Seminar Abstract

FreeNAS

What is NAS?
NAS or Network Attached Storage is file-level computer data storage connected to a
computer network providing data access to heterogeneous network clients. A NAS unit
is essentially a self-contained computer connected to a network, with the sole purpose
of supplying file-based data storage services to other devices on the network.
What is FreeNAS?
FreeNAS is an open source NAS software designed for use on standard computer
hardware.
Its functions:-
1. Provide data storage
2. Provide file systems
3. Provide access to files
4. Provide management of these functionalities
Features of FreeNAS:-
1. Is an open-source software and is easy to setup
2. Supports: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T.,
3. Supports software RAID (0,1,5)
4. Has a web-based configuration interface
5. FreeNAS takes less than 64 MB once installed on CompactFlash, hard drive
or USB flash drive.
6. Has plug-ins for various tools like SlimServer, iTunes etc
7. Supports most of the existing hardware components.
8. Provide security and SNMP(Simple Network Management) features.
Why FreeNAS?
1. RAID and Clustering is inbuilt thus data availability is usually high.
2. Performance can be increased by NAS because the file serving is done by
the NAS and not done by a server responsible for also doing other
processing.
3. FreeNAS can be run solely from disk drive itself
4. Many of the popular software and hardware components are supported, so no
need for major up gradations.
5. NAS can enable simpler and lower cost systems such as load-balancing and
fault-tolerant email and web server systems by providing storage services

Reference 1
http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/open-source-network-attached-storage-nas/

Open Source Network Attached Storage (NAS)

22 February 2008
Gary Sims wrote an excellent and in-depth review of FreeNAS (a FreeBSD-based
network attached storage system). His article details his experiences with
FreeNAS, how it worked, where it (or he) failed, and other tips and tricks that he
found as he went.
While FreeNAS appears to be the most popular (at least according to Google!)
there are others out there, including OpenFiler (which is Linux-based).
A NAS basically is a dedicated file server that provides many different protocols to
the clients and acts as an appliance. In some ways, this is no different than the
historical file server – but in these cases, the NAS device is much more a turnkey
solution with no other purpose. Many NAS systems support Windows file sharing,
Macintosh file sharing, NFS, and a plethora of other protocols – all in order to
make files available as much as possible. OpenFiler is one of these.
NAS devices were traditionally contrasted against SANs (storage area networks).
The NAS provided a filesystem on the network; the SAN provides a block device
on the network. This apparent sharp division of purposes does not exist in reality:
some NAS systems also provide SAN resources as well.
Which – FreeNAS or OpenFiler – would I use? Can’t say – OpenFiler caught my
eye first, but FreeNAS has the FreeBSD base. I’m liable to try both of them one of
these days.

Reference 2
http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/network-attached-storage-nas/

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

31 March 2009
Once you hear what a NAS appliance does, you might be tempted to think (as I did) what
all the fuss might be about. But there are reasons for a NAS appliance, though a NAS
isn’t for everybody.
Network Attached Storage is nothing more than a server with a pile of disks and a dozen
different ways to access them. For most intents and purposes, the difference between a
File Server of yesteryear and the Network Attached Storage of today is conceptually
rather minimal.
NAS typically provides access to files via such methods as Windows shares, NFS, iSCSI,
Appleshare and others.
So what does a NAS appliance provide that a NFS server does not? There are several
benefits:
• Special purpose. Since the system is solely for the purpose
of serving up files for users, there is no need for any other
facilities except those that deal with its specified purpose.
Thus, a lot of potentially vulnerable or unreliable code can be
removed, and the speed and reliability of the system can be
increased. Some systems do not come with a general
purpose operating system of any kind, but rather a specially
designed operating system for serving files alone.
• Extensive support. In many cases, since the system is
specifically designed for serving up file storage, the
innumerable variations of network storage protocols come
supported out of the box.
• Ease of use. With the system designed to serve one
purpose – and to provide the customer with the best possible
experience – the system is generally made much easier to
configure and easier to use than having to configure the
varying servers and protocols independently.
There are two different NAS products that are the heavy-weights in the free and open
source arena: FreeNAS (freenas.org) and OpenFiler (openfiler.com).
The most obvious difference between these two is their base (and their associated
licenses). The base for FreeNAS is FreeBSD, and like FreeBSD, is licensed using the
BSD license. However, OpenFiler uses Linux as its base, and is likewise covered by the
General Public License version 2.
Reference 3
http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDNews&op=Story&ndns_id=3067
 Posted On: Mon, Jun-29-2009
Written By: Tazz
Title: Synology DS-409+ Network Attached Storage Device Review

