wizard window... few questions

[ChrisNAS]

Hi everyone.

I just put together a minipc build with 4 small drives to build a multipurpose FreeNAS based server. These are the drives I got and their purposes. All brand new.

2 x 2tb drives .... would like these to be raid1/mirrored for general storage, backups etc..
1 x 250gb SSD .... to be independent drive to provide faster r/w general files and some media streaming. Maybe act as a buffer between the network and the raid1 drives. (rsync?)
1 x small SSD .... smallest I could find to install FreeNAS on (I'm aware much of the drive is not usable... that's ok. didn't want to use USB)

Questions:

So after install, I hit the browser and the wizard is up. What do I do with the wizard to enable me to use as planned above? It doesn't seem to be geared for allowing me the 2 as raid and one solo. And, it says "Disks to be formatted: ada3,ada2" which makes me wonder why there's 2? Why not 3? One was used for OS, but there's still 3 unused.

Am I supposed to not use the wizard and instead go to storage? I'm having a hard time finding clear answers yet.

I would very much appreciate a little kickstart here... how does one go about configuring this as planned?

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

[nojohnny101]

Welcome to the forums!
Have you tried going through the part of the FreeNAS manual that explains the wizard?
http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/wizard.html#wizard

Personally a lot of people on here, including myself, think the wizard if often confusing. We generally advise people to skip it and set everything up manually. The caveat is you have to know what to setup and this is a difficult question to answer because it is different for everyone (dependent upon needs).

If you want to have the 2 x 2tb together, you would create a mirror.
For the 1 x 250gb SSD, you can just set this up as a its own volume. NOTE: make sure you do not stripe to your mirror of 2tb drives. If you do, and the SSD drive dies, then you lose everything in the pool which will include the 2 x 2tb drives and all the data they contain.

For the OS boot drive, the remaining small SSD, setting that up is self explanatory and sounds like you have already set that up correctly if you are booted up.

I would recommend viewing this slideshow if you haven't already. It has a great explanation about the storage structures that FreeNAS uses in addition to underlying fundamental you should know about how FreeNAS works.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Then going through the storage section of the manual:
http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html

Post back if you have more questions!

 

[ccssid]

Watch the enclosed youtube. Although it pertains to Plex.....it really helped me with initial FreeNAS setup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DnUWTliaOY

 

[ChrisNAS]

Thanks guys for the links. Very helpful. Watched the video which helps, and still going through the pdf. Johnny, just fyi, the only link that worked was the googlde pdf. The other two didn't work. May just be me... my browser is on lockdown.

As I understand it so far, this is how to setup:
Under Storage>Volume Manager
1) Create a volume like (MyRaidStorage) and choose the 2x2tb drives. It auto set as Mirror with the 2 drives on the same row on the table to the right.
2) Create a volume like (MyFastStorage) and choose the single SSD.

Is that right so far? I haven't done this yet, want to make sure correct. On the SSD, what should I choose as the type? It auto selects Stripe. That doesn't mean it will be tied to the raid (2xdrives) right?

Thanks again for the help!

 

[gpsguy]

That's correct.

You can verify your pool layout by going into the shell and typing zpool status

 

[ChrisNAS]

Awesome. Done with that. Thank you :)

Now, this box is going to be used for personal and business stuff. I'd like to separate the two file system wise and user wise. From what I've seen so far, I need to:

- Create groups and users
- Create datasets
- Set permissions
- Set snapshots

I'm just not clear in what order. I heard a guy say in a video that snapshots should be done first before setting up shares and such. And since want to split up personal and business with both having own and shared users, I guess I need to do in this order:

1) Setup datasets, ie:
MyRaidStorage
> MyRaidStorage
>> Business
>>> Files
>>> Backups
>> Personal
>>> Files
>>> Backups
>> Shared
MyFastStorage
> MyFastStorage
>> Files
>> Media

2) Setup snapshots for the two volumes/datasets

3) Create users, like:
Group: Business
Users: Admin, Bob, Jane
And give them access to shared and individual locations under Business

Group: Personal
Users: Bob, Jane
Same access type but personal.

4) Set permissions on datasets, under each of the above structure, each user would have own directory and should have access whether read/write or both to individual places. So I assume right now that I would be able to set Groups access to shared places, Group Read Only on business places, Individual R/W on own directories.

Am I on the right track here? In terms of order to do these things. Is there something wrong with the above? A better way?

I realize this is a longer more detailed post, so I greatly appreciate your time in reading and replying.

Thank you.

 

[gpsguy]

I don't know that it matters.

When you configure snapshots, you probably want to check the "Recursive" box. Often users miss it, only to find out later (when they need the data), that they didn't check that box.

 

[ChrisNAS]

I don't know that it matters.

When you configure snapshots, you probably want to check the "Recursive" box. Often users miss it, only to find out later (when they need the data), that they didn't check that box.

Noted, thank you.