Free NAS The Free BSD based network attached

Free. NAS The Free. BSD based network attached storage (NAS) solution. Presented, tested and researched by: Elliott Lake

What is a NAS? Consider a NAS server to be: A network attached device with: A self contained O/S. One or more mass storage devices shared over the network. Examples: Hard disk drive(s). Optical drive(s). Specialized device geared for sharing files.

What is a NAS? “A specialized file server that connects to the network. A NAS device contains a slimmeddown operating system and a file system and processes only I/O requests by supporting the popular file sharing protocols, primarily CIFS for Windows and NFS for Unix. ” thefreedictionary. com

Project Background: My employer had a need for Terabytes of storage space. ➲ The need for the storage space was unexpected. ➲ No budget existed for the project. ➲ Throughput required server level capabilities. ➲ 2/3 of the IT staff does not seem to handle command line approaches. ➲ Must work in a Windows© Environment. ➲

Project Background: ➲ Specific projects: A three system, isolated production network setup has been planned. The project has been placed on an indefinite hold. The project is currently using Microsoft. Possible use for a read-only access for storing aerial photographs. The project has been placed on an indefinite hold. Various managerial staff do believe someone else should store the data.

Why was Free. NAS Selected? Installation seemed to be a Free. NAS version of Windows default installation. GUI Web interface. Only one IT staff member seems to be comfortable with command line approaches. Management wants a K. I. S. S. Approach. Lowest common denominator / skill set approach neede.

Why was Free. NAS Selected? 1. Disk backup of the organizations storage area network (SAN). The implemented Windows 2003 backup solution seemed to be inadequate. 2. Tape backups were inconsistent requiring a backup solution for the backup. 3. Total server storage in the Terabyte range. 4. Additional storage space was required for over 0. 1 TB of data with no disk space available at the time. 1.

Free. NAS System Requirements: PC class hardware with: 96 MB RAM. Bootable optical drive. Floppy disk for configuration backup. Mass storage device for O/S. USB. Hard disk drive (HDD). Compact flash (CF) drive.

Free. NAS System Requirements: PC class hardware with: Mass storage device for network data. Virtual system set to emulate the previous configuration. Was supposed to integrate with Windows 2003 Active Directory. Depending on source.

Free. NAS Supported Drive Types: SCSI IDE SATA CF USB Firewire Not listed in documentation or tested by myself as of this presentation.

Free. NAS Supported File Systems: UFS Native FAT 32 Ext 3 for UNIX, Free. BSD, Free. NAS and more.

Free. NAS Installation Demo: Or, is the curse of a live demo cross platform?

Free. NAS Installation to HDD: ➲ Free. NAS version being used: Live. CD 0. 865 RC 1 Running Free. NAS from a live CD can be done. This ability will be mentioned in the demo slides. The setup and configuration of this ability will be considered beyond the scopy of the presentation. ➲ Installation instructions will vary based on Free. NAS version. Consult documentation available on the Free. NAS web site.

Free. NAS Installation to HDD: ➲ Start system. ➲ Insert Free. NAS CD while system boots. If the system is not set to boot off of the optical drive first: Make sure the HDD does not have a valid O/S present (not applicable for VM systems). Set to boot from optical drive in BIOS. ➲ Wait for tones from system. The tones indicate Free. NAS is ready. Use as a live CD. Install. Free. NAS splash screen will be visible. Press any keey to change to console.

Free. NAS Installation to HDD: ➲ Select option 9. “Install/Upgrade to an hard drive/flash device, etc. ” This option applies to Free. NAS 685 series through RC 1. Previous versions use another option number.

Free. NAS Installation to HDD: ➲ Select option 3. “Install 'full' release on hard drive: ” Creates two partitions. First partition is for Free. NAS O/S. Second partition is for data. Do not format the second partition of the first physical drive as problems are expected.

Free. NAS Installation to HDD: ➲ Enter The the name of the optical drive. naming convention will be BSD format. Example: acd 0 for the first ATAPI CD ROM drive. I hope my research was right. Using ➲ Select acd 0 for the demonstration. the HDD drive for the Free. NAS O/S. Using ad 0 for the demonstration.

