Upgrading from 0.7 to 8 - hardware, etc.

[danb35]

Upgrading my Mac to OS X Lion broke my Time Machine backups to my FreeNAS 0.7 machine. It looks like netatalk 2.2 is coming soon to FreeNAS 8, and that should fix my Time Machine problems, so I guess I'll need to look at upgrading to that shortly.

My existing server is running 0.7.2.6694 on a scavenged laptop with 512 MB RAM and a 1TB USB hard drive, booting from a small USB key. I'm using UFS for storage at this point. From what I see, this would be wholly inadequate to run 8.x.

Fortunately, I have another machine I can repurpose to this application. It's an Athlon 64 system, currently with 1.5 GB RAM. From what I'm seeing here, this still sounds a little light in the RAM department, but it seems that most of the recommendations are made with ZFS in mind. I'm thinking of removing my existing storage drive from its enclosure and installing it in this machine (and a SATA connection vs. USB would result in much better performance, I'm sure). The OS would be installed on a larger USB key. Down the road, I intend to add RAM and set up a few larger drives under ZFS, but budget doesn't really allow for that right now.

So, assuming I stick with UFS for the time being, would this machine be adequate? Are there any caveats to attaching the drive that I'm currently using for 0.7?

 

[ProtoSD]

Right now FreeNAS doesn't support USB drives for storage, and I'm not sure that even when they are that UFS over USB is an option, I haven't seen it. Soon, probably beta 5 there should be support for external USB drives formatted with NTFS, FAT, Ext2, but even then I'm not sure if that includes write support or just sharing.

If you stick with UFS you should be fine. What type of motherboard / processor is it? Have you checked to see how much RAM you can add to it? My old AMD Athlon 64 could only handle 3.5GB.

 

[danb35]

Thanks for the quick reply! The motherboard is a MS-7309/K9N6SGM-V, and supports up to 8 GB RAM, so I should be OK in that regard. The CPU is an Athlon 64 3500+. So, if I take the drive out of the USB enclosure and install it in this tower, FreeNAS 8 shouldn't have a problem using (and serving) the existing data? Is there anything in particular I need to be aware of in that regard?

 

[ProtoSD]

Currently, the only way to access the existing data if you remove the drive from the cases and mount them internally, is from the command line. I haven't tested the nightly builds, but *I think* you should be able to import them in the GUI now if you use a nightly build. Beta 5 should have this feature and allow you to share the drives, possibly only read-only, not sure here. I'm also not sure how multiple partitions are handled or if only single partitions work.

 

[danb35]

Hmmm--can I not trust the Wiki, then? It looks like this:
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes#Importing_Volumes
indicates I should be able to import existing disks. Perhaps I'm misreading it?

 

[ProtoSD]

That page is premature, those features only work in the nightly builds so far. You're one of the few who actually reads stuff. If you want to try a nightly build with those features your can download it from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8-nightly/

 

[danb35]

OK, that makes sense. I downloaded yesterday's nightly and have it up and running with a spare drive. Looks like it incorporates whatever changes are necessary for Time Machine in Lion--I haven't yet tried to import the volume from my other server, but that's up soon. Thanks again for the help!