Installing and Upgrading Please note that the FreeNAS ® operating system must be installed on a separate device from the drives which hold the storage data. In other words, with only one disk drive, the FreeNAS ® graphical interface is available, but there is no place to store any data. And storing data is, after all, the whole point of a NAS system. Home users experimenting with FreeNAS ® can install FreeNAS ® on an inexpensive USB thumb drive and use the computer’s disks for storage. This section describes:. Note FreeNAS ® requires 64-bit hardware. The download page contains an.iso file.
This is a bootable installer that can be written to either a CD or USB flash as described in. The.iso file has an associated sha256.txt file which is used to verify the integrity of the downloaded file. The command to verify the checksum varies by operating system:. on a BSD system use the command sha256 nameoffile. on a Linux system use the command sha256sum nameoffile.
on a Mac system use the command shasum -a 256 nameoffile. Windows or Mac users can install additional utilities like or The value produced by running the command must match the value shown in the sha256.txt file. Checksum values that do not match indicate a corrupted installer file that should not be used. Note To install from a USB stick to another USB stick, two USB ports are needed, each with an inserted USB device. One USB stick contains the installer. The other USB stick is the destination for the FreeNAS ® installation.
Take care to select the correct USB device for the FreeNAS ® installation. It is not possible to install FreeNAS ® onto the same USB stick containing the installer. After installation, remove the installer USB stick. It might also be necessary to adjust the BIOS configuration to boot from the new FreeNAS ® USB stick. Make sure that the boot device order in the BIOS is set to boot from the device containing the FreeNAS ® installer media, then boot the system to start the installation.
Dd if=FreeNAS-11.0-RELEASE.iso of=/dev/da0 bs=64k 6117+0 records in 6117+0 records out 400883712 bytes transferred in 88.706398 secs (4519220 bytes/sec) When using the dd command:. if= refers to the input file, or the name of the file to write to the device. of= refers to the output file; in this case, the device name of the flash card or removable USB drive. Note that USB device numbers are dynamic, and the target device might be da1 or da2 or another name depending on which devices are attached. Before attaching the target USB drive, use ls /dev/da.
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Then attach the target USB drive, wait ten seconds, and run ls /dev/da. again to see the new device name and number of the target USB drive. On Linux, use /dev/sd X, where X refers to the letter of the USB device. bs= refers to the block size, the amount of data to write at a time. The larger 64K block size shown here helps speed up writes to the USB drive. On OS X Insert the USB thumb drive.
In the Finder, go to Applications ‣ Utilities ‣ Disk Utility. Unmount any mounted partitions on the USB thumb drive. Check that the USB thumb drive has only one partition, or partition table errors will be shown on boot. If needed, use Disk Utility to set up one partition on the USB drive. Selecting Free space when creating the partition works fine. Determine the device name of the inserted USB thumb drive.
From TERMINAL, navigate to the Desktop, then type this command. Diskutil list /dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUIDpartitionscheme.500.1 GB disk0 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: AppleHFS Macintosh HD 499.2 GB disk0s2 3: AppleBoot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3 /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDiskpartitionscheme.8.0 GB disk1 1: DOSFAT32 UNTITLED 8.0 GB disk1s1 This shows which devices are available to the system. Locate the target USB stick and record the path.
If you are not sure which path is the correct one for the USB stick, remove the device, run the command again, and compare the difference. Once sure of the device name, navigate to the Desktop from TERMINAL, unmount the USB stick, and use the dd command to write the image to the USB stick. In this example, the USB thumb drive is /dev/disk1.
It is first unmounted. The dd command is used to write the image to the faster “raw” version of the device (note the extra r in /dev/rdisk1). When running these commands, substitute the name of the installation file and the correct path to the USB thumb drive. Note If the error “Resource busy” is shown when the dd command is run, go to Applications ‣ Utilities ‣ Disk Utility, find the USB thumb drive, and click on its partitions to make sure all of them are unmounted.
If the error “dd: /dev/disk1: Permission denied” is shown, run the dd command by typing sudo dd if=FreeNAS-11.0-RELEASE.iso of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=64k. This will prompt for your password. The dd command can take some minutes to complete.
