Pox and Ragble explain how to use Unison to sync a Mac computer to a FreeNAS box.
Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.
Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc)…. More
Pox and Ragble explain how to use rsync for mirroring data stored the FreeNAS Box. rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.
Ben Long has written a post on PC World website on his experience with Lime Technology‘s unRAID. It’s not so much about how to build a home media server with unRAID, but more an account of his (positive) experience:
“One benefit of digital media distribution is that you can store all of your music, movies, TV shows, and videos as data on hard drives rather than as stacks on shelves. But with higher-quality files and larger collections, that can still add up to a lot of storage.
Finding the right storage solution for your needs can be tricky, as you try to balance performance with expandability. Throw in the need for backup and network-wide access and things can get quite complicated. I was very surprised then, to discover Lime Technology’s unRAID, a DIY storage system that provides a very powerful, flexible storage option at a very low price.”
The rest of the article talks about:
The need for storage
Building an unRAID
Hard drives
Installing the Software
Why unRAID?
Using the unRAID
Why does Ben like unRAID?
“The unRAID offers a lot of great features. First, like a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks) it combines multiple drives into a single volume. And, like several RAID formats, it has built-in redundancy. By incorporating a dedicated parity disk, anything you copy to the unRAID can be restored should a single drive fail.
Unlike many RAID configurations, though, you don’t have to expand the unRAID with pairs of drives. You can add another drive, of any size, to the array at any time. So, if you run out of storage, all you have to do is add another drive to the system, and that drive’s space will automatically be added to the total pool of storage. [...]
Like the Drobo (and unlike most RAID configurations) if a drive in the unRAID fails, you can take it out and replace it with a new drive. The unRAID system will automatically fill the new drive with the contents of the old drive. Thanks to this redundancy, the unRAID system can survive a failure of a single drive. What’s also nice is that the data is not “striped” in any way–each drive simply has directories of files, so even if multiple drives fail, you can still retrieve your data from the surviving drives. [...]
Finally, the unRAID system is extremely affordable. I had to buy a case, power supply, motherboard, and CPU, but I already had several drives. I simply took the drives out of all of my external enclosures, and some of the extra drives out of my tower, and put them in the unRAID box.
So, with the unRAID, I have a single device that, using current drive technology, can be expanded up to 38 terabytes, and allows for expansion one drive at a time, without losing any data, and without having to rebuild the entire system. All of that data is backed up, and the system can survive a single drive crash with no loss of data. Also, unlike a mirrored RAID 1 setup, half my storage is not used for backup. If I put in 10TB worth of data drives, then I have 10TB worth of usable storage. [...] (continues)
Robin Harris over at the ZDnet.com Storage Bits blog analyses a new UW-M paper analyzing the fault tolerance claims of ZFS:
“File systems guard all the data in your computer, but most are based on 20-30 year old architectures that put your data at risk with every I/O. The open source ZFS from Sun Oracle claims high data integrity – and now that claim has been tested.
File systems guard all the data in your computer, but most are based on 20-30 year old architectures that put your data at risk with every I/O. The open source ZFS from Sun Oracle claims high data integrity – and now that claim has been tested.
I’m at the USENIX File and Storage Technology FAST conference in Silicon Valley. There is more leading edge storage thinking presented here than any other industry event.
Case in point: End-to-end Data Integrity for File Systems (PDF): A ZFS Case Study by Yupu Zhang, Abhishek Rajimwale, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau of the Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison. It offers the first rigorous test of ZFS data integrity.”
Olivier Cochard-Labbé has added a roadmap page to the FreeNAS website: FreeNAS 0.8 roadmap.
We can already see a positive impact from iXsystem‘s takeover of the FreeNAS project: “Refactor the build system” and the “one click binary installs”. Two features that PC-BSD (another iXsystems project) already has. PC-BSD has the Push Button GUI installer and iXsystems also provides the hardware for the build servers.
One of the reasons for the former FreeNAS lead developer, Volker Theile, to start his CoreNAS / OpenMediaVault project was that FreeNAS lacked a modular design with the ability to easily compliment the system with plugins or add-ons.