Storage device maker Synology introduced the DS-409+ a few months

ago into a market filled with competitors. The NAS sector is booming right
now as small businesses and even home users are realizing the benefits
of a NAS: less power draw, persistent backup, media services, and
compact units. The DS-409+, as the name alludes, is a business-class
four-bay device ready to serve up a variety of protocols, services, and
other devices to a network. ThinkComputers checks it out in this review.
@ ThinkComputers

This article comes from JonnyGURU

http://www.jonnyGURU.com

The URL for this News is:

http://www.jonnyGURU.com/modules.php?name=NDNews&op=Story&ndns_id=306
7

Reference 4
http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/150599

Configuring storage in FreeNAS

By Gary Sims on October 24, 2008 (7:00:00 PM)
The essence of the FreeNAS server is to provide storage that is easily accessible from the
network. To this end, it is important to understand how FreeNAS handles hard disks and how
they can be configured and used to provide the best and most reliable storage for your network.
This article is excerpted from the newly published book Learning FreeNAS from Packt
Publishing.
Adding storage to the FreeNAS server is done in four steps:
1. The FreeNAS server is "told" about a physical hard disk.
2. This disk is formatted.
3. The resulting storage space is mounted and made available internally.
4. The mounted storage space is made available on the network via
services like CIFS and NFS.
Step one, telling the FreeNAS server about the disks at its disposal, is handled in Disks:
Management. On opening this page, you will see a list of disks that are already configured. To
add a disk, click the add circle and you will be taken to the Disks: Management: Disk: Add page.
Use the Disk field to select which disk you want to add to the FreeNAS configuration.
If you are using a hardware RAID controller, for the disks attached it, don't use the standard
device names for each disk. Instead, these RAID controllers present a virtual disk for each RAID
set, using a device named after the RAID controller driver. For example, the amr driver (which
supports controllers by MegaRAID and some Dell and Intel cards) presents its virtual disks as
/dev/amrd*. Also, some RAID cards present their hard drives as /dev/da*devices.
Once you have selected the right disk from the drop down box, you can normally just go ahead
and click Add. However, there are some parameters that you can tweak, and the field
Preformatted FS needs to be set correctly if the disk is already formatted and has data on it. Apart
from the native UFS format of the FreeBSD, FreeNAS supports FAT32, NTFS, and ext2.
Once you have selected the disk from the drop-down menu and set any of the optional
parameters, you can click the Add button, then apply the changes. The Disks: Management page
should now show your disk(s) in a table, including information about the disk name, size, and
filesystem.
Formatting a newly added disk
Once a disk has been added to the FreeNAS server, it needs to be formatted. Go to the Disks:
Format page and select which disk you wish to format. Choose the filesystem you want to use.
The default will be UFS; unless you specifically need FAT32 or ext2, it is best to format the disk
with UFS. UFS is the NATIVE file format for FreeBSD, the underlying OS of FreeNAS.
Attempting to use other file formats can result in unpredictable results, file corruption, and loss
of data.
You can also enter an optional volume label for the disk, but it isn't very useful, as it isn't used in
the FreeNAS Web interface. Leave the minimum free space percentage at its default 8%, as
lowering the threshold can adversely affect performance and auto-defragmentation. A final
option allows you to tweak the way the disk is formatted, specifically to not replace the master
boot record (MBR) with a new one during the format process. Normally, this shouldn't be
needed, but some hardware RAID cards store information in the MBR. If you find that the drive
doesn't format correctly and you are using a hardware RAID card, you can try formatting the
disk with the option enabled.
Once you click Format Disk, you will asked if you are sure that you wish to format the disk.
Click OK to proceed, then look for the Done! comment and the long list of superblock numbers
before it. If you see that, everything is OK. If the formatting failed for some reason you will see
an error message. For example, if spaces aren't permitted in the volume label, trying to format a
disk like this will result in the last lines of the output reading:

newfs: bad volume label. Valid characters are alphanumerics.

