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Programming BSD

FreeNAS 9.3 Released 115

Posted by samzenpus from the check-it-out dept.
An anonymous reader writes This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases featuring: a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. You can get it here and the list of changes are here. Existing 9.2.x users and 9.3 beta testers are encouraged to upgrade.
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FreeNAS 9.3 Released More

FreeNAS 9.3 Released

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  • x64 only (Score:3)

    by klui ( 457783 ) on Thursday December 11, 2014 @06:28AM (#48571271)

    My CPU doesn't support x64 guests so I'll remain on 9.2.x, which still works pretty well. The only downside is the minidlna plug-in is a bit old and needs to scan the entire collection when adding new files. Newer versions will either have inotify/kqueue working, if not already.

    • It needs a different name. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 11, 2014 @08:04AM (#48571597)

      I think it needs a different name. When I pronounce "FreeNAS" at a typical discussion speed, it ends up sounding like "freeniss". That, obviously, sounds far too much like "penis". "Penis" is a word that's forbidden in most non-medical workplaces, and even some medical ones these days.

      So me and the other IT guys could be sitting in a meeting, talking about integrating "FreeNAS" into our stack. Some young HR intern happens to walk by the meeting room door, and hears what she mistakenly thinks is us saying stuff like, "How much is this penis going to cost?" or "How are we going to stick penis into our stack?" Then she'll get offended, tell her supervisor, and we'll all get accused of being "sexist, racist, misogynist, intolerant bigots" and probably sent off for sensitivity training.

      Sorry, we just can't risk it. This might be the best software out there, but if there's the chance that it'll land us in deep shit, then we just can't use it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fnj ( 64210 )

      Where do you even find a CPU that old? Get a real CPU. Not like the cost has to be anything more than trivial.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by slaker ( 53818 )

        Intel was still making some Atom CPUs with only 32 bit support as recently as IIRC 2012. An Atom is generally a pretty good choice for a FreeNAS box, since just about the only thing that will even touch multithreaded operation is the NFS server (or Plex, if you've hacked that in).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by klui ( 457783 )

        It's a Core 2 Quad Q8200. It's perfectly fine for running my small group of VMs that provide FreeNAS, tftp server, PXE, NFS, Windows file sharing, network/server/environment monitoring, and IP management. It does all this with 8 GB main memory with 2.4 GB free.

        • If you're using ZFS, prepare for major pain... If you aren't, why on earth would you use FreeNAS?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by klui ( 457783 )

            Do you have any recommendations? I found out about it after some of my friends talked about it many years ago. The set up was straight forward. I only need to share some videos through DLNA/CIFS.

            • Ubuntu Server seems to be the standard non-ZFS open source solution. Other, more focused options exist.

        • Something is not right here... The Q8200 is 64bit capable (as are most Core 2 Quad's) - http://ark.intel.com/products/... [intel.com]

          Also you mention you have 8GB RAM, so unless you're 100% sure you are using a PAE enabled 32bit kernel, you won't be using 8GB of RAM effectively if you have a 32bit kernel running. (Since 32bit kernels without PAE can only address 4GB).

          The only thing the Q8200 lacks is VT-x, but for a FreeNAS (or any storage server) setup that's a mute point...

          You might to double check you hardware and s

    • Lessons learned from my dabbling with FreeNAS (and having hardware failure).

      * Use generic HDD controllers that are supported in the box. (Using a 3rd party controller and driver, only to discover that when it reports an error, it becomes unavailable altogether, reboot to start again)

      * Understand the features you are using. When I started, I configured a ZFS array with two hot spares, when a couple drives failed, the hot spares didn't activate, and I was stuck...

      * Practice a version migration early on.

      * Us

  • Users of 9.2.x and 9.3 beta who don't exist don't need to upgrade.

  • Could be a great update! (Score:5, Informative)

    by SpzToid ( 869795 ) on Thursday December 11, 2014 @06:39AM (#48571307)

    News of this release seems to address many of the short-comings Ars Technica had when Ars reviewed FreeNAS.

    http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]

    • Apropos of that review, it would be interesting to see how it stacks up against NAS4free at this point. I'm currently running NAS4Free, after a period on FreeNAS, and my impression largely mirrored Arstechnica's.

      NAS4Free isn't terribly shiny, and lacks some features that would be kind of neat to have; but (as one might hope for a NAS) its file server stuff is about as solid, predictable, and simple as it reasonably can be (which isn't always simple, should you delve into the more exiting waters of heavy

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by grub ( 11606 )
        I ran FreeNAS for ages and also moved to NAS4Free. Scanning over the changes I still don't see any compelling reason to switch back.

