Uber n00b

[Steve McKinley]

Greetings everyone, and thank you for having me aboard the good ship FreeNAS. I have a working knowledge of Linux, and prefer that over Windoze, the latter being suitable for one thing - Gaming. For the main I work with Fedora 23 at work, so that I can enjoy the wonderful world of vlans. Spose I shouldn't be so harsh on billy boy, one day he might employ people who can actually write an decent operating system with vlan capabilities that actually works.

Unfortunately not everyone agrees with my views on windoze, and we have some who have jumped ship. I started setting up a local server to store imagery and video files, as well as many other files, that my department uses. It was suggested that I download and install FreeNAS because its free, and easy to set up.

Perhaps my brains are still frozen from my last Scotland trip, but easy does not come to mind. After three failed attempts to install to a single drive, I trolled the net for information,only to find that 9.10 no longer supports everything being on a single drive. I raped and pillaged from others and finally scored a small drive for the OS, got that part resolved only to strike issue after issue setting up SMB ( for that other operating system).

I found and joined this group out of sheer desperation. Hopefully I will find some very kind and helpful people here.

Cheers

Steve

 

[JoshDW19]

Awesome! Welcome to the forums @Steve McKinley . Glad to have you. Let us know if we can help.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

It sounds like you have only one data drive. If so, you're missing out on one of the primary advantages of running FreeNAS, i.e. the resiliency of the underlying ZFS filesystem.

Can you at least find two similar sized data drives and a USB stick >= 8GB. If so, install the system on the USB stick and set the drives up as a mirror.

 

[danb35]

only to find that 9.10 no longer supports everything being on a single drive.

FreeNAS has never supported everything being on a single drive. It has always (even back to the 0.7 days, when it was a completely different product) been based on installing the OS to a small (typically flash) device, and using one or more additional devices for data storage. Back in the old days, the boot device was usually a USB stick. With SSD prices coming down, many folks are now using a small SSD for their FreeNAS boot device, not so much for performance but for reliability (USB sticks are notoriously unreliable). But an 8 GB USB stick (or better yet, a pair of them as @Robert Trevellyan suggests) is perfectly fine.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I was actually suggesting using a mirrored pair of data drives, to introduce redundancy into the pool. Not that mirrored boot devices is a bad idea, but keeping an up-to-date backup of your configuration is arguably more important.

 

[danb35]

Yep, looks like I misread your post. You're right, of course, that redundancy for the data is more important than for the OS. It looks like FN10 will finally bring the GUI option to create mirrors from single-disk pools, which is long overdue.