'Hoi' as they say in Holland

[Thijsvr]

Hi everybody, I figured it's about time I checked in and said hello.
As you might have gathered from my profile name I'm Thijs, 28 and living in Amsterdam.

I've spend a long time thinking what I wanted. A plug and play NAS system, or put in some time and effort and get a much better system. As you can tell from me being here I obviously chose the latter. I read up a ton before going in. All in all I think I spend about 10/12 hours reading up on what the expect.
Now I have to admit I'm doubting whether I made the right choice. Turns out FreeNAS is a lot harder than I expected it to be.

I've build several computers both for personal and professional use, all running Windows. I also use OS X for work and been rooting and putting custom roms on Android since Eclair.
I'm not very familiar with servers. I know the basics and I know the hardware differences between a computer and a server. Lacking knowledge I decided to go the safe way of going with a pre-build system I knew was fully supported by FreeNAS. I went with the HP Microserver Gen8. I figured getting it all running would be some work but doable. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. Nothing works as expected and I'm clearly lacking a lot of knowledge.

I hate asking questions that have been asked before, so I read up left and right. Googling my issues. I think I have about 15 hours in the thing already. I can get a server running and setup accounts, but with plugins it all gets screwed up. I like to think I have a basic understanding how FreeNAS works, the ZFS stuff, jails, etc. I just get hung up on the network stuff. There are so many options, many of which I really don't have any clue what they mean.
I'm considering calling in reinforcements in the shape of IT friends to help set it up, but that feels like accepting defeat. So here I am, frustrated, feeling dumb, with a beautiful ornament in the shape of a Microserver that doesn't work properly.


I hope to get it running properly sometime soon. It's either that or I might just get a t-shirt saying I'm too dumb for FreeNAS and go with software that's more idiotproof.
Anyways that's my story. Thanks for all the information on this forum! ;)

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Welcome.

I just get hung up on the network stuff.

Give us some specifics, maybe someone can help.

Do you know what a subnet is?

Do you understand what DHCP is for?

Do you know how to configure your router?

 

[depasseg]

When you say network stuff, what exactly do you mean? Setting up the FreeNAS management and Jail IP's? Or shares?

 

[Thijsvr]

Thanks for the kind help. I went to bed late yesterday and got up early today and finally got everything working as I want it too. More importantly I now understand what I did and why it didn't work and why it works now.
To help others who might run into the same problems and find this thread I'll post the links below as well. General tip: Don't skip the manuals/guides unless you are absolutely certain you know your stuff. I simply jumped figuring I would figure it out while I went along and that cost me a lot of time. A. Lot. Of. Time.

So I did a clean install and started over. This time reading up before doing.
I first spend time reading up on ZFS, how it works, why it's better and the advantages. For someone only familiar with idiot-proof systems like OS X and Windows it is quite the system and it took me a while to grasp the concept. Mainly because of the way things are named actually. Volumes are the same as Zpools, etc. Thanks to Cyberjock for his slideshow ( https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/ )
After that I felt I was capable to setup my volumes. I'll have an offsite back-up of all my important data, so I don't require any redundancy from within the server itself, so I set up two different Volumes, one for each disk. This went alright.

Then I followed a guide on setting up filesharing. Remember I'm coming from Windows and OS X. In these systems you go to sharing, click a few buttons and you have a network accessible drive. In FreeNAS you're met with CIFS, AFP, NFS, etc. Original guides said AFP would be best for OS X, so I just set that up. Turns out I later found posts (also from Cyberjock), saying that AFP was on it's way out and that I would be better off using CIFS. So again I read some information about CIFS, what to expect etc. Got that set up, works okay. Simple enough.

Then onto jails. Specifically I wanted to install Plex. Well this is actually where a lot of time went. It would work when I would set it up, but then would be unable to load after a reboot, or it wouldn't find my storage. This honestly make me doubt if FreeNAS was the solution for me. I got a ton of errors in the console, but when searching for the reason for them I didn't really get any solutions. Issues with hostnames, DNS servers, etc.
I had given my server a static IP outside of the DHCP range (this also gave some issues because I didn't realize you can't just give it any x.x.x.x adress, but you had to be within a certain range) and I didn't understand anything about subnets etc. So I viewed this excellent noobguide to networks: http://www.subnetting.net/school/self-study#Section4.
Anyways, when I created a jail for Plex I followed the guide provided on the FreeNAS Youtube channel. I did exactly as they did, but for some reason Plex would stop working after a bit or wouldn't start at all. I eventually saw that the IP adress of the jail was in the DHCP range and I figured it was causing conflicts with another device in the network. So I moved the IP adress to outside the DHCP range. Well that's really when I was about to give up. It took me literally hours to find out why the Plex plugin wouldn't start anymore. Why I couldn't access the jail, etc. I had tried everything. Turned of the Vimage stuff, everything I could find I tried. Until somebody mentioned something about jail ranges. Turned out jails automatically find IP ranges to use. The jail chose an IP range inside the DHCP range, while my Plex jail IP was outside of that as I had set it to be. I originally didn't think much about it, but turns out that if the jail IP is outside the jails range, it just stops working.

