20101119

New FreeNAS Beta (r5606)

Just after the release of the first beta, a couple of serious problems came to life. As such, we've respun the release to fix these issues.

  • gmirror error displayed bogusly
  • the extremely long write times for disks
  • The lack of feedback during the installation (although with the significantly faster imaging, this is much less of an issue).
  • Default ownership and permission for Windows shares has been fixed
  • Shares are browseable by default now
  • The extra and redundant steps in the installer have been eliminated
  • The inconsistent menus in the installer have been made regular
  • A ZFS issue on reboot has been corrected
  • Multi-line config fields have been fixed
  • Problems with snmp have been resolve
  • proftpd's config file is now generated properly the second time
  • minor nits fixed in many places
You can find the release notes or the release. Stay tuned for more updates.

4 comments:

HotBlack said...

Wow, I amazed how quickly you are addressing people issues. Its great to finally see FreeNAS making progress after such a long time being on life support.

The thing that appeals to me most about the new FreeNAS is that it will be much simpler to extend. There has always been endless debates about which DNLA server was most compatible or torrent client was fastest, in fact almost all of the services offered were discussed. Often only one could be chosen to focus on and there were always people who felt left out. Further is was apparent that sometimes the few developers working on FreeNAS were not experts on the given service and made unusual choices on how to implement them. Now there is the hope that people who care about a given service can be the ones who add it to FreeNAS.

My hope is that a plugin would consist of:
- A script that would use pkg_add to install needed packages.
- Some Python code to create the new pages in Django (am still reading up on Django needed for the GUI.
- possible some additional files needed for the GUI or service.
- a script handling removal of the service.
These pulgins would then be available from some central repository (possibly hosted by iXsystems?) which could be browsed directly from the GUI.
In time the core could simply be another plugin and updated just as a plugin would be.

What I have suggested is simply my own hopes for the plugin system. obviously there are many other ways of doing it, I simply hope that what we get is flexible enough that it will encourage people to start developing plugins.

Anyway all of this is a very long winded way of saying, could you tell us some of your thoughts about how plugins will work?

Unknown said...

is it a good idea to setup a NAS using this beta? Can I later upgrade Freenas to the stable version, without fear of losing data?

I am planning on building a home NAS and I am trying to choose between Freenas 7 and 8. What is the recommended route?

Anonymous said...

I echo what karnage said.

7 or 8beta???

meggawhat said...

There are still many services, (ie WWW and torrent) that are not yet included in 8. I am sticking with 7 for production.
I hope that 8 will accept the import of 7 profiles though... I am 100% ZFS. ZFS is the best file system for a storage server and multi disc management.