        • I've been using freenas for years now and have never had any issues with stability or anything like that. That said I only use it as a nas running samba & nfs.

          Since I started using freenas I have grown my system to a 15 drive multi redundancy zfs setup with differing drive sizes. It has never missed a beat.

          If I had to pick, I prefer Nexenta's feel. But a 4tb limit on the free option doesn't work for me and I had lots of issues with it's stupid cut down command line when you ssh in.

          • I prefer Nexenta's feel. But a 4tb limit on the free option doesn't work for me and I had lots of issues with it's stupid cut down command line when you ssh in.

            Nexenta is no-charge (non-commercial) for up to 18 TB of data (actual data on disk, not raw storage). You also get a normal bash shell by logging in as admin (instead of root) and using sudo.

            My biggest complaint is getting used to ZFS ACLs when sharing to Windows systems, which I guess I'd have on any ZFS system.

            • If unix permissions are enough, you can max out the zfs permissions and ignore them. Pretty sure I have a post on my blog for that - it's been about three years since I did any Nexenta work though.

            • Actually, FreeNAS 9.2.1.6 and newer abstract it all away. Set up shares, set up their owner(s). Owner configures permissions from a client machine. I believe AD integration works similarly.

      • My honest opinion as a FreeNAS forum regular:

        FreeNAS does not forgive not reading the documentation. There's a lot to read. The advantage of this is that most questions have been answered.

        The UI was confusing in 9.2.1.x, and probably will be, to a lesser extent, until FreeNAS 10.1 is released (about a year from now).

        My perception is that the devs, while not interested in flashy noob-friendly interfaces, are interested in improving the interfaces and making them easier to use for somewhat experienced users.

        A

    • I'm still running 8.3.2 because all 9.x versions have had a nasty kernel panic bug in the 3Ware 9660 drivers that apparently I'm the only one experiencing. So I'll stick with it until I need to rebuild and import the ZFS pool. The hardware is a bit old anyway (and was super cheap when obtained off eBay), so it's probably almost time.

      Yes, the same bug exists in FreeBSD - I tried that too.

    • Meh, I played around with FreeNAS for a while. I originally thought it was neat, but I kept having problems with it and eventually realized that it was easier to just set everything up myself. The GUI didn't offer that much in the way of ease of use. A short list of my observations.

      1) FreeNAS makes it dead easy to set up ZFS...but ZFS is actually pretty easy to setup on its own. Easier than RAID/LVM by far. So no huge gain there, in my opinion.

      2) FreeNAS makes it so you don't really have to learn the ins an

  • I like having smaller NAS boxes at home, but I'd really like the option of ZFS too. Most of the mini-systems I've looked at aim strictly at Linux, and the official FreeNAS Mini [ixsystems.com] is overkill--$995 diskless, partly because it has 16GB of ECC RAM. Any suggestions for a small, 2 disk setup that will run FreeNAS at closer to $500?

    • You can't easily do much cheaper than the FreeNAS Mini. FreeNAS is not something you throw on an old computer.

      The Hardware sticky over at the FreeNAS forums pretty much answers your questions: https://forums.freenas.org/ind... [freenas.org]

      The cheapest alternative for FreeNAS is probably something along the lines of:
      Supermicro X10SLL-F + 8GB ECC DDR3 + Intel G3220 + case and PSU

      miniITX would be more expensive, most likely.

      • You absolutely can do much cheaper than the FreeNAS Mini, I got a useful answer to my question (HP Microserver N54L), and I'd already rolled my eyes at that guide. I have a budget that doesn't allow spending $2000 on this, and I want to have more than one server to have real redundancy. At home, I'd rather have a $500 box here and another one off-site than spend $1000 on a single system.

        And once you've done that, the whole class of errors ECC is aiming to protect against--things like an insane scrubber w

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fnj ( 64210 )

      16GB ECC only costs a little over $100. You can way, way beat that price if you build your own.

      I built a 4U rack with 12 hot swap bays, a quad core Haswell, 32 GB of ECC RAM for about that price, all up less drives. That includes an 8 SATA3 PCIe x8 card as well as 10 SATA3 built in to the motherboard.

      I run FreeBSD 10 on it with ZFS. Why settle for a repackaged FreeBSD, way out of date, when you can use the real thing? They are both free.

      • 16GB ECC only costs a little over $100. You can way, way beat that price if you build your own.

