FreeNAS 0.7: powerful and not dead

Recently, the FreeNAS developers have released version 0.7 of their FreeBSD-based operating system for network-attached storage (NAS). This is a major release, which introduces support for the ZFS file system among other things. Around the same time, fears were expressed about the future of FreeNAS as a BSD-based NAS but, in the end, a solution has been found.

FreeNAS 0.7 is based on FreeBSD 7.2 and includes a lot of file sharing protocols. This way it can talk to all major operating systems: GNU/Linux, the BSDs, Windows, and Mac OS X. FreeNAS also supports several types of media streaming protocols and can act like an iTunes server. In addition, it supports iSCSI and different levels of software RAID. All of this can be managed from the web interface so users don't have to know the FreeBSD commands under the hood.

One of the advantages of FreeNAS is that it has very low system requirements, as it needs only 128 MB of RAM. This makes it attractive to blow the dust off an old Pentium 2 or 3 PC, put a couple of hard drives in it and make it a NAS. Of course, for high performance the machine still needs enough RAM and CPU horsepower. All of this makes FreeNAS a popular operating system for central storage and media streaming at home.

Installation

FreeNAS has downloads for 32-bit and 64-bit hardware, in a live version and an installable version. The installable version is for installation on a USB stick, hard drive, or Compact Flash card, while the live version doesn't touch the hard drive of the system but can save its configuration to a USB stick or floppy disk.

After the installer has booted, it shows the user a simple menu in the console to set up the basics. The user can assign network interfaces, set IP addresses, reset the password for the web interface or reset all settings to the factory defaults, open a shell, reboot or shutdown the system, and install or upgrade FreeNAS to a hard drive or USB stick. Most of that is just for troubleshooting, because the bulk of the settings are available in the web interface.

Configuration

Once FreeNAS has been assigned an IP address, the user can surf to the web interface in a browser and log in with the default user name and password. The first thing FreeNAS displays is some system information, such as the CPU and memory usage, the load averages and the disk space usage. The latter will show "No disk configured" first, but available disks can be added easily in the "Disks -> Management" menu by clicking on the plus icon, choosing the disk, and entering some optional settings. After this, don't forget to click on "Apply changes" on the disk management page. The next steps are formatting and choosing a mount point.

When choosing a file system for a hard drive in the "Disks -> Format" menu, FreeNAS recommends the BSD file system UFS. Other supported file systems are FAT32, NTFS, Ext2, or Ext3, but the web interface expressly warns that they can result in unpredictable results. While the web interface doesn't warn against using ZFS (which has its own menu item, because it is not only a file system but also a logical volume manager), users have to keep in mind that FreeNAS 0.7 is still based on FreeBSD 7.2 which calls ZFS support "experimental".

The goal of a NAS if of course sharing the data with users, and FreeNAS has a lot of services at its disposal to do this: FTP, TFTP, NFS, Samba, AFP (for Mac OS X users), HTTP, rsync (ideal for making backups on the NAS) and Unison (for file synchronization). It can also share a disk as an iSCSI target to another computer in the local network. But FreeNAS can also act as a streaming media server for clients that are compatible with UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) or iTunes, or it can run BitTorrent to download torrents directly on the NAS.

In general, the web interface is intuitive enough to do a lot of things without having to look up the documentation. At the same time, it is really powerful, with even the possibility to edit arbitrary files, run arbitrary commands, tune some FreeBSD kernel parameters with sysctl or add variables to rc.conf. It also shows a lot of status information. Unfortunately, documentation such as the FreeNAS Setup and User Guide is still lagging behind.

Death of a FreeBSD descendant?

During the last few months, the future of the FreeNAS project seemed in peril. The project's core developer Volker Theile announced in September that he would stop developing FreeNAS and switch his work to a new project, called CoreNAS, which would be based on Debian GNU/Linux. Some reasons he listed for this switch are:

• The Debian installer is more customizable than the hand-written FreeNAS install scripts.
• Wake-on-LAN for waking up the NAS automatically works in Linux.
• Linux has a working sensor framework to check the temperature and fan speeds.
• The system can be updated with the Debian package manager.
• Linux has better driver support.

According to Volker, the current architecture of FreeNAS is not flexible enough to add the new features users have been asking him for:

His eye fell quickly on the Debian infrastructure, which seemed to reduce the work to get a new FreeNAS to a minimum. A big plus of Linux is that it supports more new hardware than FreeBSD.

But of course this left FreeNAS users with a problem: what about the ZFS support that has been added in FreeNAS 0.7? A lot of the new users were attracted solely by this feature, which didn't seem to have a future in CoreNAS. Would they have to migrate their freshly installed data to another file system in the next release? Volker wrote that his FreeNAS successor would maybe have ZFS over FUSE, but the performance would of course not be the same. So the only real option users of ZFS on FreeNAS seemed to have was to migrate to an OpenSolaris-based NAS operating system such as EON or Nexenta Core Platform. However, these don't have the intuitive web interface that FreeNAS has (NexentaStor, the commercial and proprietary variant of Nexenta Core Platform, has one, and a 4 TB developer license is free as in beer).

Rumors of FreeNAS' death greatly exaggerated

But then in the beginning of December, FreeNAS founder Olivier Cochard-Labbé appeared deus ex machina. He agreed with Volker that a full rewrite of the FreeNAS base is needed, and he clarified that this will happen along two different paths. On the one hand, Volker will develop his Linux-based CoreNAS idea in a new project, OpenMediaVault (the website is empty at the moment). On the other hand, the company iXsystems will take on FreeNAS development and rewrite it. As part of this, Olivier will work on upgrading it to the FreeBSD 8.0 code base, which will introduce production-ready ZFS support.

Matt Olander, the Chief Technology Officer at iXsystems and also a member of the FreeBSD and PC-BSD projects, officially joined the FreeNAS project with some explanation on the forum:

Matt added that iXsystems will start digging through the forums and search some low hanging fruit to implement in the first future release of FreeNAS, an upgrade to FreeBSD 8.

So, in the end, a crisis has been averted and, with luck, everyone will be happy. The users that have been attracted to FreeNAS because of ZFS can keep using it and will get an update. In addition, they get commercial backing by iXsystems. The users that have been asking for features such as Wake-on-LAN, a sensor framework, and more hardware support get their rewrite to Linux, done by Volker in his spare time. Let's hope that FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault keep working together to share their efforts.