Free. NAS Installation to HDD: ➲ The system will create the mount point for the optical drive. ➲ The O/S will be installed on the HDD. ➲ The system will automatically reboot. ➲ The system is ready after: The Free. NAS splash screen appears. The tones have been heard from the system.

Free. NAS Test Systems: Or, what was I thinking while testing?

Free. NAS Test Systems, Stable: ➲ ➲ ➲ Intel SR 440 BX motherboard. Intel 450 MHz PII. 256 MB RAM. 16 x Sony optical DVD drive. 3 ~ HDDs. Western Digital 6 GB IDE HDD. Western Digital 20 GB IDE HDD. Western Digital 40 GB IDE HDD.

Free. NAS Test Systems, Unstable: ➲Intel D 850 EMV 2 motherboard. ➲Intel 2. 0 GHz P 4. ➲ 512 MB DRAM. ➲ASUS CD-ROM drive. ➲ 2 ~ Promise Technology TX 4200 RAID controllers. ➲ 1 ~ Maxtor SATA/150 PCI controller.

Free. NAS Test Systems, Unstable: ➲HDDs 1 6 4 ~ 20 GB Western Digital HDD for O/S. ~ 250 GB Western Digital SATA HDDs. ~ 250 GB Maxtor SATA HDDs. ➲HDDs Configurations: RAID 2 ~ 1 8 ~ 3 2 5 using 10 drives. 5 and RAID 1: HDDs RAID 1. Drive on each TX 4200 RAID controller. HDDs RAID 5. Drives on each TX 4200 RAID controller. Drives on SATA/150 PCI controller.

Free. NAS Test Systems, Unstable: ➲As of the beginning of this presentation (Thursday, October 25, 2007) the stability issues were not resolved. Further testing will not be possible as the test HDDs had to be reallocated for production use.

Free. NAS Configuration Demo: What? The thing hasn’t blown up yet? I’m slipping!!!

Configuring Free. NAS: ➲ Free. NAS setup for configuration and management through web browser. Some management does not work through the browser. Example: Integration with Microsoft AD environments. ➲ System accessed by URL. HTTP: //IPv 4 address or HTTP: //IPv 6 address.

Configuring Free. NAS: ➲ Start browser of ➲ Enter address. ➲ Enter logon. Default choice. logon credentials. User: admin Password: freenas The credentials get you this:

Configuring Free. NAS: ➲ Interesting For Note? ? ? the purposes of the deomonstration, attempts were made to install and configure Free. NAS on a Dell Latitude C 800. Free. NAS would install. Free. NAS would identify the embeded NIC with 16 hexidecimal pairs as the MAC address. Problem corrected with further experimentation using a USRobotics PCMCIA NIC. Go figure? ? ?

Configuring Free. NAS:

Configuring Free. NAS: What you can configure on web GUI: System settings. Network interfaces. Disk setup. JBOD and RAID. System access. System status. System diagnostics. ➲ Each category contains several subcategories. Several of the pages include tabbed collections / abilities.

Configuring Free. NAS: 1. Configure HDDs: Pick the Management link in the left frame, under Disks. 2. Select the + at the right side of the right frame near the column labeled Status. 3. Select the disk to be added to the system as usable storage. 1. Located to the right of the Disk label. 2. Note: If you add the remaining space on the system drive, DO NOT FORMAT THE DRIVE. 3. According to Free. NAS. 1. Select the UDMA mode. 5. Select the HDD standby time. 6. Select the power management method. 4.

Configuring Free. NAS: Configure HDDs: Select the acoustic level. No kidding. Free. NAS has the option to run the HDDs at reduced noise level. Was not tested prior to this presentation. Select the preformatted file system. Testing with Free. NAS 685 b did not indicate this worked. Manual formatting was still required. Save the settings. Repeat the previous steps if using multiple drives.

Configuring Free. NAS: Configure HDDs: Note about RAID drives: Drives being used in a RAID configuration need to have the preformatted file system set to software RAID. This was the only time in testing that the preformatted setting seemed to impact the setup / configuration. Apply the changes. Note: Free. NAS states it can be used for i. SCSI. This was not tested.