These were the larger issues, I've had some smaller ones too. But for now it seems to be working and I feel I have a foundation I can work on. Still have a lot to learn though, but my frustration is turning towards enjoying the journey. I have a fondness of tweaking 10.000 options to get things exactly the way I want. I'm absolutely certain that FreeNAS will let me do that and it's the reason I chose FreeNAS and not some pre-built plug-and-play system ;-)


My future plans are:

- Get all the standard media stuff going
- Give everybody in my house a private dataset for their own files and create some shared folders for everybody
- Set up datasets to backup phones and computers
- Set up automatic backup of important stuff to offsite location
- Set up a VPN so I can safely access my data without having to open ports on my router
- Hook up my IP camera (Tenvis Iprobot3)
- Improve general security and performance of the entire box and home network
- Learn a lot more about networks
- Donate some money to the FreeBSD
- Eventually I hope to be able to do some home automation stuff and hook up external devices to control.



Thanks again for offering to help. I hope to be able to contribute in the future.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Nice write up, I'm sure it will help others in a similar situation.

I did want to pick up on your comment about not needing redundancy in FreeNAS because everything is backed up offsite. Later on you said:

Give everybody in my house a private dataset for their own files and create some shared folders for everybody

What will everybody's expectations be for the safety of the information they put there? If there's no redundancy in your pool, will these folders also be backed up offsite? What often happens with a FreeNAS, or any NAS, is that once you have it you find new ways of using it that you didn't plan for before. This may change your risk tolerance for what you store on it. Just something to think about before you commit too much more to the system the way it's currently configured.

 

[Thijsvr]

Thanks for bringing it up. I have a couple of scenarios for future expansion.
I have one drive dedicated to back-ups only. I don't expect to fill that 2tb soon. It will be stuff like portfolios and familiy pictures. The data on this drive will be a back-up of that on the computers for now. I've made it clear to everybody that for now this drive could fail so that they should keep their own backups. I do back this stuff up occasionally. For now this backing up is done to an external drive that I just take to work. In the future I want to setup offsite mirroring of this drive.

Should I require more redundancy locally I plan on adding another 2tb RED drive and mirror it locally. If I'm not mistaken I can do this without too much trouble.

In the unlikely event that I run out of storage space locally I will have the offsite mirror allowing me to clear the original drive and create a larger pool with multiple drives for example. I can later restore the data from the offsite drive in that case. But honestly I don't expect that to happen in the upcoming couple of years.


Is this a realistic idea of how I can grow in the future or will I run into obvious obstacles?


What I forgot to mention in the future plans list is that I'm also looking into KeePass. However I'm not yet sure how safe this is. I do need to improve my security a lot before I can use this I think.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Should I require more redundancy locally I plan on adding another 2tb RED drive and mirror it locally. If I'm not mistaken I can do this without too much trouble.

Yes, adding and removing drives in a mirror is the one modification of a ZFS vdev that is currently supported.

Is this a realistic idea of how I can grow in the future or will I run into obvious obstacles?

As long as you have enough temporary or backup storage to be able to destroy and recreate your main pool, you should be OK. I've done this a couple of times (I only have about 0.5TB of data currently).

I'm also looking into KeePass.

No personal experience of that.

 

[Ericloewe]

What I forgot to mention in the future plans list is that I'm also looking into KeePass.

KeePass is excellent, but what does it have to do with FreeNAS?

 

[Thijsvr]

KeePass is excellent, but what does it have to do with FreeNAS?

Haha, well this reply makes me think I'm about to say something stupid ;-)
I was under the impression you could have the KeePass database on your server and have the database on your devices sync to this database.

 

[Ericloewe]

Haha, well this reply makes me think I'm about to say something stupid ;-)
I was under the impression you could have the KeePass database on your server and have the database on your devices sync to this database.

Yes, but it's not something I'd try. Particularly on phones and tablets.

My solution is to keep the database on OneDrive, which makes the process a bit more seamless.

 

[Thijsvr]

Thank you. Sounds like a good idea and a lot easier than having it run from home.