FreeNAS 9.2.1-RC2 (2nd Release Candidate) now available for download

[jkh]

Greetings!

The FreeNAS development team is filled with mixed emotions in announcing the second Release Candidate image of FreeNAS 9.2.1!​

On the one hand, we're happy to say that we've fixed a LOT of bugs since 9.2.1-RC was released. Lots. You folks have been going crazy with finding and filing the bugs every day! Seriously, we can hardly keep up (but please don't stop filing them). We have fixed over 164 bugs in 9.2.1 so far, also adding some new features along the way and doing lots of stuff to make 9.2.1 better in almost every conceivable way!​

On the other hand, we still have 16 bugs left, and most of them are in SMB (CIFS), so we're pretty sure we're going to have to release a 9.2.1-RC3 before this is all said and done since we just can't release SMB with known breakages. These aren't "SMB will eat your data" breakages, these are more subtle issues that most people will never hit, but we know they're there so we have to fix them!​

Therefore, we will not be doing 9.2.1-RELEASE on Feb 7th as originally planned. It would have been nice, but quality before schedule! The new provisional release date for 9.2.1-RELEASE is Feb 12th. We don't have a LOT of work to do, but we'd like to make our next Release Candidate a genuine "we don't know of any significant problems with this" release, so that means we'll kick this RC2 out the door and give it around 5 days to get tested (there's a lot more to FreeNAS than CIFS), then we'll roll -RC3 when we've fixed all the remaining blockers for release and could conceivably just rename 9.2.1-RC3 to 9.2.1-RELEASE if no show stoppers were found!​

Please feel free to file bugs against this build, taking care to note in your bug report that you saw it in 9.2.1-RC2 and also note the datestamp of the build, since we will continuing to release 9.2.1-RC2 nightly builds and it’s otherwise very hard to tell which build you saw the problem in if you don’t tell us.​

Please download it now and check it out!

Thanks,

The FreeNAS Development Team

Release notes:​

• Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.4. This adds support for SMB3, the ability for FreeNAS to be a Windows Domain Controller, and advanced features like server-side copy support in Windows 2012 and later, along with multiple years worth of improvements over the version of Samba that shipped in 9.2.0. It also enables SMB protocol version 3. Previous versions of FreeNAS limited samba to SMB2 because of random crashes that would occur using SMB3.

• Added the LSI 12G SAS driver as a module to the build. This can be enabled by adding a tunable for mpslsi3_load with a value of YES. This driver is still under development and not yet committed to FreeBSD. It is provided for beta testing only. For production use please consider using a 6G SAS adapter, such as the LSI 9207.

• Fixed a bug with netatalk that prevented share browsing from working in the finder on OSX. Also enabled options for fuller-fidelity AFP copies with Mac OS ACLs (ACEs) now stored as ZFS ACLs.
• Remove the non functional share password field from AFP shares.
• Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, improving the Mac share browsing experience.

• Added additional Web API functionality for manipulating ZFS snapshots.
• Brought back the FreeNAS 8.x volume manager as a "Manual Setup" option. This volume manager allows manual vddv building and offers no seatbelts. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, using the standard volume manager is highly recommended by the development team!

• Made some changes to reporting graphs that segregates reports by type, one type per tab. Add graphs that show individual disk activity (and sort them correctly now!)

• Fixed a bug that prevented building an encrypted volume using multi path devices.

• Update django (used by the WebUI) to 1.6 and dojo to 1.9.2

• Add the following ZFS features: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks

• Add trafshow to the image. This utility gives a CLI view of connections and usage to the FreeNAS box.

• Fix kernel module load for fuse. This is needed for importing NTFS volumes.

• Add the ability to use a keytab for AD joins. This eliminates the need to use the AD Administrator account to join FreeNAS to AD, closing a long standing issue of needing the AD Admin password in the FreeNAS configuration database.
• Updated the LSI 6 Gbps HBA driver (mps) to version 16. Please update the firmware of any mps HBAs to phase 16.

 

[pbucher]

Keep up the good work.

Just a heads up, a .vmdk image has shown up recently in the downloads(RC2 & the last few nightlies) but you get a access denied when you try to download it.

 

[jkh]

Just a heads up, a .vmdk image has shown up recently in the downloads(RC2 & the last few nightlies) but you get a access denied when you try to download it.

I believe this is fixed now!

 

[Yatti420]

Thanks,

 

[pbucher]

A heads up for my virtualizing friends...It appears that this release now works again with the pre-built vmware FreeBSD 9.0 vmxnet3 drivers again.

Could we please not merge the Kernel change back in that broke the binary drivers for FreeBSD? I saw the revert of the change in the TrueOS repo as "Revert "MFcalloutng:" ee99ee3972. At least I think that's the revert that made the vmware binary drivers work again.

 

[jkh]

Could we please not merge the Kernel change back in that broke the binary drivers for FreeBSD? I saw the revert of the change in the TrueOS repo as "Revert "MFcalloutng:" ee99ee3972. At least I think that's the revert that made the vmware binary drivers work again.

No worries, we won't! The ABI breakage was a bad idea and it took us awhile to find all the places in which it was done so we could revert it. I think it was originally thought that the fallout wouldn't be as bad as it was, but of course that proved incorrect. Lesson learned, and from now on we'll remain ABI compatible with whatever major release of FreeBSD it is we're tracking.

