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FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

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Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#111

Post by jlgaddis »

tobias3 wrote: post #22
benologist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/files/Synology%20NAS%... I think it's in there, their account's got a lot of files so it might be elsewhere. Latest version isn't published yet.

This looks just like their GPL source drop location. No build instructions, no readme etc. This thread seems to confirm this notion: https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?t=120535 Here is the one for Thecus: http://www.thecus.com/Downloads/GPL/ QNAP: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qosgpl/ And since they haven't published the latest versions they are in violation of the GPL.

> And since they haven't published the latest versions they are in violation of the GPL.

There are a few ways that they can comply with the GPL without posting the source on the web.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#112

Post by cmurf »

baruch wrote: post #58
cbsmith wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many levels to this. Drives themselves remap sectors to handle bad sectors, and some have integrated ECC bits... there are also things at the sensor level to help recover from errors. Once you are at the block level, you have simple parity checking with some redundancy models, but the good ones use ECC bits. Usually this is done at the block device layer, but ZFS and some other filesystems do this at the filesyste…

An HDD/SSD without ECC will not work, and wouldn't have worked for a long time now. Many of the reads performed will require some ECC use. ECC is always written alongside the actual block and the overhead for ECC is the reason for the move from 512b sectors to 4Kb sectors in HDDs. For SSDs the data is already written in different block sizes depending on the NAND and the internal representation and ECC is done for la…

Yes, the two key things: population of drives (model/version possibly, but ultimately not publicly known what the sample size is), and the rate is generally a maximum. i.e. use of "less than" symbol with the rate. Therefore, it's wrong to say every x bytes you should expect an unrecoverable read error. We have no idea how good the drives actually are, the reporting is in orders of magnitude anyway so it could be 8 or 9 times more reliable than the reported rate; or even multiple orders of magnitude. It's not untrue to say < 1 URE in 10^14 bits, but for the population to actually experience 1 URE in 10^16 bits. Why not advertise that? Well, maybe there's a product that costs a little more than advertises 1 URE in 10^15 bits. And other product classes that promise better.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#114

Post by olp2 »

rsync wrote: post #64
buro9 wrote: post #18

Ooh, these FreeNAS boxes for the home are very nice: https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/ When I built my home NAS there wasn't an off the shelf FreeNAS option and it was definitely a "research all the things, build your own system" with the huge caveat of "Did you put enough RAM in that?". The 8-bay one is particularly good value, rivalling similar systems by QNAP, and I personally do have a QNAP and if I were to…

I think the generation 8 "HP Microserver" is a good system. One limitation is the 16GB max ram, but given that it's for home use with (presumably) large files and a small number of simultaneous clients, it shouldn't be a problem - even if you use 4x 8 TB disks. The key is to populate it with ECC ram which should be an absolute requirement for any ZFS system.

A quick google search brings up [0] telling ECC RAM is just as necessary as it is for another filesystem.

[0]: http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-yo...

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#116

Post by gradschool »

lima wrote: post #97
rsync wrote: post #61

A FreeNAS device has the ability to do native ZFS send/recv to rsync.net.[1] Always remember to ask about the "HN Readers Discount". [1] http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html [2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-...

Is there any way to use this and encrypt your data?

I don't know if it's possible with FreeNAS, but on an ordinary Debian box nothing stops you running ZFS on LUKS encrypted devices. I've been using this configuration without issues for about a year on a home file server.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#117

Post by guitarbill »

mawburn wrote: post #20

I never really understood the system requirements for FreeNAS. It would be something that would work great on some small old system, but at 8gb Recommended the system requirements is basically the opposite of a small old system. Can anyone explain the reason for this? What makes the specs so hardcore?

It's just a recommendation. Remember, some people use FreeNAS professionally, so they're going to err on the side of recommending too much (= enterprise). Less will probably work fine, as long as you aren't running dedupe, compression, or heaps of jails and services. E.g. if you have 4 drives and just use the SMB service to connect to one or two machines, 4GiB is probably okay.

Having said that, RAM is pretty cheap. 8GiB isn't a huge ask for any machine in 2016. Any system with less than 4GiB, is it really worth bothering with redundancy/ZFS? UFS (which is far less RAM hungry) + nightly backups might be good enough. (Edit: of course, you miss out on the awesome ZFS features with UFS. It's never easy, is it?)

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#119

Post by feld »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #108
BrainInAJar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's ZFS backed, screwing up the RAID is going to be pretty close to impossible. you can lose the system disk (usb key) that holds your settings, but the data you actually care about will be safe.

I used ZFS in two production instances a few years ago on Solaris, and had two instances of a bug that totally corrupted the superblock on each drive, meaning that all data was gone with no way to recover. Now I'm back to HW RAID, LVM, and ext4, which works a treat, and I'll be using that until I have more faith in ZFS.

You had incredibly bad luck then unless you weren't running Solaris on Sun hardware, in which case you may have shot yourself in the foot with a poor disk controller and/or no ECC.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#120

Post by feld »

jmporcel wrote: post #100

It is worth noticing the Active Directory integration is not yet ready. https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/16966

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is only indicating that they aren't exposing any query filters in the GUI and searching for all objects from the root is overwhelming the GUI if you have a large AD environment.

Rookie mistake, but a simple patch solves it.

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