Done!
Once you have formatted the disk, you need to mount it internally in the FreeNAS server. Go to
Disks: Mount Point and click the add circle. There are several important fields to fill in here:
Type, Disk, Partition, File System, and Name.
• Type: Here, you can select if you want to mount a disk or an ISO file.
For new physical disks, you need to select disk. The ISO option is useful
if you have an .isofile and you wish to make its contents available on
your network.
• Disk: Select the disk which you wish to mount. This will be the same
disk as you used in Disks: Management and Disks: Format.
• Partition: Under FreeNAS, if you install the server software on a hard
disk, then two partitions are created, the first for the operating system
software and the second for data. When mounting disks, you need to
know which partitions you wish to mount.
By default, FreeNAS doesn't use the legacy method to partition disks, which involved
storing the partition data in the MBR; instead it used the GUID Partition Table (GPT),
which is part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard proposed by Intel as a
replacement for the soon-to-be-obsolescent PC BIOS. If you have just formatted this disk
using FreeNAS, select EFI GPT here. If your disk has previous data on it, select which
partition the data is on. If you have installed FreeNAS on a disk and you want to use the
rest of the disk for data, select 2.
• File System: For disks that have been formatted using FreeNAS,
select UFS. If you have chosen to use another filesystem format or the
disk already had data on it, select the appropriate file system type
(FAT, NTFS, or ext2).
• Name: Each mounted disk needs a name to distinguish it from other
disks. It does seem possible to use spaces in the name but for safety I
recommend using a simple single-word mount point name. The name
specified will be used to mount the disk under the /mnt directory on
the FreeNAS server, so if, for example, we used store2, then the disk
will be mounted on /mnt/store2 and that would be the name used to
share the disk on the network using CIFS.
• Description: You can fill in an optional description for this mount
point.
• Read only: Tick this to mount the file system as read-only, and even
the Administrator account (superuser/root) may not write it.
Once you have filled in all the data, click the Add button. You will be shown a table with a list of
the mounted drives on the FreeNAS server. Their status will be listed as Configuring. Click
Apply changes. Once the changes have been applied, the newly displayed table should include
the new mount point with the status of OK.

Reference 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS
FreeNAS is a free network-attached storage server, supporting: CIFS
(Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T., local user
authentication, and software RAID (0,1,5), with a web-based configuration
interface. FreeNAS takes less than 64 MB once installed on CompactFlash,
hard drive or USB flash drive.[1] FreeNAS is currently distributed as an ISO
image and in source form. It is possible to run FreeNAS from a Live CD, with
the configuration files stored on an MS-DOS-formatted floppy disk. There is
also a VMware disk image available.
The minimal FreeBSD 6.4 distribution, web interface, PHP scripts, and
documentation are based on m0n0wall. FreeNAS is released under the BSD
license.

Features
• Protocols: CIFS (via Samba), TFTP, FTP, NFS, SSH, rsync, AFP and UPnP.
 • Extensions (plug-ins) for: SlimServer, XBMSP via and iTunes.
• rsync server, client and local sync.
• Unison support.
• iSCSI targets feature to create virtual disks.
• iSCSI initiator.
• Dynamic DNS client for: DynDNS, ZoneEdit, No-Ip, and
freedns.afraid.org.
• File systems: UFS and ext2/ext3 are fully supported, NTFS read-only
supported, and FAT32 read/write supported.
• Hard drive: P-ATA/S-ATA, SCSI, iSCSI, USB and Firewire.
• GPT/EFI partitioning for hard drives larger than 2 Terabytes.
• Networks cards: All wired and wireless cards supported by FreeBSD 6.
• Boot from HDD, USB key, CompactFlash, CD-ROM + floppy disk, or USB
flash.
• Hardware RAID cards: All those supported by FreeBSD 6.2.
• Software RAID levels: 0, 1, 5, JBOD, 5+0, 5+1, 0+1, 1+0, etc. (using
GEOM).
• Disk encryption with geli.
• Management of groups and users (Local User authentication or
Microsoft Domains).
• S.M.A.R.T. support.
• Remote syslogd forwarding.
• SNMP monitoring (Netgraph and MibII).
• Email log and reporting notification.
• ATA over Ethernet (AoE)

Awards
• VMware - "Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge, Consumer"[2]
• sourceforge.net - Project of the Month January 2007[3]
• InfoWorld - Best of open source in storage[4]