 

[Sir.Robin]

Quality before quantity :)

 

[ThreeDee]

We appreciate your hard work .. Thanks a big heep much! :)

 

[Dennis.kulmosen]

Will test asap.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Rand]

• Updated the LSI 6 Gbps HBA driver (mps) to version 16. Please update the firmware of any mps HBAs to phase 16.

Any particular reason why you didnt use v17?
Will it ill affect anything if my hba's are on 17?

 

[pbucher]

Any particular reason why you didnt use v17?
Will it ill affect anything if my hba's are on 17?

Unless you have a board that needs P17 or newer then I'd use & stay on P16. Not every firmware release gets a lot of testing under FreeBSD. FreeNAS sticks with versions that have been well tested. Also the driver and firmware are coupled together, some days you can get away with using a newer 1 of the 2 and other days not. As you see in the release notes they are moving up to P16 for 9.2.1 which gets you a year or so newer then the version used in 9.2.0. You can download the driver from LSI and get it installed on FreeNAS if you really want to use a newer version.

Don't always associate newer with better. That's not a knock on LSI, but rather the fact that no every firmware release gets a lot of use in the wild on FreeBSD to find possible bugs.

 

[Rand]

I see.
Didnt have any obvious issues with p17 but will observe.
Just wondered;)

 

[cyberjock]

pbucher: If you check out LSI documentation, the driver and firmware are always supposed to be inline. Failure to match the versions can result in data loss. So I think that your recommendation that you stay on p16 firmware despite the driver being on p17 is not well placed. Here we've seen that generally if your firmware is higher than the driver and you are in IT mode it really doesn't matter. But I definitely wouldn't bank my data on that. Personally, assuming I ever actually decide to go above 9.2.0, I'll definitely match the firmware with the driver, period.

 

[Magnus33]

Well the rc2 and rc1 are vast improvements i noticed freenas has a large flaw.

There a lack of real time information for the likes of temperature, system monitoring and the like.
There shell and snap shot but they really defeat the purpose of real time monitoring for predicting hardware failures or future failures.

I recently went through my whole system looking for the one failing part where real time stats would have made this very simple to track down.

All modern nas have system monitoring built in for hardware to one degree or another shouldn't freenas have this?
Considering how nas's are ever growing in size its seems quite important to be able to see your cpu, harddrive temps and so on.

A feature request was made three years ago and there are scripts for temp checking but beyond that nothing come of it.
When your monitoring multiple nas's this can get complicated very quickly.

 

[pbucher]

pbucher: If you check out LSI documentation, the driver and firmware are always supposed to be inline. Failure to match the versions can result in data loss. So I think that your recommendation that you stay on p16 firmware despite the driver being on p17 is not well placed.

Omm the driver is P16 in 9.2.1 and you should upgrade to P16 firmware when you move up to 9.2.1. I agree they should always be inline and just because it seems to work is a bad idea.

 

[cyberjock]

Damnit, sorry. I thought you were saying p17 is the firmware you should use. Apparently I couldn't read earlier! I could have sworn p17 was what FreeNAS was upgrading to and you were trying to say to stick with p16.

 

[emk2203]

One thing I noticed: I have a layout with a home directory which contains my home folder directly below:
/mnt/tank/home/emk2203 on the root filesystem. However, after enabling home directories in CIFS, they show up on a network client as \\N40LNAS\emk2203\emk2203\. If I browse to the homes directory, everything is as it should be: \\N40LNAS\homes\emk2203\.

Any idea how to get the home to be \\N40LNAS\emk2203\ ?

 

[Nik]

The problem is where do I get the P16 firmware? All I can find on the LSI website is the P18.

Edit:
Found it....
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public...P16_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows.zip

 

[jkh]

Well the rc2 and rc1 are vast improvements i noticed freenas has a large flaw.
There a lack of real time information for the likes of temperature, system monitoring and the like.
There shell and snap shot but they really defeat the purpose of real time monitoring for predicting hardware failures or future failures.

Where were you expecting to get that information? A lot of systems don't have a separate service processor that is wired into all of the sensor data (and those motherboards which do have some array of sensors, don't necessarily support getting that information in the same way, which makes a generic solution somewhat difficult). This is really what IPMI is all about - it both collects and exports this data in a convenient way, also logging events. If your hardware is not IPMI capable, you're Doing It Wrong and this isn't really a flaw in FreeNAS so much as a flaw in your hardware.

And yes, iXsystems sells systems with IPMI. Very soon, even the lowest-end product will have it, and it's got a lot of great sensor data.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Where were you expecting to get that information? A lot of systems don't have a separate service processor that is wired into all of the sensor data (and those motherboards which do have some array of sensors, don't necessarily support getting that information in the same way, which makes a generic solution somewhat difficult). This is really what IPMI is all about - it both collects and exports this data in a convenient way, also logging events. If your hardware is not IPMI capable, you're Doing It Wrong and this isn't really a flaw in FreeNAS so much as a flaw in your hardware.

And yes, iXsystems sells systems with IPMI. Very soon, even the lowest-end product will have it, and it's got a lot of great sensor data.

Alot of this stuff could be done with nrpe as well (though you'd need a Nagios/Icinga server, either in a jail or separate system). I guess a request would be to include nrpe into FreeNAS's host system. I tried using it in a jail before but it was too limiting, not able to collect ZFS/SMART information. I ended up hacking it in by just remouting read+write, pkg_add, remount read only.