FreeNAS NotesRevisionas of Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 19:56 UTC

Notes

  • Drives from the same manufacturing batches are prone to
    fail together. This is bad. So purchase drives from separate
    websites/vendors to mix things up.
  • Be careful with SATA port
    multipliers    .
  • Storage is cheap, and RAIDZ2 is the way to go.
  • Picking components is essentially a balancing act of these factors:
    • Low power and/or small form-factor
    • High capacity
    • High redundancy
    • High performance
    • Low $$$
    • Expandability
  • Used FreeNAS 8.3
  • SMB was significantly slower than AFP.
  • Use Memtest to test memory
    after purchase.
  • Bought non-ECC memory without thinking and because it was super
    cheap with a deal. This isn’t the most calamitous
    thing    .
  • Wrote a small
    script     to snapshot
    my Macs from the FreeNAS box. Did this by creating a new account,
    setting the home folder in a ZFS filesystem, generating SSH keys,
    putting them on Macs.
    • Runs as a cron job at midnight
    • Script needs full paths to zfs, sudo, rsync, etc.

Gigabyte USB Boot Issues

BIOS would ‘forget’ boot order. Configured USB stick as hard drive.
Problem solved by upgrading from F1 to
F3.

FreeNAS Upgrade

Downloaded GUI upgrade
for v9.2 (x86-64). Backed up config, then applied.

Got the dreaded “Mounting failed with error
19”
message no matter what I tried in BIOS (disabling XHCI, etc.) Plugging
USB stick into a 2.0 port seemed to work. ZFS volume upgrade was quick
and painless.

Hardware

I didn’t care about size. Also wanted a mobo that has as many onboard
SATA ports as possible. Lots of memory since ZFS loves
memory.

Component Link Price
Case NZXT Source 210 $79.99
PSU Rosewill Capstone 450W $59.99
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-F2A85XM-D3H $39.99
CPU AMD A4-5300 APU 3.4Ghz $49.99
Memory Corsair Vengeance 16GB $129.99
Storage (x4) Seagate Barracuda 3TB SATA 6 Gb/s $120
FreeNAS stick ADATA S102 8GB USB 3.0 $20
Fan Filters (x4) Rosewill RFT-120 $4
  • Used nylon 8-32 × ½ Phillips flat-head screws for the fan-filters.

Software Configuration

Sudoers

Need to have NOPASSWD sudo access for my backup
scripts. Created a user
in the “wheel” group and added a cron job via the web interface. Bad
part is that I have to do this with every update. Maybe a jail can solve
this?

su -

# Mount read-write
mount -wu /

# Edit sudoers file
chmod u+w /conf/base/etc/local/sudoers
echo -e "# For ZFS snapshots\n%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /conf/base/etc/local/sudoers
chmod u-w /conf/base/etc/local/sudoers

# Mount read-only
mount -ru /

# Make sure to reboot when done

References

Category: Nikhil’s Notes
Category: Installation Logs
Category: FreeNAS