Am I in Over my Head?

[Glarus]

Hello,

I'm new to this. I figure I probably got here the way a lot of people do, looking for a better way to store photos and other media. My plan is to store photos on the NAS, and in the cloud, to cover SHTF scenarios (house burning down, burglary, etc.) Since I'm going to have this machine, I imagine I'll also stray into Plex. First things first, however.

I've acquired what I think is everything I need (based on the FreeNAS Community Hardware Guide,) but the more I read this forum, the more I fear I've gotten myself into something I can't handle. I get the impression FreeNAS is sort of like this old Far Side comic:

By that, I mean it seems there's a lot of people who did some seemingly trivial thing, some X before Y, and who lost everything. Some of them are hardware-related (like not enough RAM*,) and I think I'm good there. I'm not inclined to tinker, or to go running commands I don't understand, but as a non-geek, I'm daunted by this whole thing. The forums read like everyone's system is on the brink of blowing up, and you'll be faced with this do-or-die choice, where the wrong move will corrupt everything, and the right one leads to hundreds of hours of troubleshooting and recovery. I'm probably getting the wrong impression, or what I've read isn't representative of the community's overall experience.

I can't help but think, "I just wanted to store my files, and the media server thing seems cool, too...but now this is going to take up more time than my job? Yikes!" The idea is to have a better place to store everything, not something that crashes and burns because I hit the wrong key.

My first questions then are, "are my concerns valid, and should I be here? If FreeNAS isn't for me, how should I set up this machine I'm about to build?" I have the hardware and the need for safe storage, but I need your advice on whether I should be running some other system. I'm a nerd, but not this kind of nerd. Commitment is not an issue, because if I'm afraid of losing my precious data, I'll do everything by the book. The question is whether I want to introduce risk and create more tasks for myself when free time is so limited.

I look forward to and appreciate your advice!

* but good grief, as a regular computer user-type guy, if I don't have enough memory, maybe my programs run slowly or one crashes. I've never had a system say "dude, I noticed you don't have enough RAM, so I went ahead and corrupted all of your files for you." It's this sort of thing that makes FreeNAS seem like a hand grenade with the pin pulled out.

 

[wblock]

Chill, dude. Take a deep breath. If you have 8G of RAM or more, things will be fine. If there is not enough memory, the system will just run slowly as it swaps. This is the same as other computers.

The rest of it is also the same as other computers: use quality parts, treat them well, and make backups. All of this is the same as any technology, using best practices is insurance to make sure that failures are rare and as painless as possible when they do happen.

Most of the recommendations here have a solid technical basis. Some are a reaction to people dredging up ancient computers that weren't that great when they were in the prime of health a decade ago and wanting to run datacenter-grade NAS software on them.

So don't panic.

 

[Spearfoot]

You've read about some user disasters here and have gotten the false impression that FreeNAS is like a Molotov cocktail, ready to explode if mishandled. Admittedly, the experiences of people who've suffered disaster are over-represented here, precisely because they've had problems. It's the old Tech Support complaint: no one calls to tell you how great everything's going, they only call when they have issues!

The truth is that FreeNAS is really very stable, robust, and reliable, in my experience. It's a powerful system with quite a few capabilities, many of which you probably won't even need. If you take your time and study it and ask questions here and plan your build carefully, you'll be repaid with a system that will give good service for many years.

Good luck!

 

[leenux_tux]

It mught be worth tinkering with FreeNAS in a virtual environment prior to diving right in with a full install on bare metal. I made the mistake (and I 'm not for one minutes saying you will!) of getting a tad excited when all the hardware arrived and just wanted to get up and running ASAP. What eventually happened was I hosed the whole install and started again, after doing some testing/learning in a virtual environment that is. I didn't think through properly....

• What type of data I would store (Music ? Movies ? Backups ? ISO images ? Photos? Full Laptop/Computer images ?)
• Would I have seperate data sets for each or store everything under one huge folder
• Would I need to provide dedicated folders for each person in the house ? (this is a SOHO system)
• Would I need a seperate "guest" share that everyone could access ?
  
• Would it be better (depending on the number of disks you are going to deploy) to create more than one pool ? I eventually did as I have a seperate pool for my Proxmox server.
  
• What types of share are you going to create ? CIFS ? NFS ? I have mainly Linux systems in the house so there is actually a mixture.

It's all stuff you can learn as you work with FreeNAS, in the safety of a virtual environment.

 

[joeschmuck]

FreeNAS is now a very friendly system but it's not for the faint of heart or someone who only wants a simple Plug&Play system. It does require you to know a little bit about your system. If you simply wanted a platform to store data then you could buy a WD Book drive or a cheap Dlink NAS, but if you want something with high reliability and redundancy while being cost effective, FreeNAS is what you are looking for.

When building the system you must know what you need it to do. Above you stated to store data and run Plex, these are simple and stable to run.

While I'm experienced in FreeNAS, I still created a single sheet of paper instructions to repair my system should drive failure occur. It's a step by step procedure to identify and replace a failed hard drive. Honestly, I doubt I'd use the procedure but if my daughter needed to repair it while I was on the road, well she could do it. It's not difficult to do this operation however where people screw up is in pulling the wrong hard drive to replace or not doing the correct thing in the GUI. It's easy to screw up by accident and as you have seen in these forums, people screw up.

Other things people screw up is updating the FreeNAS software needlessly. If your system is running fine and it's not on the open internet then don't mess with it. Let it run and be happy. If there is an update that affects you then by all means perform an update. And always keep a configuration backup, it will save you a lot of time re-configuring if you have to rebuild the boot drive.

As suggested above, build your FreeNAS and play with it before you commit your data. Remove the drives, wipe the drives, create your pool(s), etc... Try to screw it up and then try to recover. You don't need to do this but it's good to do this once.

Once you get it running, leave it alone. Mine will run for months without rebooting it, well I should say before I play around with it, running some test like creating a jail, then I clean up my mess and reboot. If I didn't play around I think it would run for 6 months or longer without issue.

Here is one big tip, write down the last 4 digits of the hard drive serial number on the side of the hard drive using a marker so you can easily read it. This will help out later on when a hard drive fails and you need to find the drive. Always know the driver serial number you have a problem with, ada0 does not mean SATA port 0. You must user the drive serial number.

So now that I'm done preaching, hopefully you will build a FreeNAS system which conforms to our hardware recommendation and enjoy a rock solid stable system.

 

[Glorious1]

I had never built a computer or dealt seriously with a unix system (other than Mac OS) when I built my NAS two years ago. Assuming you don't have a hardware issue, and you don't start doing things you don't understand, it is extremely stable. As others have said, it can run for months with no problem. And I'm one who can't resist updating to the latest stable release.

If you do your homework, the people on this forum are extremely knowledgeable and helpful. It's one of the best online communities I've run into.

It does take a serious amount of time to learn and get comfy with it. But it's rewarding, useful knowledge. You'll be a geek before you know it.