Category Archives: FreeNAS

Open Source Storage Technology Crafters

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

The conversation often starts with a challenge. “What’s so great about open source storage technology?”

For the casual end users of storage systems, regardless of SAN (definitely not Fibre Channel) or NAS on-premises, or getting “files” from the personal cloud storage like Dropbox, OneDrive et al., there is a strong presumption that open source storage technology is cheap and flaky. This is not helped with the diet of consumer brands of NAS in the market, where the price is cheap, but the storage offering with capabilities, reliability and performance are found to be wanting. Thus this notion floats its way to the business and enterprise users, and often ended up with a negative perception of open source storage technology.

Highway Signpost with Open Source wording

Storage Assemblers

Anybody can “build” a storage system with open source storage software. Put the software together with any commodity x86 server, and it can function with the basic storage services. Most open source storage software can do the job pretty well. However, once the completed storage technology is put together, can it do the job well enough to serve a business critical end user? I have plenty of sob stories from end users I have spoken to in these many years in the industry related to so-called “enterprise” storage vendors. I wrote a few blogs in the past that related to these sad situations:

We have such storage offerings rigged with cybersecurity risks and holes too. In a recent Unit 42 report, 250,000 NAS devices are vulnerable and exposed to the public Internet. The brands in question are mentioned in the report.

I would categorize these as storage assemblers.

Continue reading →

Windows SMB synchronous writes with OpenZFS

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

Sometimes I get really pissed off with myself because I have taken a bigoted view, and ended up with eggs on my face. The past week was like that, and the problem was gnawing me on the inside all week, because I was determined to balance my equilibrium by finding the answer.

Early in the week, I was having a conversation with a potential customer. It evolved around the missing 10 seconds or so of the video footage between the users of a popular video editing software. The company had 70% Windows users, and 30% users on the Mac, both sides accessing the NAS device. The issue was the editors on the Windows side will store the raw and edited files to the NAS, but when the Mac users read them, they will often find 10 seconds or so of the stored video files missing.

The likeliest culprit of this problem is the way the SMB protocol write I/O behaves in Windows and in MacOS. Windows SMB, by default, writes I/O asynchronously while SMB on MacOS writes I/O synchronously.

I had a strong conviction I had the answer to this issue but this was not a TrueNAS®, It was another brand of NAS that I did not have knowledge of, and so, I left the conversation feeling quite embarrassed because I had the answer only on the TrueNAS® server side, not on the Windows client side. Bigotry blinded me. Hmmph! 

SMB (Server Message Block) client-server model

Continue reading →

Setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS Part 2

By | | , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

[ Note: ] This is a continuation of Setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS Part 1 in June 2021 blog.

Nextcloud logo

I mentioned in my previous blog that what I did here was not unique. There were many great open source crafters who have done this better than I did. I stood on the shoulders of giants whose videos have helped me to learn and configure Nextcloud on FreeNAS™ (not TrueNAS® CORE, because my weekend exercises were on version 11.2U5). The videos made by Nhan P. Nguyen were instrumental in getting my Nextcloud to work, and I would shamefully admit that I have copied his work almost verbatim.

Continue reading →

RAIDZ expansion and dRAID excellent OpenZFS adventure

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is the foundation of almost every enterprise storage array in existence. Thus a technology change to a RAID implementation is a big deal. In recent weeks, we have witnessed not one, but two seismic development updates to the volume management RAID subsystem of the OpenZFS open source storage platform.

OpenZFS logo

For the uninformed, ZFS is one of the rarities in the storage industry which combines the volume manager and the file system as one. Unlike traditional volume management, ZFS merges both the physical data storage representations (eg. Hard Disk Drives, Solid State Drives) and the logical data structures (eg. RAID stripe, mirror, