20101202

New FreeNAS beta snapshot released (r5648)

We've released the next beta snapshot of FreeNAS.

You can read the release notes for all the details.

Here's a highlight of the issues that we've fixed since the last beta (r5606):
  • Upgrades from prior FreeNAS 8 beta releases are now supported.
  • zfs creation failures have been fixed. The gui would indicate it succeeded, but you couldn't share it.
  • ufs creation failures have been fixed.
  • booting off USB or SCSI cdrom is now supported.
  • Many disk initialization errors that showed up as odd failures have been corrected.
  • lagg has been introduced.
  • Errors in the network screen have been corrected.
  • The storage wizard no longer says 'of X' when creating the storage unit. This eliminates the confusing 1 of 3 -> 2 of 2 dialog heading.
  • Improved compatibility with IE and Safari.
  • The installer has been streamlined.
Also, I was pleasantly surprised today when I logged in and found 19 comments from my last blog entry. I'm not used to so many, so hadn't been checking. I'll be checking more here. I'll also write a blog entry to address many of the issues raised in them.


You can download the latest from sourceforge.

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looking forward for the posibility to upgrade my FreeNAS 7 and be able to use the data still ;-)

Anonymous said...

So excited about new freenas, just wondering if this relase will allow us to add pre-formatted ufs drives from 0.7?

It's looking great keep up the good work!!

tnkflx said...

Thanks!

How stable would you rate this release? Reason for asking is that I'm currently looking for a small (<256MB) OS with ZFS support for my Intel ss4200. FreeNAS 8 is about the only thing that comes close it seems ;)

Warner Losh said...

Some updates on direction...

We plan on having an upgrade path from 0.7. We also plan on adding the ability to bring in pre-formatted disks with data on them. However, there are some caveats with this... ZFS in 8.x is a newer version than in FreeNAS 0.7. When the zpool is converted to the new version, you lose the ability to downgrade.

Warner Losh said...

ZFS and 256MB likely won't give you the performance that you want. ZFS performs better when you feed it more memory.

A virtual machine with 1GiB that has a ufs mount right now says 'avm' is 383MiB right now. You might be able to shoe-horn into 256MB. Please let me know how that works out for you.

Warner Losh said...

@thnflx: I rebooted my VM with 256MB. Although the 'avm' size still said 383MiB, top reports that there's 113MiB free. This suggests that 256MiB might be reachable. You might need to produce a customized kernel with only the drivers you need for your box to reduce the system footprint by several MiB.

MenacingM said...

Keep up the good work Warner.

-MenacingM

tnkflx said...

Hey Warner, Thanks for the anwser! I actually meant 256 OS footprint, not RAM ;) RAM will be 2GB or 4GB.
The Intel SS4200 NAS has a Disk-On-Module connected to the IDE port of 256MB RAM and it's for this machine that I'm looking for a good small NAS OS...

Anonymous said...

@Warner Losh

I don't mind that I can't downgrade. As long as I don't lose data and the data can be approached somehow I'm happy.

Any estimate when that will be possible from 0.7 ?

thx a lot for all the work!

Anonymous said...

I can't wait to try it! This is the only distribution I know that can accomplish small footprint, ZFS resilience to data corruption and open source philosophy. Moreover, a vaste community to ask to, when some troubles should come.

Keep up the good work! You rock!!
Enrico

Anonymous said...

I wonder, what i am doing wrong:
* i am missing usermanagement for CIFS shares and the possibility to make shares available only to certain user groups
* iSCSI can be enabled, but it is not useable because i can't create a target

MM5K said...

I'm building my first NAS device and have hit a road block. I've loaded FreeNAS on a CD and then on to a jump drive (even tried a hard drive). But now before I get to the Guie interface it ask for Username and Password. I have looked every where for something on this. I have tried "admin" and "freenas", doesn't work. Help?

Chris McEnteer said...

Pretty sure tnkflx meant 256 MB disk size.

