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Going for simple FreeBSD instead of FreeNAS

So, I have been playing with my small soekris net6501-70-based NAS device for home.

Lots of things have happened since I last blogged about this:

1. I decided not to use FreeNAS 8 on my net6501, but rather to just use FreeBSD 9 with ZFS, NFS, Samba, and rsync.
2. I have copied my olde NSLU2 shared space onto my net6501 under ZFS... it took over 24 hours to copy over the network, the NSLU2 being fairly slow.
3. I have set up a script to take snapshots of my ZFS storage on a regular basis using a script I found on the internet: zfs-snapshot.sh... this is almost as nice as have the Mac OS X time machine on my little NAS server (ok, not as nice, but still pretty good)
4. I have had some difficulty with an old Maxstor 1TB USB drive, which seems to appear/disappear... it has caused corruption in my main ZFS pool, which I needed to fix manually, and then scrub the ZFS pool (which took almost 7 hours).
5. Given all of this, I have ordered a small HP microserver. External USB drives are handled strangely by server O/Ses as they appear/disappear, change device names, etc. Let see how well the microserver with internal drives will do.
6. By the way, when dealing with External USB disks, never use device names (such as /dev/da0 or /dev/da1s1a...); these names can change dynamically as drives are plugged in, or powered off, etc. Always label your filesystems (e.g. for UFS: tunefs -L disk1 /dev/da0s1a, which then appears as /dev/ufs/disk1; or for GPT disks: /dev/gptid/760ae9e2-5988-12f1-a136-000054cf2648) and use these names in ZFS or fstab... this will avoid a LOT of grief when reboting, or disconnecting or reconnecting a device, or indeed when a device fails.

So, lots is happening with my small NAS server.

More on this next weekend.

/FreeBSD | Posted at 19:01 | permanent link