From the roadmap:
Blocking Features
Development on FreeBSD RELENG_8. Release, depending on timeframe may be based on a RELENG_8 snapshot or 8.1-RELEASE
Migrate off m0n0wall
Migrate GUI to django
Add support for ada and ahci SATA drivers
Add optional SoftUpdates + Journaling support to UFS2 filesystems
Migration path/tool for previous releases and configurations
Preservation of all existing features of the current FreeNAS release
Refactor FreeNAS build system to allow building FreeNAS without affecting the host environment
Non-Blocking Features
FreeNAS package support. Binary one click installs that modify the GUI dynamically.
We’re looking forward to the first iXsystems FreeNAS release. How is it going to compare with OpenMediaVault (unreleased as yet)? Time will tell.
The Orion II Storage Server & JBOD Storage Expansion Deliver Unparalleled Storage Density With Redundant Cooling and Powerful Intel® Technologies
iXsystems have released the iX-N4236 Orion II Storage Server which is designed to handle storage-intensive tasks while remaining at an optimal temperature and drawing less power than other servers in its class. The Orion II’s powerful complement of features and light energy footprint create an ideal environment for ZFS implementations, virtualization, and high-capacity storage.
iX-N4236 is a high performance, high quality, ultra dense, 4U rackmount server designed to maximize your rack-space, while saving energy, and your overall storage budget. The iX-N4236 features a highly efficient (92% Gold Level) power supply, 36 hot swap drive bays and amazing redundant cooling. Performance is handled by two Intel(r) Xeon(r) 5500 Series CPU’s, and up to 144GB of DDR3 ECC Registered 1333MHz memory.
The Orion II Server sports dual, intelligent Intel® Xeon® 5500 series quad-core processors, making it a powerful, efficient storage platform. Each Xeon® processor saves power by automatically putting the CPU into the lowest available power state during periods of light utilization. Intel® TurboBoost Technology raises performance on individual cores based on the needs of specific applications, ensuring efficient allocation of resources and increasing overall system performance. This intelligent power management, coupled with ultra-high efficiency power supplies and optional low-power hard drives and RAM, make the Orion II servers top of their class in storage capacity, compute power, and density per watt.
Unbelievably inexpensive networked storage options have emerged, but it’s a case of ‘False Economics 101.’
PCMag has a post advising how to avoid the pitfalls of cheap storage:
The proliferation of huge, cache-laden SATA disks in the consumer market has led to an ever-expanding array of very inexpensive networked storage products for business. More often than not, these devices offer both NAS and iSCSI SAN functions that, until recently, were found only in enterprise-class storage products — at a fraction of the cost. Are these ultracheap alternatives right for you? That depends on who you are and what you do.
A huge range of performance variables separate true enterprise-class storage products from their inexpensive pretenders. The most glaring is transactional performance. Most low-cost storage devices are based on a small number of very large SATA disks rather than larger numbers of SATA or higher-speed SAS/FC disks. These types of configurations will yield extremely anemic transactional performance, which would generally make them poor choices for hosting a busy database or mail server.
What if that’s not what you want, though? If you’re a small business without a whole lot of transactional disk performance needs or a big business that just needs a very large, low-cost parking lot for some big data, are these low-end storage devices a good option?
So be careful when you venture into the land of low-cost storage. Take a hard look at what your storage will be used for — and how it’s going to get fixed when it breaks — before you congratulate yourself for saving a dump truck full of money. Sometimes, the dump truck you know is better than the one you never saw coming until it ran you over.
FreeNAS is a free network attached storage server (NAS server) that is under active development and improving with every release. Though its release number may indicate an alpha/beta product (version 0.7), FreeNAS is stable and can be used on production machines. FreeNAS supports CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, and software RAID (0,1,5); all this manageable through an intuitive web-based configuration interface.
We are already a few weeks into 2010, but what’s wrong with looking back over 2009? Below I have collected a number of FreeNAS related posts, howto’s and videos that were posted in 2009. Most of these were found via FreeBSD News, Google News (Alerts) and the Learn FreeNAS blog.