        I built a 4U rack with 12 hot swap bays, a quad core Haswell, 32 GB of ECC RAM for about that price, all up less drives. That includes an 8 SATA3 PCIe x8 card as well as 10 SATA3 built in to the motherboard.

        I run FreeBSD 10 on it with ZFS. Why settle for a repackaged FreeBSD, way out of date, when you can use the real thing? They are both free.

        The management UI.

      • I was asking about something small, which tends to come with less noise and power consumption too. I have a 4U server already; it's not small. It also sounds like a jet engine sometimes. Those things limit where I can put such a server.

        I haven't decided on FreeBSD vs. FreeNAS (and NAS4Free) yet. I figured that anything known to work well for FreeNAS would alternately run straight FreeBSD fine as well.

        • If you need hot-swap, everything sucks or is crazy expensive for home usage.

          If you don't, I can highly recommend a fractal node 304 chassi.
          6 disk slots with good cooling options in a pretty small form factor.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jkonrath ( 72701 )

      Get a Lenovo TS140 for $219 (http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkServer-70A4000HUX-i3-4130-Computer/dp/B00F6EK9J2) - it uses ECC, is quiet, fairly low power, and has more than enough horsepower.

      That comes with 4GB - throw in another 4GB for ~$55.

      That's diskless. Throw in three WD Red 2TBs for under $100 each, and install the OS on a USB drive. That would give you a 4TB RAIDZ setup with one drive of parity. Closer to $600, but that's cheap for a system that actually has ECC RAM in it.

    • As long as you just want basic ZFS without fancy stuff like deduplication you can use an HP Microserver. I've got an N54L with four gigs of RAM, which is currently running FreeNAS 9.2 with a mirrored two-disk setup (because my budget didn't allow more then two disks when I put it together). It works just fine and didn't put a huge dent into my finances. Also nice is that there is a modding community for those things so if you want to replace the DVD drive with more fixed storage you can easily find an artic

      • Thanks for the only serious answer to what I was asking about. I really didn't need all the lectures on ECC and ZFS I got from almost everyone else; knew what I was getting into already.

  • I'm planning on setting up one of these in a month, and I'm considering FreeNAS and NAS4Free. I'm very interested in comments from anyone with experience with both.

    • Make sure your system meets the minimum hardware specs for FreeNAS. I got away with running FreeNAS on old hardware for years. When I updated to version 9.x and reformatted the hard drives to ZFS, it wasn't as stable as the previous versions were. Looking at the minimum hardware specs, I had to rebuild the system. ZFS requires 1GB RAM per every 1TB of raw storage.
    • I used to use freeNas 7 (before they rebuilt it) and was happy with that. When FreeNas 8 came out it had less features that v7 and Nas4Free was forked soon after with newer ZFS etc. so i moved to that and have been happy ever since. the only thing (not sure about freenas 8+) is that installing other software in jails is a pain at best but i currently have mySQL, ownCloud and virtualbox installed and running on Nas4Free.

      FreeNas 9 probably has a nicer interface and the plugins probably remove the hassle of

      • Oh i also run the the embedded version of Nas4Free which is installed on a usb drive to free up HD slots not sure if that is possible with freenas9

        I've been running FreeNAS on a USB stick for years. It's the recommended install method.

    • Re:Compare with Nas4Free? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@yahoo. c o m> on Thursday December 11, 2014 @03:43PM (#48575849)

      I'm planning on setting up one of these in a month, and I'm considering FreeNAS and NAS4Free. I'm very interested in comments from anyone with experience with both.

      I've used both, migrated between them, and support instances of both for different clients.

      tl;dr: NAS4Free better adheres to the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". FreeNAS does not - it does more stuff. Depending on your use case, either one of them can be a help or a hindrance.

      Both of them essentially solve the same problem, essentially the same way: Get a bunch of hard disks recognized by a computer, and use the ZFS file system and various networking protocols together in order to facilitate data storage. Both of them have the same advantages of ZFS (Data security, "datasets", good performance in software RAID, snapshotting, compression, volume portability) and cons (you'll need plenty of RAM [ECC RAM is strongly recommended], hardware RAID controllers are only useful in JBOD mode, adding disks later on gets weird, etc.). If the ZFS tradeoff is worthwhile for you, then you're in the right place.

      Pros, NAS4Free:
      --Runs better on lower spec'd hardware.
      --Faster startup time and generally snappier web interface.
      --Has all the core stuff (SMB, FTP, SSH, NFS, iSCSI), and notably, Transmission.
      --"More Open" than FreeNAS with regards to licensing.