Wait until the prompt returns and a message is displayed with information about how long it took to write the image to the USB drive. Note If the installer does not boot, verify that the installation device is listed first in the boot order in the BIOS.
When booting from a CD, some motherboards may require connecting the CD device to SATA0 (the first connector) to boot from CD. If the installer stalls during bootup, double-check the SHA256 hash of the.iso file. If the hash does not match, re-download the file. If the hash is correct, burn the CD again at a lower speed or write the file to a different USB stick. The installer will start automatically after a few seconds, or an option can be chosen by moving the highlight bar to it with the up and down arrow keys and pressing Enter.
After booting, the installer menu is displayed as shown in. Note A minimum of 8 GB of space on the boot device is required.
However, 32 GB is recommended to provide room for future additions and boot environments. When using mirrored boot devices, it is best to use devices of the same size. If the device sizes are different, the mirror is limited to the size of the smaller device. The installer recognizes existing installations of previous versions of FreeNAS ® 8.x or 9.x. When an existing installation is present, the menu shown in is displayed. To overwrite an existing installation, use the arrows to move to Fresh Install and press Enter twice to continue to the screen shown in. Note For security reasons, the SSH service and root SSH logins are disabled by default.
Unless these are set, the only way to access a shell as root is to gain physical access to the console menu or to access the web shell within the administrative GUI. This means that the FreeNAS ® system should be kept physically secure and that the administrative GUI should be behind a properly configured firewall and protected by a secure password. FreeNAS ® can be configured to boot with the standard BIOS boot mechanism or UEFI booting as shown. BIOS booting is recommended for legacy and enterprise hardware. UEFI is used on newer consumer motherboards. Installation Troubleshooting If the system does not boot into FreeNAS ®, there are several things that can be checked to resolve the situation.
Check the system BIOS and see if there is an option to change the USB emulation from CD/DVD/floppy to hard drive. If it still will not boot, check to see if the card/drive is UDMA compliant. If the system BIOS does not support EFI with BIOS emulation, see if it has an option to boot using legacy BIOS mode. When the system starts to boot but hangs with this repeated error message.
Runinterruptdrivenhooks: still waiting after 60 seconds for xptconfig go into the system BIOS and look for an onboard device configuration for a 1394 Controller. If present, disable that device and try booting again. If the system starts to boot but hangs at a mountroot prompt, follow the instructions in.
If the burned image fails to boot and the image was burned using a Windows system, wipe the USB stick before trying a second burn using a utility such as. Otherwise, the second burn attempt will fail as Windows does not understand the partition which was written from the image file. Be very careful to specify the correct USB stick when using a wipe utility! Upgrading FreeNAS ® provides flexibility for keeping the operating system up-to-date:.
Upgrades to major releases, for example from version 9.3 to 9.10, can still be performed using either an ISO or the graphical administrative interface. Unless the Release Notes for the new major release indicate that the current version requires an ISO upgrade, either upgrade method can be used. Minor releases have been replaced with signed updates. This means that it is not necessary to wait for a minor release to update the system with a system update or newer versions of drivers and features. It is also no longer necessary to manually download an upgrade file and its associated checksum to update the system. The updater automatically creates a boot environment, making updates a low-risk operation. Boot environments provide the option to return to the previous version of the operating system by rebooting the system and selecting the previous boot environment from the boot menu.
This section describes how to perform an upgrade from an earlier version of FreeNAS ® to 11.1. After 11.1 has been installed, use the instructions in to keep the system updated. Caveats Be aware of these caveats before attempting an upgrade to 11.1:. Warning: upgrading the ZFS pool can make it impossible to go back to a previous version. For this reason, the update process does not automatically upgrade the ZFS pool, though the system shows when newer feature flags are available for a pool.
Unless a new feature flag is needed, it is safe to leave the pool at the current version and uncheck the alert. If the pool is upgraded, it will not be possible to boot into a previous version that does not support the newer feature flags. The does not recognize an encrypted ZFS pool.
If the ZFS pool is GELI-encrypted and the starts after the upgrade, cancel the and use the instructions in to import the encrypted volume. The can be run afterward for post-configuration. It will then recognize that the volume has been imported and not prompt to reformat the disks. Upgrading the firmware of Broadcom SAS HBAs to the latest version is recommended. If upgrading from 9.3.x, please read the first.
