FreeNAS Version 8 — A First Look

As a member of a family of five who are all avid computer users, one of our growing problems has been sensibly managing an increasing amount of data. I’ve had our home wired with gigabit Ethernet for a while now, which makes the process of copying large files (such as video) from one computer to another much more efficient than it would be over wireless or even over a 100 megabit Ethernet link. Unfortunately, that also has the downside of making it easy to duplicate those large files unnecessarily. (If one of the kids wants to watch a movie from a computer upstairs that’s stored on one downstairs that you’re using and you might need to reboot it before their movie finishes, the quick fix is copying the whole thing to the upstairs machine and getting back to what you were doing!) With the large capacity of modern hard drives, this doesn’t quickly lead to running out of disk space like it would have once done, but it sure does make a confusing mess of things after a while. You find yourself asking the same questions repeatedly. Is it really safe to erase this file or do I still have another copy of it on a different machine? Did I already put a copy of that document on this laptop or was that the OTHER computer I’m thinking of?

Additionally, there’s the issue of backups. Time Machine is a great backup tool on the Macs in the house (which constitute the majority of our machines these days), but it just doesn’t seem efficient buying external hard drives to attach to each one of them as the backup destinations. There are enough items occupying USB ports or sockets on power strips without that additional clutter, anyway. So far, Apple’s only real alternative is buying a “Time Capsule” combination wireless router and network hard drive storage box. But the Time Capsule doesn’t offer a drive capacity any larger than a single external drive has, so it’s not nearly sufficient for holding full system backups from four or five computers. Technically, one could also buy an Apple Mac Mini Server, but it would again be somewhat limited in hard drive space without chaining multiple external drives onto the back of it — and it wouldn’t exactly qualify as an inexpensive solution by the time it was done, either.

Since I work in corporate IT, I had the opportunity to take home one of their aging Windows servers they upgraded and put aside. With a $35 investment in a 4 port PCI SATA controller card to drop in it and a set of four 2 TB SATA internal drives, I had the makings of a really useful storage solution. Now the question was, what to run on it? I knew that with enough time spent installing, configuring and tweaking the right programs, I could use practically any of the popular Linux distributions or a version of the FreeBSD operating system to hammer the computer into a workable solution. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the free time (or patience) to struggle with all of that. Keeping Windows Server installed on it wasn’t really a viable option because Windows lacks the capability to properly handle Time Machine backup volumes, not to mention the fact that this eight year old server wasn’t going to run a recent version of Windows very smoothly or quickly. A good alternative seemed to lie in locating a custom distribution of Linux or BSD that was designed to turn a PC into more of a “network appliance”, specializing in doing just a few tasks. There are plenty of options out there to perform tasks ranging from making the PC into a PBX/phone system to running as a dedicated firewall and junk mail filtering box to a home automation server that controls your lights, thermostat, and appliances. I narrowed things down to only two real contenders that focused on my needs: FreeNAS and OpenFiler.

OpenFiler is a Linux-based NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution, while FreeNAS serves the same purpose using the OpenBSD operating system as its base instead. I haven’t yet tried out OpenFiler, but started experimenting with FreeNAS based on the advice that it has better support for the more advanced “zfs” filesystem. The first thing I discovered upon trying to download a copy of FreeNAS is that the authors only recently completed a major overhaul of version 8.0 of the product.  Most of the extras the previous (7.2) release had built into it were removed in 8.0, with the intention of putting most of them back in by the time the 8.1 update is completed. That would include such things as bit torrent support, the ability to present itself as an iTunes music server, and the ability to act as a streaming video server using the DLNA standard (usable by the PlayStation 3 and many newer LCD and plasma televisions, among other devices). On the other hand, FreeNAS 8.0 has quite advanced support for the zfs filesystem, allowing such things as creation of virtual disk volumes that enforce disk storage quotas and automatically do compression on data stored in them, and automatic replication between two FreeNAS servers (so one acts as a real-time backup of the other).

Here’s a a nice feature-comparison chart.

A rather unique thing about FreeNAS is that they recommend installing the OS onto a USB memory stick or SD memory card, and then configuring your PC’s BIOS to boot from it. That way, all of the hard drive space in the machine can be devoted to sharing data on your network. The CD image you download and burn simply acts as an easy initial installer to get you to this point. In my case, I had no problem installing it onto a 4 GB USB memory stick I had lying around. I believe one as small as 2 GB can be used, however. After the system restarts from the memory stick, you’re presented with a basic menu of options that lets you do such things as shut down/restart the machine or reconfigure the network card to use a static IP address. (It defaults to getting one via DHCP.) Everything else is controlled via a web browser on any other computer on your network. You log into the FreeNAS box with a username of “admin” and a password of “freenas” to get started using it via web.

At this point, you want to configure a few basic things like the correct time-zone you’re in, and then configure the hard drive storage itself. In my case, I was able to add all four of my 2 TB drives into a “pool”, with the option to use software “z-raid” on all of them. This configuration gave me a total of about 6 TB of free space, while formatting the drives in such a manner so no data would be lost even if any one of the four drives happened to fail. After that, I had the ability to create the virtual disk volumes on top of it, which might be handy for Time Machine backups if you want to make sure no one Mac on your network can use up more than a certain amount of the total available drive space with its backups. Lastly, I could enable and configure the type of file shares I wanted to be active on FreeNAS. It defaults with NO sharing functionality enabled, but you can create NFS shares, Samba (Windows-compatible) file shares, and Apple File System (AFS) shares in any combination you like. A share specifically for Time Machine backups is done by creating a new AFS share, giving it a sensible share name (like “Network Time Machine”), and toggling an option that tells FreeNAS it’s a Time Machine share type. You need to create a new user account and password (easily doable under an Accounts area in the FreeNAS setup screens) for the client computers to log in with. For one of my Macs to see and start using it for backups, the only extra step is to connect to the share using the “Go” menu in the Finder and selecting “Connect to Server”.  Then when the “freenas” server appears with the “Network Time Machine” share listed on it, you’re prompted for the username and password with the option to check the box so your Mac remembers it for future connections, which you’ll want to do. Now, Time Machine can be pointed to that share when you go into its configuration. To make sure your Mac automatically reconnects that share every time you restart it or log off and back on again?  Simply drag the “Network Time Machine” share icon on your desktop into the “Login Items” list under “System Preferences” and “Accounts” for your user account.

I’ve only just begun playing with my new FreeNAS server, but so far, I think it has a lot of potential. I believe the next scheduled update is an 8.01 release that will simply fix a few bugs, but version 8.1 sounds like the one many people are really waiting for. I know I’d like to use the iTunes server functionality, at least, so I have a central collection of music that’s accessible by any computer in the house running iTunes.