Configuring Free. NAS: Configure HDDs: Configure Software RAID if applicable. Software RAID is beyond the scope of this presentation. Software RAID 1 and 5 were tested. The tests involving RAID 1 and 5 were on the unstable setup. Problems encountered with the RAID configurations are inconclusive at this time,

Configuring Free. NAS: Configure HDDs: Format the disks. Select the disk to be formatted in the Disk drop-down menu. Select the file system type in the File System dropdown menu. Select the minimum free disk space in the drop-down menu. This is space made unavailable to the user. Space is a percentage of the disk size. If desired, retain the disk's MBR. Format disk. Repeat as needed for remaining disks.

Configuring Free. NAS: Configure HDDs: Create Mount Points: Select Mount Point link under Disks in the left frame. Select the + at the right of the window near the Status column. Select the type of media (HDD or ISO) in the dropdown Type menu. Select the disk from the Disk drop-down menu. Select the partition. Select the file system. This was done in previous steps. Testing has not been done as to the ability to change the FS type in this window. Enter share name. Enter share description. Save the mount point settings.

Configuring Free. NAS: 1. Controlling 1. Access: Testing did not provide positive results for the following: 1. Using Active Directory Integration. 1. The last documentation viewed indicated this option did not work and a request for those versed in PAM was included in the document. 2. LDAP Integration. 1. Testing did not provide favorable responses for this function. 3. What option is left? 1. Users and Groups.

Configuring Free. NAS: Controlling Access: Users and Groups: Pick the Users and Groups link in the Access list. Select the Group tab. Start the add group function by selecting the +. Fill in the fields provided. Save the settings using the Add button. Select the Users tab. Fill in the fields provided. Save the settings by selecting the Add button. Note: Using the available shell option is suspected to provide an increased level of control. Research on the Free. NAS web site seems to verify the idea. This is option 6 in the console setup menu.

Configuring Free. NAS: Configuring Network Shares: For Microsoft: Select the CIFS link in the Access list. Enable CIFS (SAMBA) service. Fill in the fields in the Settings tab. Note that testing indicates that these settings are applied to all shares on the system. Save the settings with the Save and Restart button. Select the Shares tab. Select the + to start defining a share. Fill in the fields for the share name and description. Select the mount point for the share. Select desired options for: Set browsable. Permission inheritance. “Recycle Bin”.

Configuring Free. NAS: Configuring Network Shares: For Microsoft: Note: Testing of permission inheritance was incomplete and therefore inconclusive. Attempted different masks with success related to the specific share. Suspected overriding inheritance through the shell commands will be possible. This theory has not been tested as of this presentation. Unknown level of control. Unknown level of impact of the setting. For Linux: First testing / research were done using SAMBA. The NAS can be accessed using SAMBA and Linux.

Configuring Free. NAS: Configuring Network Shares: For Linux: NFS Select the NFS link in the Services list. Enable the NFS service. Select to allow access to the root of the drive. Enter the network data. Testing done with 192. 168. 1. 1/24. Testing is in process.

Configuring Free. NAS: Successful Network Share Access: Linux: In address bar type smb: //IPAddress/share. Name Microsoft: In Windows Explorer: Browse to the system and share. Only if the share is set so browsers can see the share. In address bar type \IPAddressshare. Name Note: RC 1 seems to encounter a timeout issue with Microsoft requiring a logon after the timeout. These issues were not present in Free. NAS 685 b.

Support / Sources of Information: http: //www. freenas. org

Private Implementation / Research: ➲ The presenter will be looking to implement Free. NAS: On home / experimental network. On research network at place of employment

Research / Testing Conclusions: ➲ Seems to need: Work on AD integration. ➲ Acknowledged by Free. NAS. Additional documentation. Free. NAS has definite possibilities: Inexpensive mass storage. Relatively intuitive GUI through web interface. ➲ Relative to user. Watch future versions!

References: http: //computingdictionary. thefreedictionary. com/NAS http: //www. freenas. org/downloads/docs/userdocs/Free. NAS-SUG. pdf Free. NAS version 685 b. Free. NAS version RC 1. Free. NAS documentation (for version 684). Free. NAS downloads are available through the Free. NAS web site.

Questions? Or, please be kind, I never claimed to be an expert…