Sneak Peak at some of the features & changes coming in FreeNAS 9.1

[ProtoSD]

Disclaimer, the stuff I am mentioning here is unofficial and may or may not be included in FreeNAS 9.1 (I am not employed by iXsystems ;) ). Since iXsystems holds the license for PCBSD, it seems likely that *some* of the features/improvements mentioned in the following link could become part of the next release of FreeNAS, 9.1.
WARNING: Do Not Use ALPHA or BETA builds in a production environment, or ask for support on those builds! Features can be added/removed or fail without warning.

http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/What's_New_in_9.1

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/What%27s_New_in_9.1.0

• MAJOR Changes to Jails:
• More configuration options for jails in the GUI
• Multiple Jails, including a "type" that can run Linux.
• Upgrade FreeNAS from the GUI without downloading upgrade files from Sourceforge.
• Increase image size from 2G to 4G, will safely fit on 4GB flash sticks.
• ATA over ethernet https://support.freenas.org/ticket/2082
• Source code has been moved to Github to make it easier for people to contribute code to the project.
• dtrace debugging tool
• zilstat - identifies ZIL activity by sampling writes sent to the ZIL
• Init/Shutdown Scripts has been added to the GUI.
• NIS Domain has been added to the GUI.
• NT4 Domain has been added to the GUI.
• Asynchronous mode has been removed from NFS as it
• Alerts now contain a checkbox, allowing the administrator to hide unneeded alerts from the display.

These are just handful of things that don't even begin to cover all the bugs and other things that are being worked on.

Nightly ALPHA builds can be found here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-nightlies/

and bugs can for it can be reported at:

http://support.freenas.org

Do not use the ticket system to ask for help, only to report bugs.

You can take a look at the source on Github here:

https://github.com/freenas

Keep in mind that although iXsystems sponsors/supports FreeNAS, there are only a handful of regular people working on it.

EDIT: When reporting bugs on ALPHA builds, copy and paste the BUILD version from the System Information tab/button in the GUI at the top of your ticket (inside the ticket).

FreeNAS-9.1.0-ALPHA-c01812f-x64

Even though it appears like there's a new build every night on Sourceforge, it can be the same build as the previous night (not new). So double check before you download.

 

[fracai]

Released next week?

Very exciting and I really hope the "Linux jail" makes it in. Hello Crashplan!

 

[Caesar]

Released next week?

Very exciting and I really hope the "Linux jail" makes it in. Hello Crashplan!

+1 for Crashplan. I was thinking the exact same thing.

 

[fracai]

I was looking into this a bit further and it looks like the Linux Jail is accomplished through GNU/kFreeBSD, ie Linux distributions compiled to run on a BSD kernel. I'm not sure if this would still restrict Crashplan from running. Searching for "kFreeBSD Crashplan" didn't turn up anything interesting either way.

Still, I very much look forward to seeing how this progresses.

 

[ProtoSD]

Released next week?

No, not sure where you saw that. It's still in ALPHA right now, we will probably see a beta sometime in June.

 

[fracai]

No, not sure where you saw that. It's still in ALPHA right now, we will probably see a beta sometime in June.

“A week” was a joke, but June is great news. I'd been fearing it'd be a year.

 

[ProtoSD]

The May 2012 issue of BSD Magazine has a few articles that will be useful to people wanting to learn about some of the new features of FreeNAS 9.1. A couple of those are:

• A Fresh Look at the Warden for PC-BSD 9.1
• Intro to DTrace

http://bsdmag.org/magazine/1800-bsd-security-protect-your-bsd

There are also many other helpful articles pertaining to FreeNAS in other issues.

September 2012

http://bsdmag.org/magazine/1812-what-s-new-in-pc-bsd-9-1

• Setting up Your OwnCloud Instance via the Warden™

 

[William Grzybowski]

I was looking into this a bit further and it looks like the Linux Jail is accomplished through GNU/kFreeBSD, ie Linux distributions compiled to run on a BSD kernel. I'm not sure if this would still restrict Crashplan from running. Searching for "kFreeBSD Crashplan" didn't turn up anything interesting either way.

Still, I very much look forward to seeing how this progresses.

No, it is actually the linux kernel emulation. The FreeBSD kernel has a module that converts linux syscalls to freebsd syscalls. It can run linux binaries.
However the kernel version emulated is kind of old so there might be a few syscalls that have not been translared yet.

 

[fracai]

Interesting. I can't wait to see this release.