Upgrades from FreeNAS ® 0.7x are not supported. The system has no way to import configuration settings from 0.7x versions of FreeNAS ®. The configuration must be manually recreated.
If supported, the FreeNAS ® 0.7x volumes or disks must be manually imported. Upgrades on 32-bit hardware are not supported. However, if the system is currently running a 32-bit version of FreeNAS ® and the hardware supports 64-bit, the system can be upgraded. Any archived reporting graphs will be lost during the upgrade.
UFS is no longer supported. If your data currently resides on one UFS-formatted disk, create a ZFS volume using other disks after the upgrade, then use the instructions in to mount the UFS-formatted disk and copy the data to the ZFS volume. With only one disk, back up its data to another system or media before the upgrade, format the disk as ZFS after the upgrade, then restore the backup. If the data currently resides on a UFS RAID of disks, it is not possible to directly import that data to the ZFS volume. Instead, back up the data before the upgrade, create a ZFS volume after the upgrade, then restore the data from the backup.
The VMware Tools VMXNET3 drivers are no longer supported. Configure and use the driver instead. Initial Preparation Before upgrading the operating system, perform the following steps:. Back up the FreeNAS ® configuration in System ‣ General ‣ Save Config. If any volumes are encrypted, make sure that you have set the passphrase and have a copy of the encryption key and the latest recovery key. After the upgrade is complete, use the instructions in to import the encrypted volume.
Warn users that the FreeNAS ® shares will be unavailable during the upgrade; you should schedule the upgrade for a time that will least impact users. Stop all services in Services ‣ Control Services. Warning All drives are shown, including boot drives and storage drives. Only choose boot drives when upgrading.
Choosing the wrong drives to upgrade or install will cause loss of data. If unsure about which drives contain the FreeNAS ® operating system, reboot and remove the install media.
In the FreeNAS ® GUI, use System ‣ Boot to identify the boot drives. More than one drive is shown when a mirror has been used. Move to the drive where FreeNAS ® is installed and press the Spacebar to mark it with a star. If a mirror has been used for the operating system, mark all of the drives where the FreeNAS ® operating system is installed. Press Enter when done. The installer recognizes earlier versions of FreeNAS ® installed on the boot drive or drives and presents the message shown in. 2.5.2 Install in New Boot Environment or Format The updated system can be installed in a new boot environment, or the entire boot device can be formatted to start fresh.
Installing into a new boot environment preserves the old code, allowing a roll-back to previous versions if necessary. Formatting the boot device is usually not necessary but can reclaim space. User data and settings are preserved when installing to a new boot environment and also when formatting the boot device. Move the highlight to one of the options and press Enter to start the upgrade.
The installer unpacks the new image and displays the menu shown in. The database file that is preserved and migrated contains your FreeNAS ® configuration settings. 2.5.3 Preserve and Migrate Settings Press Enter.
FreeNAS ® indicates that the upgrade is complete and a reboot is required. Press OK, highlight 3 Reboot System, then press Enter to reboot the system. If the upgrade installer was booted from CD, remove the CD. During the reboot there may be a conversion of the previous configuration database to the new version of the database.
This happens during the “Applying database schema changes” line in the reboot cycle. This conversion can take a long time to finish, sometimes fifteen minutes or more, and might have to reboot the system again afterwards. Please be patient and the system will start normally. If database errors are shown but the graphical administrative interface is accessible, go to Settings ‣ General and use the Upload Config button to upload the configuration that you saved before starting the upgrade. If Something Goes Wrong If an update fails, an alert is issued and the details are written to /data/update.failed. To return to a previous version of the operating system, physical or IPMI access to the FreeNAS ® console is needed.
Reboot the system and watch for the boot menu. In the example shown in, the first boot menu entry, FreeNAS (default), refers to the initial installation, before the update was applied.
The second boot entry, FreeNAS-, refers to the current version of the operating system, after the update was applied. This second entry is highlighted and begins with a star, indicating that this is the environment the system will boot unless another entry is manually selected. Both entries include a date and timestamp showing when that boot environment was created. 2.5.4 Boot Menu To boot into the previous version of the operating system, use the up or down arrow to select it and press Enter. If a boot device fails and the system no longer boots, don’t panic. The data is still on the disks and there is still a copy of the saved configuration. The system can be recovered with a few steps:.
