Stuck at the first hurdle

[garyi]

Hi folks. Just taken delivery of a prolient server.

I am trying to create a bootable USB stick of freenas 8. The instructions on the web are all from 2011 so not sure if this has a baring but I cannot create this stick.

I am on osx mountain lion. installed keka, that just outputted a .7z archieve of the ISO download?

Tried to follow the instructions for installing from the command line and it just tells me it cannot proceed because the file is not in gzip format.

tried doing in under VMWARE fusion with win 7. Used win32diskmanager which which I clicked write said that it could not resolve the path to the file.

This is really frustrating have been at it for three hours. I do not consider myself daft, but really one might expect it to be a bit simplier than this surely?

 

[James]

Which instructions are you following? This one? http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Burning_an_IMG_File.

 

[garyi]

Hi, I think it comes down to an issues with 10.8.2 mountain lion, I simply could not get it to work. In the end after much faffing I used VMWare again, this time putting the freenas file into the windows document as opposed to the VM share.

Have to say though long term that would be a lot nicer is more simple for the end user!

That being said its up and running. Can I just ask, I have set up two 1.5tb disks as ufs striped volume. On previous nases its had to 'sync' smetimes taking over night to do so. The nas has been usable but slow.

There is no evidence this is happening on freenas, but its quite slow, trying to rysnc from another nas and a bunch of files that took four hours on the network is looking at 8 hours to the freenas. Wondering if that syncing process is going on somewhere?

 

[garyi]

And yes following them instructions in OSX. They need updating because in ML well for me anyway it bums out after starting the DD saying that the format is not gzip

It worked ok in 10.6.8 but would not boot. Worked fine from VMware windows.

 

[garyi]

Also having a fair amount of issues with CIFS shares. i.e. one minute its there, next minute connection failed, then its there again. If I turn off cifs shares in the browser then back on it works straight away.

Really need to ensure its all stable. So far its not great.

 

[bollar]

I didn't have any problems creating a USB with 10.8.2 using the instructions -- from your description, is sounds like you tried to do this from the ISO file. You needed to use the .xz file instead.

As for the CIFS issue, that's not my area of expertise, as I have CIFS/SMB turned off, but that feels like an IP address conflict. I would review the network for conflicts -- see if the same problem exists when it's just FreeNAS, router and one PC connected.

 

[garyi]

Hi, no its not an IP issue, I have been playing this game for a fair while now :)

Unfortunately for the initial USB install, it getting to the right file to download is it not? goto freenas's main webpage and the download options are all ISO's It took me a fair while to even work my way through sourceforge to get to something. Even then it want some other little product to turn the iso to img and etc etc, really very tedious.

In short, yes I accept that freenas is aimed squarely at the 'expert' end of the market, but no doubt could be eased a little with some simple tweaks. Such as a simple USB creator for instance. The usual answer to such a comment is, 'create one then' bit there you go. Al working now, it just seemed to take all day.

As for the shares it appears that when I create new shares it tits up, the way to resolve it is to turn the protocols off and on in the services section and all seems well again.

Extremely slow though, I'll see how this looks in the morning. Just hoping it comes down to syncing the drives for raid, otherwise I may have to review my options.

 

[garyi]

Another thing and this I will fully except is me. I set an rysync module for copying over some data from another NAS. But this module now appears in all shares.

I really don't want it to do that?

 

[bollar]

In short, yes I accept that freenas is aimed squarely at the 'expert' end of the market, but no doubt could be eased a little with some simple tweaks. Such as a simple USB creator for instance. The usual answer to such a comment is, 'create one then' bit there you go. Al working now, it just seemed to take all day.

There's room for improvement in the documentation -- it's a wiki, so I've updated a couple of pages where I feel comfortable doing so.

I think the experts are making their ZFS NAS with FreeBSD, OpenIndiana or Solaris. I don't think any real expert would be using a GUI to do something that could be done by CLI. ;) Which leaves the rest of us...

As for your system, the types of problems you report aren't the ones I typically see in this forum. I would still look at something specific with your configuration and possibly reinstall while also exploring what FreeNAS could be doing to cause them.

 

[garyi]

Well right now I have all my data backed up in two places so happy to have a play.

Its worth understanding that I am not expert in this, I have had a couple of Nases but they are off the shelf and the software presumably designed to protect muppets like me from the complexities of users and groups.

