I built my FreeNAS box last night. Then I built it again tonight.
I installed the three new 500 Gig hard drives, dug up an old CD ROM drive to boot off of and tried to install FreeNAS version 0.70 (BETA) to a 2GB USB flash drive. The FreeNAS doco claims it will run from a 32MB USB stick.
That didn’t work. I’m not sure what the problem was. The conf directory and config file got written to the USB drive, but when it tried to lay down the boot image it failed.
After trying that a couple of times I just decided to install the OS onto an 80 Gig hard drive that I had used for the OpenFiler OS drive. That worked fine.
Installation from the CD is pretty quick. Then you set the IP address on the console and point your web browser at it. It’s all GUI from there. (Well, almost all.)
The web based interface is beautiful. All the pages have the same look and feel, all the controls work the same way. It’s very nice.
After setting all the drives up in a RAIDz1 array (RAID5 I guess) and make the shares and such, I decided to make some tuning changes per HarryD’s suggestions.
After putzing around for a bit and messing things up, I discovered that my windows machines didn’t have rights to write to the CIFS shares. I figured I’d messed up something and maybe a reboot would help, so I rebooted the FreeNAS box.
After a few minutes I tried to reload the web GUI. No-go. Hmm.
I head to the basement and on the console I see: kernel panic – rebooting in 15 seconds
Oops. Looks like I busted it. So I turned it off and quit for the night. I’m going to blame the tuning changes I made, because I made them without understanding the implications.
This evening I reinstalled the OS and rebuild the RAID and shares. It’s all working fine except I had to change the group ownership on the shares (using the CLI) so I could write to them from my windows boxes. There are no permissions really, anyone can write anywhere. Fine for home use, but the SAMBA/AD integration still isn’t really there (this was a problem with OpenFiler for me too.)
So now I’m rsyncing my data back. When I copied the data off the OpenFiler box I plugged the USB drive into the front of the server and rsynced it directly. Unfortunately the server only supports USB 1.1 with a max speed of 12 Mb/s. Painfully slow. It took a week to sync around 400GB of data.
Now I have the USB drive plugged into my desktop (USB 2.0) and am using the Cygwin rsync client to send the data back.
The graph on the FreeNAS box shows that I am shoving the data in at a rate of almost 55 Mb/s! Whee!