      Cons, NAS4Free:
      --Limited functionality beyond NAS stuff, i.e. no plugins, though there are a handful of tutorials for unofficial methods (I've personally set one up to run BT Sync and Plex, but it took about an hour and LOTS of command line fun).
      --Update schedule is erratic.
      --I've personally had some annoyances with their Samba implementation; it doesn't always respect "remember password" in mixed environments with mapped drives.

      Pros, FreeNAS:
      --Extensible functionality with plugins; there are multiple avenues for media streaming and automatic downloading (Transmission, SabNZBd, XDM, etc.). There's also an OwnCloud plugin which is very nice, and an Amazon S3 plugin that allows for real-time replication to The Cloud (tm) if that's worthwhile. Depending on the environment, integration with Active Directory is possible.
      --ZFS Replication - you can have your datasets replicate to a secondary NAS somewhere else.
      --In-UI updating, automatic or scheduled. This is a new feature in 9.3 admittedly, but it no longer requires updates to be manually uploaded or the NAS to be taken offline for an update to be performed.

      Cons, FreeNAS:
      --All those extra features come at a cost - you'll need to account for that when buying RAM.
      --Plugin updates aren't always immediate when the source program updates; when some programs update internally, it's not always reflected in the FreeNAS UI.
      --UI is more daunting at first go. Also, some things are a bit more quirky than they should be.
      --iSCSI is a bit more complicated to set up than on N4F.

      I personally like the FreeNAS route myself, but that's also based on my extensive use of plugins, because I'm trying to do "one box to rule them all" - FreeNAS fits that bill better. If you either don't care about your NAS doing anything besides speaking FTP and SMB, or you've got an ESXi server running around that does all your other server-like stuff and you just need an iSCSI target, or you're building a FrankenNAS and need to squeeze the most out of your RAM, then N4F is probably more practical for your use case.

  • Why (Score:2)

    by fnj ( 64210 )

    A serious question: why use FreeNAS, a repackaged FreeBSD, when you can just use the way more up to date real thing - FreeBSD 10.1 itself?

    • Are you a FreeBSD admin? If not, you have no chance in hell of getting something usable in a decent amount of time.

      You do have that chance with FreeNAS.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fnj ( 64210 )

        Not by vocation, but it was pretty easy to learn enough to get by just fine. As it happens I did "get something usable" running in not much time at all.

        • I'm guessing it did not serve data stored on a ZFS pool via several protocols while still allowing for proper permissions.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by crtreece ( 59298 )
          Did your "something usable" include jailed instances of Plex media server, DLNA server, OSX time machine service, and bittorrent client, all with web GUIs? I've done Solaris, FBSD, and linux admin, and probably could have set all that up, eventually. I set it up, plus CIFS, and NFS shares, in an afternoon on FreeNAS.

          It's the plugins for all those that really sold me on using FreeNAS instead of rolling my own.

          • Jailed Time Machine service? I just made a share with the appropriate settings and that was it; no jail or service required.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by crtreece ( 59298 )
              You are correct. That should have been grouped with the CIFS/NFS statement. looks around for the "edit post" button

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As as FreeBSD admin I would usually agree with you, especially when ZFS is involved as FreeBSD tends to be much more up to date. I have always historically just used the latest FreeBSD when I've wanted a NAS.

      However, setting up a well configured NAS with FreeBSD isn't something an end user is going to do very easily. On top of that the FreeNAS devs have put a lot of effort into configuring the various services in the most optimal way. You'll probably find an off the shelf FreeBSD that you have enabled some

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by klui ( 457783 )

      FreeNAS's base is NanoBSD. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_... [freebsd.org] describes the project. The primary benefit of using NanoBSD is that everything is RO at runtime which means you can pull power from the system at anytime.

      Another vendor who uses FreeBSD is Juniper. I've read about file system corruption--not often, but it can happen--from admins when they don't perform a proper shutdown.

    • I used to set up Linux for file sharing back in the day. It's easier these days just to install FreeNAS on a USB stick and be done with it.
    • The derivative OSs are specifically tuned for certain functions. Like FreeNAS for file system management, pFsense for firewall & routing, PC-BSD for desktop users, and so on.

  • I've been running FreeNAS systems on hardware that's considered junk by most standards for years, and I think I'll have to stay with the 9.2 branch for now. The 9.3 version makes ZFS mandatory and the hardware requirements for running the drives in ZFS is huge compared to a NFS setup.

    Before someone replies the ECC is only a little more than regular RAM, yeeeah. But it's a lot more RAM you need, and to use ECC you also need the rest of your system to be compatible with it. That means a new motherboard and pr

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