Some newbie questions

[alyster]

Hey,

First of all thanks to the dev team for delivering such a thing like FreeNAS. Playing around on linux would have been probably way more brutal for a home user. Nonetheless I'm a fresh FreeNAS user and I set up my system last weekend.

Me: I'm currently running the latest FN 11 with ownCloud and Plex. Ports have been forwarded and I have my ownCloud linked to my personal domain so I could access it on the go from random computers at work. I work at school.

I like to puzzle and work step by step to get my stuff working, but now I'm in bit of a dead end. Especially with the following issues Mainly security.
1) I should probably keep my plugins up to date. Plex offers some update in plex.tv settings but the FreeNAS builtin plugin doesn't. Should I start updating from plex.tv site?
2) I have ownCloud anti virus app enabled, firewall (except for 3 ports) is up. What should I look out for to avoid ransomware or other similar malicious stuff.
3) Is linking ownCloud to a domain increasing my risk?
4) From non security side. I want to set up automated back-ups. Which way should I do it for one laptop that's usually never in my LAN. Mainly would like to offer the mother some help with backing up files to my NAS incase something happens to her SSD.

Thanks a tonn and great job dev team!

 

[rwslippey]

Welcome to the forums, I'm rather new here myself but I recently decided I need to give back to all the help I've gotten here, so I started in the newbie question forum.

I'm sure someone will elaborate on this but FreeNAS is not Linux. Some might actually might take that as an insult. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD... just something to keep in mind.

As far as the plugins go, I've noticed they're always a behind. I don't use Plex currently, but did a while ago and will be going back to it in the future here. I try to keep my plugins updated as much as possible and will run the updates by the software they're run on, in your case, I'd update Plex. Plugins are run in jails so it's in its own container and can't access the main system so from a security standpoint you're only opening up what you've allowed that jail (or plugin) to see on your main system. An example is if you've allowed Plex to see your "media" dataset. It can only ever access that dataset and its own storage, It's locked in a jail and so it won't have access to the rest of your FreeNAS system.

I really can't help you with Owncloud. I will say opening anything up with a domain is dangerous on any level. I prefer to do things inside a VPN but that could be difficult from a work computer.

Backing up client computers is easy with FreeNAS. Just make yourself a dataset and point your Windows (or whatever other software you use) backups at it. I use the regular Windows backups to my "backup" dataset. This gets more complicated if she is outside your network (I just noticed that you said that). You could do a VPN between your house and hers but that might be overkill, again I like doing things in VPNs. I've used CrashPlan home before to do this type of backup and Crashplan will run in a FreeBSD jail (but it's a pain) and Crashplan recently did away with their free version that allowed computer to computer backups and only offers business backups now. Now that I think about it, there might be a few ways to craft a backup like that for a client off the network. I haven't done that in a while so not something I could elaborate on at the moment.

Not sure how helpful that was... but I hope it gave you some useful info.

Rob

 

[alyster]

Sorry didn't really mean to say it's Linux. Just saying alternative of FreeNAS or NAS4Free is to set up a fullblown Linux server which is way harder. But thanks. I'll look into VPN between my own home and parent's home.

 

[rwslippey]

Sorry didn't really mean to say it's Linux. Just saying alternative of FreeNAS or NAS4Free is to set up a fullblown Linux server which is way harder. But thanks. I'll look into VPN between my own home and parent's home.

Understandable, Wasn't trying to beat you up... Some might though.

Depending on the routers at either end (your home and your parents) a VPN might be pretty easy.

Good luck