Jails within volumes

[sylekimmonds]

Hello everyone, I'm quite new to FreeNAS, and have had my box running for about a week now. I'm using an AFP share to run Time Machine for multiple Macs at home on a UFS (legacy) volume. I know, I should be using ZFS, but my hardware is super old, except the HDD.

Currently, I'm learning about using either SSH or OpenVPN to set up remote access, and subsequently learning about jails and user home directories.

My question is: Why are jails stored within volumes? Doesn't that take up space on the drive that I would want for backups? And if I decided not to use FreeNAS in place of manually connecting the HDD *shudder*, wouldn't the FreeNAS-specific information be stuck there unless I reformatted the drive? It seems like there should be a directory within my OS disk that allows for this sort of thing, in addition to home directories, custom configs, etc.

Thank you for being gentle with someone who wants to learn. I'm open to any resources that teach more on these subjects, as well.

 

[krikboh]

Because FreeNAS is designed to run off a usb thumb drive and the jails would require too much read/write for a thumb drive.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[sylekimmonds]

@krikboh thank you for the answer. I forgot that about FreeNAS; I'm running it off a small HDD because my old BIOS doesn't support booting from a flash drive.

I would ask if it's possible to add jails and home directories somewhere other than a volume, but I understand that this forum isn't meant for making FreeNAS do things it wasn't meant to do. So, I'll leave it here. Thank you again!

 

[DrKK]

Also, I just want to point out, UFS is no longer going to be available in FreeNAS, starting with 9.3. It's ZFS boot, and ZFS filesystems for the pool. Period.

 

[sylekimmonds]

@DrKK thank you for pointing that out. I am aware that UFS support is being dropped, but my hardware specs are so low I can't reliably run ZFS. I also understand that means I need better hardware or to not use FreeNAS, which is something I'm deciding on now. It was a goal of mine to successfully get FreeNAS running, but maybe a Time Capsule is a better solution...

 

[DrKK]

$700 is enough (plus disks) to get everything you need for a small FreeNAS going with fully-qualified server grade hardware.

:)

Of course that's in the United States. More expensive elsewhere.

 

[sylekimmonds]

@DrKK this project originally started out as a way to make a NAS that was comparable to a Time Capsule that cost much less:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-an-inexpensive-Ikea-NAS/

Knowing what I know now, I would probably have just shelled out the extra money for a Time Capsule. Not that FreeNAS isn't great, but I don't need so much power.

 

[danb35]

Unfortunately, there are a lot of videos and guides out there from the FreeNAS 0.7 days, promoting it as a great way to repurpose antique computer hardware. At the time, that was true, but FreeNAS today is a completely different product with much greater hardware requirements. It does much more, and provides much greater data integrity, but it demands more in the way of hardware.

If you were looking to do a cheap Time Capsule equivalent, a Raspberry Pi and a USB hard drive would be something to consider.

 

[cyberjock]

@DrKK this project originally started out as a way to make a NAS that was comparable to a Time Capsule that cost much less:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-an-inexpensive-Ikea-NAS/

Knowing what I know now, I would probably have just shelled out the extra money for a Time Capsule. Not that FreeNAS isn't great, but I don't need so much power.

And I will give you an applause for being able to make that decision. Not everyone is capable of figuring that out and not everyone is willing to backtrack and accept that they may not need FreeNAS. If a Time Capsule will work better for you I'd highly recommend you go that route.

On the flipside you could setup the server to be dual purpose as a Time Capsule alternative along with being a file server. ;)

 

[sylekimmonds]

@cyberjock yeah it could be nice in the future to have a dual purpose NAS. If I keep FreeNAS as a long-term Time Machine solution, it'll be based on the ability to access FreeNAS and backup computers remotely, which I'm working on figuring out now. With Time Capsule you can view the disk remotely, but not back up.

Granted, I know that's also not recommended by either FreeNAS or Apple.