Category Archives: NAS O/S

Microsoft confirms Windows Home Server is dead – PC Pro

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Microsoft has killed off Windows Home Server and Small Business Server.

Microsoft had been expected to shelve Windows Home Server since the end of 2010, when it removed a key feature called Drive Extender, a drive pooling system. The Windows Home Server package led a troubled life from the outset, arriving with a data corruption bug that Microsoft took months to fix, and a lack of support from hardware vendors.

In its FAQ on the changes, Microsoft confirmed the demise of Home Server, suggesting fans move to a new SKU called Essentials.

“Windows Home Server has seen its greatest success in small office/home office (SOHO) environments and among the technology enthusiast community,” Microsoft said.

Read the full article at PC-Pro: Windows Home Server is dead.

In my opinion we do not need MS Homeserver as there are many free and very capable NAS operating systems available.

Amahi Ubuntu Edition now available

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After a long wait the first Amahi Ubuntu based edition is now available.

Here are some of the features in Amahi 6.1, Ubuntu Edition:

  • Latest storage pooling technology with the latest Greyhole 0.9
  • Reliability fixes and updates, including a new, professionally designed, polished look (see at the end of this post)
  • Support for both the 32 & 64 bit Desktop and Server versions of Ubuntu
  • Improved cloud storage with Amahi Sync
  • Some support for ARM systems, like the PandaBoard and BeagleBoard (these are not well tested, so, expect rough seas)
  • One-Click App installs via Amahi’s application store

Get started here.

FreeNAS 8.2 Released

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The FreeNAS development team at iXsystems has announce the availability of FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE.

FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE is the first release on new branch of code that incorporates tighter integration between the ZFS command line and the FreeNAS GUI.  This release also features the ability to run arbitrary services and interact with them through the FreeNAS GUI packages or ports, as well as official FreeNAS plugins (PBIs).

Additional features include:

  • Support for iSCSI target reload.
  • GUI support for SAS and FC multipath hardware.
  • Webshell accessible from the FreeNAS web interface.
  • ZFS scrubs are configurable from the GUI.
  • A newer web toolkit is used in the GUI, enabling use of mobile browsers.
  • An autotuning script tunes ZFS for the hardware it’s running on.

Check out the other features on the SF project page, where you can choose your architecture and download FreeNAS 8.2 and some available PBIs.

FreeNAS 8.2.0-BETA4 available

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Josh Paetzel from iXsystems has announced the beta release of FreeNAS 8.2.0-BETA4

A complete refactoring of the plugin networking stack has been done, to allow greater flexibility and functionality. The ability to upgrade plugins has been added, as well as the plugin jail itself.

Compared to previous beta releases, there have been numerous bug fixes and improvements.

From the changelog:

The GUI upgrade format changed in 8.2.0-BETA3 from xz to txz. What this means is that if you are attempting to do a GUI upgrade to 8.2.0-BETA4 from 8.2.0-BETA3 use the .txz version of the GUI_Upgrade file. If you are upgrading from any previous version use the .xz file.

- The image size increased in 8.0.1-BETA3. The new size requires a 2 GB storage device. The GUI upgrade can be used to upgrade a system from BETA3, BETA4, or RC1 but upgrades from earlier releases can only be done from the CD. The other option is to save the config, reinstall the new version, then restore the config.

- FreeBSD can be really touchy with hardware. Please be sure to update your BIOS/BMC firmware when upgrading / installing FreeNAS if you run into OS hang issues. There have been cases identified where a BIOS upgrade has fixed driver hangs, and/or other issues with FreeNAS; one such example was with an Intel 82578DC motherboard, as noted in the FreeNAS 8 forum thread titled “8.0.3-RELEASE coming soon..”: http://bit.ly/rq78Q3 , post # 70-88. Again, please only do this if you experience booting / runtime issues, as some vendors don’t test FreeBSD interoperability as much as others between major firmware releases.

- Previous builds were branded as i386/amd64 (32-bit and 64-bit respectively). 8.0.3-RC1+ rebranded the architectures as x86 and x64, respectively.

- 8.0.1 and 8.0.2 images advertised CIFS shares to Macs by default but 8.0.3 and later images don’t advertise CIFS shares by default. If you want to advertise CIFS shares in 8.0.3 and later, be sure to turn on “Zeroconf” support in the CIFS global settings.

- Builds prior to 8.0.3-RELEASE with ‘CIFS’ didn’t actually have AIO (asynchronous I/O) enabled. So, if you experience performance degradation after upgrading from prior versions of FreeNAS to 8.0.3-RELEASE or newer, turn off AIO or tune the AIO size from ’1′ to something more reasonable (the new default in 8.0.3-RELEASE-p1 is 4096 or 4kB).