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Perform a fresh installation on a new boot device. Import the volumes in Storage ‣ Auto Import Volume. Restore the configuration in System ‣ General ‣ Upload Config. Upgrading a ZFS Pool In FreeNAS ®, ZFS pools can be upgraded from the graphical administrative interface. Before upgrading an existing ZFS pool, be aware of these caveats first:. the pool upgrade is a one-way street, meaning that if you change your mind you cannot go back to an earlier ZFS version or downgrade to an earlier version of the software that does not support those feature flags. before performing any operation that may affect the data on a storage disk, always back up all data first and verify the integrity of the backup.
While it is unlikely that the pool upgrade will affect the data, it is always better to be safe than sorry. upgrading a ZFS pool is optional. Do not upgrade the pool if the the possibility of reverting to an earlier version of FreeNAS ® or repurposing the disks in another operating system that supports ZFS is desired.
It is not necessary to upgrade the pool unless newer ZFS feature flags are required. If a pool is upgraded to the latest feature flags, it will not be possible to import that pool into another operating system that does not yet support those feature flags. To perform the ZFS pool upgrade, go to Storage ‣ Volumes ‣ View Volumes and highlight the volume (ZFS pool) to upgrade. Click the Upgrade button as shown in.
Virtualization FreeNAS ® can be run inside a virtual environment for development, experimentation, and educational purposes. Please note that running FreeNAS ® in production as a virtual machine is. If you decide to use FreeNAS ® within a virtual environment, as it contains useful guidelines for minimizing the risk of losing data. To install or run FreeNAS ® within a virtual environment, create a virtual machine that meets these minimum requirements:. at least 8192 MB (8 GB) base memory size. a virtual disk at least 8 GB in size to hold the operating system and boot environments.
at least one additional virtual disk at least 4 GB in size to be used as data storage. a bridged network adapter This section demonstrates how to create and access a virtual machine within VirtualBox and VMware ESXi environments. 2.6.7 Select File Name and Size of Virtual Disk This screen is used to set the size (or upper limit) of the virtual disk. Increase the default size to 8 GB. Use the folder icon to browse to a directory on disk with sufficient space to hold the virtual disk files.
Remember that there will be a system disk of at least 8 GB and at least one data storage disk of at least 4 GB. After making a selection and pressing Next, a summary of the configuration options chosen is shown. Use the Back button to return to a previous screen if any values need to be modified. Otherwise, click Finish to complete the wizard. The new virtual machine is listed in the left frame, as shown in the example in.
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2.6.9 Storage Settings of the Virtual Machine Click the Add Attachment button, select Add Hard Disk from the pop-up menu, then click the Create New Disk button. This launches the Create New Virtual Hard Drive Wizard (seen in and ). This disk will be used for storage, so create a size appropriate to your needs, making sure that it is at least 4 GB. To practice with RAID configurations, create as many virtual disks as needed.
Two disks can be created on each IDE controller. For additional disks, click the Add Controller button to create another controller for attaching additional disks. Create a device for the installation media. Fifa 14 android commentary. Highlight the word “Empty”, then click the CD icon as shown in.
VMware ESXi Before using ESXi, read for an explanation of why iSCSI will be faster than NFS. ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor architecture created by VMware Inc. Commercial and free versions of the VMware vSphere Hypervisor operating system (ESXi) are available from the.
After the operating system is installed on supported hardware, use a web browser to connect to its IP address. The welcome screen provides a link to download the VMware vSphere client which is used to create and manage virtual machines. Once the VMware vSphere client is installed, use it to connect to the ESXi server. To create a new virtual machine, click File ‣ New ‣ Virtual Machine. The New Virtual Machine Wizard will launch as shown in. 2.6.16 Virtual Machine Settings Increase the Memory Configuration to at least 8192 MB.
To create a storage disk, click Hard disk 1 ‣ Add. In the Device Type menu, highlight Hard Disk and click Next. Select Create a new virtual disk and click Next. In the screen shown in, select the size of the disk. To dynamically allocate space as needed, check the box Allocate and commit space on demand (Thin Provisioning). Click Next, then Next, then Finish to create the disk. Repeat to create the amount of storage disks needed to meet your requirements.
