Comparison to PC-BSD

[Benny Mac]

Hi,

I've been using PC-BSD for about a year, but wonder if FreeNAS might be more suitable for me. I'm interested to hear your comments on this.

My PC-BSD system is only used for 3 things, and I'd be surprised if that changes in the next couple of years.

1. raidz2 storage for 24Tb over 8 disks (mostly my ripped BluRays) shared over SMB/CIFS
2. Gallery3 + PHP + Apache + mySql for Photo sharing
3. Logitech Media Server for my music systems

These are all working fine on PC-BSD 9.1, but I have my doubts if the LMS binaries built for 9.1 will work if I upgraded to 10.0. Whereas, I've seen in the FreeNAS forums that LMS is fairly easy to get going on the latest FreeNAS build.

My specific questions are these:

1. What's it like getting Gallery3 (and dependencies) working in the latest FreeNAS? I've searched for the answer, but everything seems to refer back to old versions, and is maybe a bit more technical than I'm comfortable with.

2. I was surprised to see that FreeNAS runs from a USB flash stick, rather than getting installed to an internal SSD. My hardware doesn't have a CD-ROM, so that's not an option for me. If the USB stick is just 4Gb, how is there space to install things like Gallery, Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc ? I sort of feel I can't have properly understood the FreeNAS design in this regard.

So, do you think FreeNAS is for me, or should I stick with PC-BSD?

Many thanks for the help and advice!

 

[jgreco]

You can install FreeNAS to an internal SSD if you wish. It really doesn't care. There's simply no good advantage to doing so.

You cannot add to the base system, but you can run jails that can run lots of other services if you wish. The jails run on the ZFS pool. You can run most things that do not require a custom kernel of some sort.

 

[DrKK]

Sounds to me like you'll work out well for porting all this to FreeNAS. Cyberjock runs the Logitech thing in a jail, flawlessly, and to great success. Gallery is trivial.

Edit: Gallery is trivial to install in a FreeNAS jail for anyone like yourself that already knows what they're more or less doing.

 

[cyberjock]

As for #1, if it runs on PC-BSD, you can almost certainly run it in a FreeNAS jail. Yes, LMS works great in a jail. There's a "how-to" guide in the forums that provides simple instructions installing LMS. If you are familiar with PC-BSD, you probably have the experience to do the setup for yourself. I actually use 1 jail for every application I run. So I have one jail for LMS, one jail for Minecraft, etc.

As for #2, don't let the USB stick requirement fool you. If you read the manual there's ways to install FreeNAS onto a USB stick that don't require you to have a CD-ROM drive. In fact, you can install FreeNAS from CD-ROM to USB stick on a different machine than the machine you intend to use as your server. You just move the USB stick later.

 

[Benny Mac]

Thanks very much for the replies. It seems pretty obvious now, but the part I was missing was that the extra applications are installed into jails, and the jails stay on the main storage disks, rather than the USB stick.

Makes a lot more sense now :).

Another question, in a different direction, is around how the base o/s is updated? For example, if there's a new version with better features, or a fix for a security hole, how does the o/s on the USB stick get updated? Is it a case of waiting for a new build, writing that image to the stick, then putting back the saved configuration from before?

Again, my experience with PC-BSD incremental (automagical) updates could well be shaping my thinking here.

 

[jgreco]

The base OS is intended to be a fixed image, like firmware. You can upload a new firmware or install new firmware on a new flash drive and upload your existing configuration to it.