The FreeNAS community and forums are vibrant, full of activity. There are always new users with questions and problems, and experienced users to help out. Others write up useful howto’s and share tips. It is difficult how many FreeNAS users there exactly are, but we can be fairly confident it is quite a number, including corporate enterprises.
Late 2009 Voker Theile, the core FreeNAS developer, announced that further development of the FreeBSD-based FreeNAS would be halted. FreeNAS 0.8 was going to be a Debian-based NAS server. This decision was reverted shortly afterwards, when iXsystems, the sponsor behind the PC-BSD project, offered to sponsor further development of (a FreeBSD based) FreeNAS with Olivier Cochard-Labbé, the founder of the FreeNAS project, returning and assisting with the development. OpenMediaVault is the new Debian-based NAS and developed by Volker, independently from FreeNAS.
A Debian based OpenMediaVault will have better hardware support, but it won’t (as it stands now) be able to include the ZFS file system. Later this year I will write a comparison of the two NAS operating systems
Contents:
I FreeNAS Releases
II FeeNAS videos
III How does FreeNAS Compare?
IV FreeNAS Howto’s
V FreeNAS hands-on Howto’s and guides
VI FreeNAS Book
I FreeNAS Releases
Volker Theile and developers working with him released the following versions in 2009 (in chronological order):
Add TFTP service. It is accessible via ‘Services|TFTP’ in the WebGUI.
Add Samba patch CVE-2008-4314.
Upgrade nano to 2.0.9.
Upgrade PHP to 5.2.8.
Add WOL support for misc NIC’s. Thanks to Tobias Reber for porting WOL patch to FreeBSD 6.4.
Upgrade nfe driver. Thanks to Tobias Reber for backporting FreeBSD 7.0 driver and adding WOL support.
Finally fixed Samba lock file problem (they are located in/var/db/samba now). You can increase the memory filesystem size for /var for LiveCD and’embedded’ installations by modifying the rc.conf variable named ‘varsize’. This is necessary if you are running out of file space for *.tdb files (this normally happens on heavy Samba share usage with many users). The default size
is 32MB.
Replace FTP server pure-ftpd 1.0.21 with proftpd 1.3.2rc3. Please note that there can be set additional options via rc.conf variables which are not displayed in the service WebGUI. Please have a look into /etc/rc.d/proftpd script for a detailed list of options.
Add TCP Wrappers. All applications linked against libwrap support this feature, for example services like FTP, TFTP, SSH, NFS… The rules can be configured via WebGUI ‘Network|Hosts’.
Upgrade ATAidle to 2.4.
Upgrade transmission to 1.42.
Upgrade rsync to 3.0.5.
Upgrade cdialog to 1.1.20080316.
Upgrade msmtp to 1.4.17.
Add ability to create a SWAP partition during installation.
Enhance the ‘System|Advanced|Swap’ page to select a file or disk device as swap space.
Upgrade nut to 2.4.1. This version uses TCP wrappers instead of the internal ACL mechanism. Because of that all client can listen the UPS. If you want to prevent this you have to
use the FreeNAS client firewall to block specific IP ranges.
Upgrade transmission to 1.51.
Upgrade fusefs-ntfs/ntfs-3g to 2009.2.1.
Upgrade 3Ware serial ATA RAID controller driver to 9.5.1.
IV FreeNAS Howto’s
FreeNAS is a file server by default, but since its code is open and based on the versatile FreeBSD operating system, it can be tweaked and enhanced to take on other jobs as well.
FreeBSD’s slogan is “The power to serve” and that’s exactly what is true for FreeNAS too. FreeNAS can be used as
Before installing FreeNAS, have a look at FrugalTech’s 11 FreeNAS tips
VI FreeNAS Book
If you are looking for a good FreeNAS reference book, you may consider buying Gary Sims’Learning FreeNAS: Configure and manage a network attached storage solution book. Packt Publishing has published a few extracts of this book online
That’s it for now. Many links, useful videos and write ups. Do the reading and why not give it a go and build, install and configure your own NAS file server? Doing it yourself saves you a bit of money over buying a NAS appliance, give you hands-on experience and gives true job satisfaction.
