Software Update: FreeNAS 8.0.1

FreeNAS has been updated to version 8.0.1. With this package, a computer included in the network can be used as ‘network attached storage’, so purely for storing data. The whole is based on FreeBSD version 8.2 and provided with a clear web interface. Where the system requirements in version 7 were still very low and it could run fine on an old computer, there is slightly more extensive hardware for version 8 necessary† FreeNAS supports many network protocols and can also be used as a UPnP, web and iTunes server, or to download BitTorrent files. The following changes and improvements have been made in this release:

Major changes

• django has been updated to 1.3.1 to address multiple security advisories.
• istgt has been updated to 20110928
• Base system has been updated to FreeBSD 8.2-p3, which addresses and

Changes since 8.0.1-RC2

• Fix the regex used to validate iSCSI target names so that ‘-‘ is an allowed character. (r7827)
• Multiple improvements to the UPS service. (r7841, r7842, r7843, r7844, r7845, r7846, r7847, r7848, r7849)
• Fix a bug in the GUI where zvols from multiple pools caused GUI corruption. (r7859)
• Add a button to zpools that will display zpool status in a tab.
• Set each LUN in an iSCSI target to a unique serial number. This allows vmware ESXi to see multiple LUNs per target. (r7878)
• Change the encryption type in the LDAP config screen to a choicebox instead of requiring freeform text input. (r7881)
• Remove DDP option from AFP server config. (r7883)
• Fix typo so that hosts allow and deny actually get populated in rsyncd.conf. (r7906)
• Fix deleted snapshots. (r7916)
• Add a button to volumes to manually kick off a scrub of ZFS volumes. (r7943)
• Fix smartd.conf generation bug. (r7956)
• Fix a bug preventing the import of zpools created on Solaris (r7971)
• Allow adding a public key for user ssh authentication. (r8002)

Changes since 8.0-RELEASE

There’s too much to list here, but the high points are:

• Divorced the volume members in the database from the FreeBSD devices. This resolves an issue where FreeBSD can change devices names and the GUI doesn’t pick up the updates due to the devices names being hard-wired in the database.
• Support exporting ZFS zvols (virtual devices) as device extents via iSCSI. 8.0 was only able to export physical device nodes or file based extents.
• The GUI now has an event notification system.
• The email backend has been refactored.
• Many many changes in the GUI to help it validate and sanitize inputs that are passed to the backend daemons.
• Added UPS functionality.
• Added rsync client and server functionality.
• Added the ability to schedule cron jobs in the GUI.
• Vastly improved and reworked snapshot replication.

Error:

• CHAP doesn’t work with GlobalSAN initiators on OS X.
• Upgrades from FreeNAS 0.7 aren’t supported.
• The installer doesn’t check the size of the install media before attempting an install. A 2 GB device is required, but the install will appear to complete successfully on smaller devices, only to fail at boot.
• The installer will let you switch from i386 to amd64 architecture and vice-versa, but some files, such as the rrd files used by the statistics graphing package are architecture dependent.

FreeNAS 8.0 screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.