First FreeNAS Build

[Chris Moore]

That seems excessive.

I could change it, but I set it up that way because I was concerned there might be a failure and I wanted to catch it quick. I probably should make it weekly like the other drives, now that I am more confident of the setup.

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

Oops, missed that. You're right, the GUI doesn't provide for a way to schedule SMART tests on the boot device(s). A cron job would do it, though.

Yeah, I kinda thought that would be the route I'd need to take. I'll give it a job number.

Too many reports here of people losing their pools. Unless you have a particular legal or regulatory requirement to encrypt all your data, it's safer not to.

So I now discover...currently reading various threads as a result of your warning.

Well that's a bit of a bugger since some of my clients do indeed impose legal requirements for data encryption. One of the reasons I went with FreeNAS was the disk encryption support. I currently use BitLocker (which is a pain), and was hoping to shift all this sensitive data onto the NAS. Reading between the lines, it sounds like GELI is very pernickety when swapping out drives from an encrypted pool.

Hmmm, if I'm not going to encrypt the entire ZPool, I wonder if there's a solution which involves just encrypting a single dataset outside of FreeNAS? Possibly using VeraCrypt?

https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Sharing over Network.html
https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/general/thread/1b7234db/

 

[danb35]

I understand that native ZFS encryption is coming Real Soon Now (tm), and I'd expect things to settle down a bit at that point. I think the general recommendation at this time is that client-side encryption is safer.

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

I understand that native ZFS encryption is coming Real Soon Now (tm), and I'd expect things to settle down a bit at that point. I think the general recommendation at this time is that client-side encryption is safer.

Yes, certainly seems that way. A bit of a faff but better than the worst case alternative (losing the entire pool!).

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/best-practices-for-storing-sensitive-documents.30472/

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

Like I said, it was all going too smoothly...there's always a banana skin.

ATA status errors. I'm unsure if this actually relates to AHCI or ATA. Time to start the diagnosis dance of swapping components. Is it the drive, the cable or the port? Place your bets now please gentlemen.