2.6.17 Creating a Storage Disk For ESX 5.0, Workstation 8.0, or Fusion 4.0 or higher, additional configuration is needed so that the virtual HPET setting does not prevent the virtual machine from booting. If you are running ESX, while in Edit Settings, click Options ‣ Advanced ‣ General ‣ Configuration Parameters. Change hpet0.present from true to false, then click OK twice to save the setting.
For Workstation or Player, while in Edit Settings, click Options ‣ Advanced ‣ File Locations. Locate the path for the Configuration file named filename.vmx. Open that file in a text editor, change hpet0.present from true to false, and save the change.
Plex Media Server is by far the most popular Media Server out there. I am using it for several years already without any issues.
You can access Plex from your mobile devices, PlayStation 4, XBOX, Chromecast, Amazon Fire, and many other devices. So without further ado, let’s start with the tutorial. Step 1 – Creating a new Dataset First, we are going to create a new Dataset for our Plex Media Files.
Navigate to Storage - Volumes - View Volumes and click on your main Volume. Now click on Add Dataset. Creating a new Dataset Now name it as you will and click on Add Dataset. Give the child a name Step 2 – Creating a new user for Plex This step is optional. You can use whatever user you already have, I prefer creating an extra user just for Plex.
Navigate to Account - Users - Add User Give it a Name, check Create a new primary group, enter a Full Name and a Password and hit create on the bottom. Creating a new group is also optional, I prefer doing it tho. Creating a new User Step 3 – Changeing the Dataset permissions Now we need to change the Dataset permissions to our new User.
Navigate to Storage - Volumes - View Volumes - Select your volume - Click on Permissions. Apply as in the image below. Adjusting permissions Step 4 – Creating a SMB share Now we got to create a share so that we can drag & drop files into our Plex Library directly from our Windows Computer. Navigate to Sharing - Windows (SMB) Share - Add Windows (SMB) Share. For path choose your plex-share, give it a name, can be the same as the dataset, and tick Allow Guest Access. Creating an SMB share Next, we are going to connect the drive to our Windows Computer. Open an explorer window by pressing Windows Button + E.Click on Map Network Drive on the top.
If you don’t have the map network drive option, just type the path to your NAS directly in the Breadcrumb Bar. Then right-click the plex-share and select Map Drive. Adjust as in the image below. Connecting the share Share is connected So this is where you want to drop all your Videos, Music et Cetera in. Step 5 – Installing & Configuring the Plex Plugin Navigate to Plugins, select PlexMediaServer and hit Install.
Installing the Plex Media Server Plugin Now we are going to change the IP Address of the Plex Jail. Navigate to Jails - Select your plexmediaserver1 Jail and hit Edit.
Adjust the IP to your own preferences. Setting an IP Address for our Plex Media Server Next, we are going to assign Storage to our Plex server, hence we are showing it the path to our plex-share. The Source is our plex-share, this is where Plex searches for Media Files. The Destination is the path where Plex stores information about the Media, like Movie Posters, Information, all kinds of Meta. For the Destination, click on Browse and choose the Media Folder within Plex.
Configuring Paths Reboot your FreeNAS now. Otherwise the Plex Plugin won’t start. Rebooting the NAS After the reboot Navigate back to Plugins - Installed and switch your Plex Media Server on.
Activating the Plex Plugin Now navigate to Plugins - PlexMediaServer and click on “here” to open a browser window and logging in to Plex. Step 6 – Adding a Library to Plex Go through the initial steps, rename your server if you want. You need to create an Account with Plex before being able to use it. After you have done all that, it’s time to add Media. This can be a little confusing, but I’ll help you through. Let’s say you want to add the Folder Movies from your plex-share. Adding a Library After clicking on Add Library in Plex, you have to adjust the path like this: Media Movies This will add the Movies Folder to your Plex Media Server.
The input is case sensitive! If Movies is written with a capital M and you would write Media movies, it wouldn’t work.
If you are using a l, you can learn how to enable HTTPS on Plex with it. The Plugin is not updated as frequently as it should be, to manually update your Plex Media Server check out this. Alright, this concludes this tutorial.