So I have done what I thought correct however any folder I create in a share appears in all other shares, doh! Still learning. As it goes I will settle on a two disk stripped volume for my films etc and then two separate volumes for other stuffs so can avoid this rather sticky issue. Really I just want it working.

What is for sure is shares etc appear very very fast in the finder, something my other NASes have been unable to achieve so I feel there is something there to be gained.

 

[bollar]

I assume you're using CIFS/SMB because you have Windows users. How did you create the shares? Can you step-by-step describe the procedure?

One of the delights of making your own NAS is that you can make things ridiculously fast if you want. AFP over some of my old machines was so slow, but I love the crisp responsiveness.

 

[garyi]

Hi there, well I went into services and enabled CIFS shares.

Then in sharing I created a new share called 'Tv Shows' under windows shares.

I have not set up any users or groups the various shares under CIFS and AFP have been under 'nobody'

Basically all I want is what I had with Qnap, a bunch of shares for the Raid, for different uses. i.e. a share fo tvshows and share for films and a share for music.

I have a hifi that interrogates the networks for music under SMB, so thats why I need Windows sharing, however I was not expecting my TVShows to appear under the music share, this is confusing the hifi somewhat as its scanning the tvshows for music.


On the qnap all you did was goto share folders, create your various folders and they would appear as shares, no passwords and users required which is all I want. On freenas it seems to cross pollinate, is I put a enw folder within the TV shows share it then appears in music and films as well. I don't want that really.

I would certainly like speed, not for any particular reason the QNAP never let me down in that it could stream quite happily to three XBMC clients at once without a hiccup.

What I really want though is ease of use. I am wondering if I would be better with freenas 7? Would that be quicker with a stock configuration N40L proliant?

Certainly the time its taken to rysnc a bunch of files from the qnap has been painfully slow, at least half the speed I usually get.

 

[bollar]

Is if safe to assume that all of these CIFS shares are in the same ZFS dataset? If so, I would considering creating separate ZFS datasets for your TV Shows and Music libraries and point the shares to those directories.

I don't know anything about FreeNAS 7, but I can't comment. I found FreeNAS 8.3 to be quite fast once I configured it -- and slowness is related to the FreeBSD version of ZFS and not to FreeNAS.

 

[garyi]

I formated everything as UFS don;t know if that makes a difference (Only got 2 gigs of ram at the minute)

If by data set you mean how I have set the volumes up then I have three data sets, but could really do with seven. On other nases I have used I have been able to create multiple shares that did not 'bleed' into each other. But I cn cope with 3 I suppose.

 

[garyi]

Whoh there,

Must be some incompatibility with rysnc between the two devices because a straight drag and drop from the mac is wicked fast! At least four times quicker than anything I have seen around 50MB/s up, very tasty.

 

[bollar]

I have never used UFS with FreeNAS, so I don't know the configuration that works best. A ZFS dataset is below the Zpool and creates a separate file system and database on the volume. You can see examples of how that is setup in the manual, but with 2G RAM, you're right -- a ZFS configuration is probably not going to work well.

Your rsync experience doesn't surprise me. I have found rsync to be very CPU intensive and in my scenarios on another NAS, I would do initial transfers with NFS and subsequent transfers with rsync -- however, NFS tends to be slow on ZFS, so I don't think that will work. Although Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac also uses rsync, you might try it to do the transfer. I have found it to be fairly lightweight with system resources.

Also, did you see another post overnight from a person having intermittent CIFS connections with a Realtek NIC? Maybe that's another avenue to explore.

 

[garyi]

Thanks for your help boller. I think all in all its just a learning experience for me. Very pleased with the significant speed improvement. Download for instance from freenas to mac is topping out at around 100MB/s with throughput of around 80MB/s this is superb, the best I have seen from a QNAP and a Readynas has been 35MB/s

From that perspective great stuff, just having issues with permissions etc which I need to get my head around.

FWIW As long as after creating a share I turn the CIFS off then on again it all seems very stable.

 

[garyi]

OK my final little problem is I cannot copy to a AFP share. It just says error code -50 from the mac finder.

I believe the AFP shares are set correctly, and there is no issues copying via SMB

 

[bollar]

That's an error in the user parameter list. I'd look at your AFP share settings and try setting a specific user and group for access; trying guest access, or something other than what you've currently configured.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1618