Definitely looking forward to FreeNAS 8 though. Espectially the improved zfs support. One thing I've noticed from tooling around with FreeNAS 7 in a VM is that the web interface for vdev/zpool management is missing quite a bit. Any chance that will be improved in 8? Things like being able to expand a zpool by adding an additional vdev to it directly through the web interface would be fantastic.

Warner Losh said...

Let me address many of these comments:

We have plans to allow upgrading from 0.7. First, we'll allow importing of storage volumes, and later full migrations of the settings.

We're in the process of adding user editing for SMB, so that should be in a forthcoming snapshot.

Ditto with iSCSI: we have another engineer working on that.

Zpool management is further down on the list of priorities. it is something we'd love to have, but there are are few other things that we need to finish first.

@mmk5: try to catch me on IRC. freenode/#freenas is the right place.

Anonymous said...

I can't wait for a stable release. I will finally rid my house of any MS built operating system. As much as like WHS, FreeNAS seems to be a much better alternative.

Great work Warner, appreciate the dedication!

Anonymous said...

I've been trying the various builds inside VM's using VMware ESXi and all releases show great promise. Very clean and streamlined. So far very impressed.
Now I am tying to load up on actual hardware. Seems my SATA controller is not supported. I have an LSI 9240-8i and BSD drivers are available but I don't know how to add them to the build. Any plans in the future to support additional controllers?

UrbanVoyeur said...

Great work Warner!

Anonymous said...

will freenas 8 run as a pv guest in xen ?

meggawhat said...

FreeNAS is great and is gaining a growing following, so lots of interest in your efforts on 8 Warner.

I will need the zpool management to migrate from 7 personally...

There are so many nice extras in freenas7 already, everyone has high expectations with a dedicated profesional dev team!
Thanks again for the hard work and focus for this great project. IMHO - FreeNAS is still the best option for a NAS. (mostly due to how great ZFS is at multi-drive filesystm mngt.)
"zpool replace /sda /sdb" on a raid 6. how freaking kick-ass that?? Way kick-ass my friend.

Unknown said...

Any idea on reworked packages for daap and fuppes yet? I building a PS3 and iTunes server on freenas 7 now. I'd love to be able to just start clean with 8.

HotBlack said...

Any updates on what has happened since Christmas?

Unknown said...

Great work so far devs! I tried setting up an AFP share but it keeps asking me for an username and password even when I check off guest access box. Also do you guys plan to add UPS support via NUT? I think that's vital for a NAS server and was IMHO one of the most important features in Freenas 7. Otherwise keep up the work guys!

johnedstone said...

Awesome .. I'm a big fan of FreeNAS, FreeBSD, NanoBSD, Django, xIsystems.

I have deployed 3 for friends, I use FreeBSD at home, done a few nanobsd projects for x86 and x64, .. I run a Djgango project in a FreeBSD jail at johncompanies.com .. so this is all good stuff. Thanks for your work on this.

I am totally against your PC-PSD point of view on this, though. To me that's a negative. I've attempted to use it at home, but it always fails me, eventually. And, FreeBSD, has never failed me. I build from ports, not packages. I find the PC-BSD project very frustrating, and a distraction from FreeBSD. I wish that the PC-BSD project would not deviate from FreeBSD. That's my $0.02 on that. Otherwise, this project, FreeNAS is perfect. Thanks again for all you are doing.

Not for public:
If you'd like to look at my Django/FreeBSD project, you can use the username/password edcpublic/edcpublic - but don't make this public (support@edc-info.org) - thanks

Unknown said...

I'm very interested in this project, to the point that I'm following the svn commits ;-)

Are you intending to stick with FreeBSD 8.1 as the underlying OS, or are you going to move to (the imminent) FreeBSD 8.2 for the FreeNAS 8 release?
I ask because then FreeNAS 8 would have a compatible zfs version - 15 - with the ZFSGuru project. Would be nice to be able to switch disks between systems.

@felipeds: I also couldn't get AFP working with my Mac running 10.6.6. It work fine in the latest 0.72 release though.

Unknown said...

Hi, I could not manage to get quotas on zfs with the GUI of freenas 0.8, is it possible ?