This should have you covered, as we went through each and every step. So long, happy nerding!
I’ve spent the last couple months configuring and setting up a new home server, with the intent of using it as a storage and media server. I looked at a few different options for the operating system I wanted to run. I knew I wanted to use an OS with support for an advanced filesystem with features like snapshots and check-summing for data integrity. It’s going to be used as a storage server so I wanted a filesystem that wasn’t going to corrupt my data. I also knew I was going to be working with at least four discs to start, maybe more, so I wanted a filesystem that was able to deal with multiple drives and a large storage pool. This really didn’t leave me with too many choices and thus I settled on using a variant of with ZFS. I considered using a Linux distribution with ZFS as that’s what I’m more comfortable with, but largely due to the amount of user adoption on FreeBSD the amount that ZFS has been tested on Linux comes nowhere close to how much it’s been tested on FreeBSD.
In addition to that, at the time of this build no Linux distribution ships with ZFS support natively, hopefully this changes soon. I considered using plain FreeBSD to give myself complete flexibility, but given that this was my first server build and I was basically intending to use the server for network attached storage, I settled on using for the ease of use and advanced features.
FreeNAS is a variant of FreeBSD that has been altered in order to be an easy to use network attached storage server. The way FreeNAS is designed also makes it very easy to backup the server configuration. Instead of saving all the raw data from how the server is set up, the settings are saved into a database which can easily be backed up and restored. This makes it very easy to get back up and running after a reinstall. FreeNAS can all be managed from a web interface and is easy to use but is also filled with power features.
Since it’s also essentially FreeBSD under the hood, if you do want to accomplish something that can’t be done in the web interface, you can easily drop down into the command line. The web interface makes it easy to manage your ZFS volumes and discs, letting you attach new pools or export your pools, take snapshots, make datasets, and use ZFS replication. I figured this would be an easy way to get used to using all these features and that if I wanted to switch to FreeBSD at a later date it would be as easy as exporting my pool and installing FreeBSD. Hardware Requirements On the the minimum hardware requirements are listed as:. Multicore 64-bit processor (Recommended Intel). 8GB boot drive.
8GB of RAM. A physical network port And the recommended hardware is listed as:.
Multicore 64-bit processor (Recommended Intel). 16GB boot drive. 16GB of ECC RAM. Two directly attached discs (non-hardware RAID). A physical network port One thing that might stick out here is that hardware RAID is not recommended. This is because ZFS uses software RAID, and thus if you use a hardware RAID controller there is an extra layer in between ZFS and the discs. This can hide things from ZFS and cause problems, so a host bus adapter (HBA) is recommended for use instead of a RAID controller.
The other thing is (ECC). There has been a lot of talk about whether or not it’s necessary to use ECC RAM, but ultimately the consensus is if you care about data integrity on your server, you should have it. This is especially true on a server intended for storage. ECC RAM is able to detect and correct data corruption in memory. This is necessary even with ZFS having advanced error checking capabilities.While ZFS is able to check to make sure your data remains in the same state in which it was written, it has no way of verifying the quality of that data. When incorrect data (say in the form of a flipped bit) gets read from memory, ZFS has no way of knowing that the data is corrupted and will still write it to the disk.
ECC RAM, on the other hand, will correct the most common types of data corruption. What made the hardware in my build atypical from the average server build is the requirements of ZFS.
In order to work correctly ZFS requires a lot of memory, as it uses an intelligent caching system called the “adaptive replacement cache” that allows it to make good use of whatever memory you give it. If you do not have enough memory all sorts of strange things can start happening on your system. It is therefore not recommended to run FreeNAS with any less than 8 GB of memory, and for every terabyte of storage on your server, an additional gigabyte of memory should be added. T makes sense to start with a minimum of around 16GB of memory on most home sized server builds. Build The parts I ended up deciding on for my build were probably a bit overkill for my needs, but I wanted to build something that I knew would last for a while and would work for anything I wanted to throw at it. My requirements were something that would be small enough to sit by my desk, was quiet, and drew fairly little power.
