Download FreeNAS 8.0 RC 4

A new development version of FreeNAS 8.0 has been released. 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:

Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.0 Release Candidate 4

Release Candidate 4 contains both bug fixes and new functionality over previous Release candidates and betas.

FreeNAS 8 should be installed to a USB stick or Compact Flash device. It requires a device of at least 1 GB in size. In a departure from FreeNAS 0.7 releases, the OS drive can not be used as a component for a volume, nor can it be partitioned for sharing.

New in 8.0-RC4:

Snapshot functionality has been added. There are features to create periodic snapshot jobs, create one time snapshots, clone snapshots (which can then be exported as shares like any other dataset) and rollback to previous snapshot.

VLAN interfaces are fully supported. VLANs can be created from the GUI or from the CLI menu on the console.

NFS shares can be set to use the full range of maproot and mapall options. In addition, tuning is available for the NFS service to boost performance past gigE networking speeds.

Users and groups available to the system from any source (local users, LDAP, AD) are now presented anywhere a user or group is specified, whether it’s volume permissions, samba anonymous user, or NFS maproot.

Several functions in System -> advanced were hooked up, a few were deleted. Powerd now works, toggling between the CLI script and a normal login works, the MOTD updates properly, and the serial console works.

The kernel modules to support several RAID controllers were added, as well as the modules to enable mount_smbfs to work from the CLI.

Thanks to several users in the community, multiple issues with AFP have been resolved.

Several ZFS options have been exposed to the GUI, and the ability to edit ZFS options such as quotas, compression, reservations on existing volumes and datasets has been added.

Notable bug fixes:

• Several errors that were causing volume creation to fail have been resolved.
• User passwords were not propagating to the password files properly on creation, this was causing issues with ssh access as well as samba access.
• iSCSI device extents were not being dropped from the database correctly when they were deleted, leading to devices “vanishing” from the GUI.
• A bug in the way FreeBSD handles empty removable devices was causing processing of the disk list to fail. If the kernel placed certain removable disks before traditional disks the failure of the processing would stop the GUI from recognizing all of the latter devices.
• Lockd and statd were not starting when the NFS service was started.

FreeNAS 0.8 screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.