Download FreeNAS 8.0 RC 1

The development of version 8.0 of FreeNAS has arrived at the first release candidate. With this package, a computer included in the network can be used as a network attached storage machine, so purely for storing data. The whole is based on FreeBSD version 8.2 and provided with a clear web interface. The system requirements are low. For example, 128MB of space is needed for an installation and 256MB of memory is enough to run it. FreeNAS supports many network protocols and can also be used as a UPnP, web and iTunes server or to download BitTorrent files. The release notes for this version look like this:

New Functionality:

• iSCSI Target support has been added.
• ZFS datasets can be created from the GUI and then are treated like a volume for purposes of sharing and management. The GUI does not yet support many ZFS attributes, but they can be set from the CLI interface and will “stick”.
• Local Users/Groups can now be added and edited from the GUI.
• Samba can now be set to use local users to authenticate.
• Mountpoint owner/group and permissions can now be set from the GUI.
• Sharing of subdirectories via Samba isn’t supported, but sharing ZFS datasets is. Datasets can be created, and then their permissions set individually. You can leverage this functionality as well as the ability to add users and groups to emulate sharing of subdirectories.
• Telemetry and performance graphs are now available under the system tab. These graphs should persist across upgrades and reboots. Because they are only synced to flash every hour, hard shutdowns will cause a small amount of data loss and blank spots in the graphs.
• A glimpse at the GUI technology we have been working on is available. It isn’t enabled by default, but it is included in the image. Append /admin/interface to the URL you access the GUI at to activate the new GUI. It’s still a little buggy, but in many cases very usable.
• A console menu has been added which is very similar to FreeNAS 0.7. It can be used to configure network parameters which are then detected by the GUI and used and displayed for network configuration. The default behavior of unconfigured networking is to attempt DHCP on all active interfaces.

Upgrading from previous 0.8 Betas/snapshots/alphas:

• Care has been taken to ensure upgrades from previous 0.8 version will work as expected.
• UPGRADES FROM FREENAS 0.7x ARE STILL UNSUPPORTED
• The system has no way to import configuration settings from 0.7 versions of FreeNAS, nor is there any sort of volume importer yet that will preserve data on existing volumes. Attempting to upgrade from 0.7 will result in the loss of your configuration, your data, or quite likely, both.
• IMPORTING EXISTING STORAGE VOLUMES IS UNSUPPORTED
• We will get that working very shortly, for now, don’t feed disks with data you care about to FreeNAS 0.8.

Usability of this snapshot:

At this point the feature set of FreeNAS 8 is complete enough to perform file sharing tasks via NFS or Samba, using local users, AD, or LDAP, as well as allowing the system to operate as an iSCSI target. The base technology of FreeBSD, ZFS, Samba, and NFS is very stable and very well tested. While there isn’t an upgrade path from other storage solutions, including previous FreeNAS 0.7 releases, the system is suitable for new deployments provided the featureset is a good match for the requirements.

FreeNAS 8 screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.