I also wanted it to be expandable and have fault-tolerance so that I could lose several drives and not lose my data. These requirements were what ended up bringing me to my choice of hardware. Parts. Fractal Design Node 804 Chassis. Supermicro X10SL7-F Motherboard. Xeon E3-1231 v3 CPU.
4x Samsung DDR3 1.35v-1600 M391B1G73QH0 RAM. 2x 32GB SATA III SMC DOM Boot Drive. SeaSonic G-550 Power Supply.
Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD 1500VA 900W PFC UPS. 6x Western Digital 6TB Red HDD. 2 x ENERMAX T.B. Silence UCTB12P Case Fan. 3x Noctua NF-P14s redux-1200 Case Fan Supermicro X10SL7-F Motherboard Initially when I started the build I was looking at mini-ITX motherboards. With a mini-ITX you can get a smaller case as well as possibly lower power consumption. In particular I was impressed with the feature set on the.
However, the small cases that a mini-ITX permits can actually be a be an issue. When you cram all of your hard drives in an extremely small space where you have impeded air flow, you’re more likely to start having heat problems.It probably wasn’t the best idea to get a tiny case, cram a bunch of hard drives together and expect a quiet and cool box. In addition, the kind of power you’re going to get out of the Atom processor that is on the ASRock is not even close to what you would get out of a Xeon. Upon doing a bit more reading and listening to people’s recommendations on the FreeNAS forums, I came to the conclusion that I’d be better off getting a Supermicro micro ATX motherboard. They are the most highly recommended and compatibility issues are less likely. They’re also server grade motherboards, which means they have features you’re not going to see in a desktop motherboard. During the build, the one feature that ended up being my favorite was IPMI.
It allows you to administer the motherboard remotely, meaning you never have to hook up a monitor and keyboard to turn on and off the server, type commands into the console, and view sensor information. There are a few options that I looked at from Supermicro, in particular the, and. The X10SLL-F had a max of 6 discs, and I wasn’t sure if that was going to be enough in case I wanted to expand in the future.
The X9SRH-7F, on the other hand, is double the cost of the X10SL7-F and is a bit overkill for my needs. The X10SL7-F seemed like a good middle ground, as it’s half the price of the X9SRH-7F.
Seeing as I didn’t think I would need any more than 32 gigabytes of RAM, and it includes a LSI SAS 6Gbps controller, it seemed like the best choice. Chassis Fractal Design Node 804 I ended up choosing this chassis as I wanted something a little bit different for my server than just a regular tower case to differentiate it from a desktop. Fractal Node makes really nicely designed cases, and this one in particular has lots of room for airflow on the inside as well as room for up to 10 3.5” drives and two 2.5” drives. I probably could have gotten away with a smaller case if I had gone with the tower, as there is a fair bit of room on the one side where the hard drives aren’t stored since I didn’t need a graphics card. CPU Xeon E3-1231 v3 Seeing as I wanted a CPU that supported ECC memory, had AES-NI and I was planning on using the server as a media server, I chose to go for the higher end CPU choice of the. The higher end processor seemed necessary as it was going to be doing some transcoding and I didn’t want the server falling to its knees every time someone tried to watch a video.
The difference in power consumption between using this compared to a pentium is fairly negligible so it didn’t seem worth it just to save a tiny bit of power. Memory Samsung DDR3 1.35v-1600 M391B1G73QH0 RAM I ended up maxing out the amount of memory at 32GB that I can put on my motherboard as it only allows 8GB DIMMs. I figured it was worth giving FreeNAS as much memory as it could work with, as ZFS is optimized to make good use of it. Too little memory on FreeNAS and you’re likely to start seeing problems. This was actually the part I had the hardest time finding. Using memory that is not on your motherboard’s recommended parts list can lead to some issues, especially with ZFS and FreeNAS, so I had to track down a specific type of memory.
There are even on the FreeNAS forums about problems created by using incorrect memory. Boot Drive 2x 32GB SATA III SMC DOM The way FreeNAS runs is quite different than most other systems. While normally your operating system is running right off the drive, FreeNAS puts the entire operating system into memory upon startup. For the longest time people have been using USB flash-drives as a boot drive because, although slower, it shouldn’t matter what the speed of the drive is once the system has booted up.
