Download FreeNAS 8.0 RC 5

Development of FreeNAS 8.0 has reached the fifth and most likely final release candidate. 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. 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 RC5 look like this:

Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.0 Release Candidate 5

Release Candidate 5 contains both bug fixes and new functionality over previous Release candidates and betas.

This release candidate is the result of a flurry of bug fixes for issues noticed by people using RC4, as well as some added functionality. This image will be handed over to QA to begin preparations for 8.0-Release.

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-RC5:

The ability to create “stacked” ZFS configurations is now present in the GUI. This also goes hand in hand with the ability to add devices to ZFS volumes. For ZFS the volume wizard will now accept an existing volume name when adding volumes. If an existing volume name is specified, the volume being created will be added to the existing volume as a stripe. In this manner one can create complex volumes such as RAID 10, RAIDZ+0, RAIDZ2+0, RAIDZ3+0 in the same manner as conventional RAID controllers build complex volumes. Simply start with the subgroups and build up from there. The top level group is implicitly a stripe, there is no provision to build a mirror of mirrors, or a RAIDZ of mirrors, or a mirror of RAIDZs

Under settings -> config there are now buttons to save, restore, or reset to defaults for configuration. If you are intending to recreate volumes and wish to reset to defaults delete the volumes before resetting to factory defaults.

The email settings now contains a “Send Test Email” button. This uses the saved email settings, it can’t be used to test new settings before they are saved.

The GUI contains functionality to replace components in volumes. Mainly useful for replacing failed drives in arrays, it can handle replacing devices in place or migrating devices depending on is the new device has the same or a different device name in it. Due to a bug in FreeBSD’s ZFS implementation, occasionally ZFS will attempt to hold on to the old device. The GUI contains a detach button for such cases.

Spare, Cache, and Log devices can now be added to ZFS volumes at any time through the GUI.

Notable bug fixes:

• AFP has received more attention. In particular shares are browseable, and time machine works.
• The GUI to select users and groups are far friendlier when the system has access to large numbers of users and groups.
• The email backend supports SSL/TLS properly, and several errors were fixed in the backend that creates the config file it uses.
• Multiple VLANs with the same parent were not being started properly, in addition using a lagg device as a VLAN parent was not working properly.
• Active Directory now starts up properly after rebooting the system.
• Setting the GUI to HTTPS now persists on reboot.

Error:

• The iSCSI Target software does not properly present multiple LUNs per target to initiators. For the best results use one target per LUN.
• Disks with certain configs can get get probed by geom and become essentially unwritable without manual intervention. For instance, if you use disks that have previously had a geom_mirror on them the system may pick that up and the disks will be unavailable until the existing gmirror is stopped and destroyed.

Upgrades from freenas 0.7X are unsupported

The system has no way to import configuration settings from 0.7 versions of FreeNAS, but the volume importer should handle volumes created with FreeNAS 0.7. Please note that zpool upgrade is a one way street, and upgraded volumes will not be usable with FreeNAS 0.7.x

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