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Moving forward with FreeNAS

FreeNAS 8 is a nanobsd configuration, based on FreeBSD 8.2. In order to boot FreeNAS 8 on my Soekris net6501 under the amd64 image of FreeNAS, one needs to rebuild the FreeBSD kernel that is at the heart of FreeNAS with the line "device mptable" added to the kernel configuration file, as described on the unofficial Soekris wiki here.

Therefore, I used the instructions from the FreeNAS Forums here to set up a VMware virtual machine running FreeBSD to setup the FreeNAS sources, adjusted the kernel configuration file in "/usr/local/freenas/trunk/nanobsd/FREENAS.amd64" to add the device mptable line as described above, and then built a FreeNAS-8.2.1-ALPHA-r10006M-x64 image that I put onto a USB key and booted my Soekris net6501 with it.

FreeNAS 8 seems to look good on the net6501 and I am able to set it up with 2 external 2 TB USB disks partitioned with ZFS. For some strange reason, the FreeNAS 8 website seems to call for at least 6 GB of RAM to run it with ZFS, but my 2 GB net6501 seems to do just fine so far.

So, I just need to complete the set up of my FreeNAS box, export one of the disks through CIFS, NFS, and rsync, and set up a regular backup from disk1 to disk2. Once that runs fine, I can probably connect a 3rd 2 TB drive to that net6501, and set up some form of RAID-5 between the 3 drives (with snapshots, perhaps I don't need the weekly backup from disk1 to disk2, as I normally do on my NSLU2).

FreeNAS seems like a winner so far. More info later.

Miscellaneous comments & ramblings:

• I still need Soekris to fix the USB boot code on the net6501 before I consider this completely operational: the net6501 will freeze on boot when my two 2 TB external USB drives are connected at boot time. Works fine when I connect them after the machine has booted... if at least Soekris could add an option in the BIOS to not scan certain USB ports for bootable devices, I could move forward.
• FreeNAS 8 is based on FreeBSD 8.2, which is unfortunate as it only has ZFS v15, as opposed to FreeBSD 9.0 which comes with ZFS v28 (and perhaps the upcoming FreeBSD 8.3 also?)
• There appears to be a certain amount of tension between the "new" FreeNAS 8 team, and the "legacy" FreeNAS 7 team. The latter has based FreeNAS 7.5 on FreeBSD 9.0 to get the newest FreeBSD stuff (including ZFS v28 as stated above) and is starting to talk about calling its branch FreeNAS 9, which is not going over too well with the FreeNAS 8 people (who actually own the FreeNAS trademark). Seems like FreeNAS 7 will either die or else it will need to fork off with another name (see here).
• I don't have a strong opinion on this at this point, except for the fact that I am disappointed that FreeNAS 8 specifies minimum RAM requirements which seem to me to be unreasonably high (4 GB minimum, and 6 GB minimum if one wants ZFS) for some of the small machines that one could want to run FreeNAS upon. I like the FreeNAS 7 community effort, but I fear that it will end up as a dead-end effort once FreeNAS 8 is solid & feature-complete.
• Anyway, I decided to set up my NAS server as a FreeNAS 8 server, to see if it ran OK in 2 GB of RAM (which, frankly, I don't see why it couldn't).
• Seems like the net6501 will work as a home NAS device anyway, so finally I don't need the HP Proliant Microserver I was referring to the other day.

Anyway, enough for tonight... good night to all.

/FreeBSD | Posted at 17:39 | permanent link