USB flash-drives have also been popular because not much space is needed for the OS, as anything that’s installed as a plugin goes right on your hard drive in FreeNAS. The only thing that is written to the disc is the operating system, for security reasons. On the FreeNAS forums there’s recently been a bit of a shift to using SSDs or for reliability.
I ended up going with a SATA DOM as they’re nice and small, they can be plugged directly into a SATA port, and they have a fairly low power consumption. I could have also just used a small SSD. I wanted to have a bit of extra redundancy so that in case the boot drive got corrupted I could easily restore functionality to the server without losing my FreeNAS configuration. While it’s probably a little overkill, I decided to run 2 mirrored SATA DOMs as my boot drive. In case one fails, I should be able to just reboot and run straight off the other one. I can then pick up another SATA DOM, plug it in and the mirror will resilver. In order to run two SATA DOMs on the X10SL7-F, I purchased a four pin to two pin CBL-CDAT-0597 y-connector from Supermicro.
Hard Drives 6x 6TB Western Digital Reds The Western Digital reds are kind of the go-to for most high end home servers and are highly recommended on the FreeNAS forums. I went with the 6TB drives as they seem to be at a pretty good price per gigabyte. The 6 hard drives fit nicely in the case and I could easily fit another three drives in the bay. I also still have room for 2 SSDs in case I ever decide I want to put in a cache, log, or L2ARC, which I decided would not be beneficial at this point. Case Fans ENERMAX T.B. Silence UCTB12P and Noctua NF-P14s redux-1200 Unfortunately, while the case does come with three fairly quiet fans, they have no PWM and therefore need to be stuck on a constant setting.
I had planned to put the server right in my workspace and wanted it to be fairly quiet. I also wanted to be sure it was getting adequate cooling and therefore leaving it at a constant setting kind of worried me.
I ended up deciding to get PWM fans that will ramp up and down based on the temperature of the CPU. The motherboard has the ability to run five fans using PWM, one of which is reserved for the CPU. With these fans, the server is extremely quiet, even when it gets up to a high workload. I would say it’s much quieter than an average desktop PC Pre setup Before installing any software onto the server, the LSI controller needed to be cross flashed into IT mode so that instead of acting as a RAID controller, it runs as a dumb HBA and passes all information through to ZFS. Due to how ZFS works, it wants to have complete control of the hard disks. If a RAID controller is used, complete information about the state of the disks is not passed through to ZFS which can cause problems along the way and potentially hide information about failing disks.
Supermicro makes available with an ISO that can be mounted over IPMI or burned to a USB disk. I chose to mount the ISO, and reboot boot into the UEFI shell where the provided program can be run.
Fs0: cd UEFI SMC2308T.NSH After following simple directions my controller was successfully flashed to IT mode. FreeNAS Setup Setting up FreeNAS was incredibly easy. I downloaded the image, and because of IPMI was able to mount the image over the network as if it was a regular drive. After booting from the image, I saw the following screen with the IP of my FreeNAS box and a few setup options. I didn’t need to change anything at this screen, and you can change all of these options later from the web interface. After punching in my IP in my browser, I was greeted by FreeNAS’s welcome screen and the setup wizard. Before going through with the setup and initializing my discs, I ran a proper burn-in.
Burn in Memory As memory is so key to ZFS it was the first thing I checked. I downloaded a utility called and let it run for 46 hours. Hard Drives Most hard drives die in the first hours of usage, so this makes it all the more critical to run the proper tests before setting up your entire system so that you don’t do all that work and end up finding out later that one or more of your hard drives need to be sent back to the manufacturer. I followed the process detailed on the, which explains how to run a proper burn in on your disks in order to weed out bad hardware.
The process I went through involved:. Smartctl tests. Short test.
Hello, I run freenas on a VM on a dedicated server hosted by OVH, in bridge mode. That means that its IP is routed as a /32 and that its default gateway is on a different subnet and must itself be routed as a /32 through the physical interface.
I could make it work using the console thanks to the following commands: route add -host -iface re0 route add default Unfortunately there is no way to make it persistent. There seem to be no clean way to make persistent change to the configuration through CLI. The static route configuration in the WebUI is too simplistic and does not allow specifying an interface instead of an IP (-iface). As it is, I will loose network connectivity the next time I will reboot the VM.
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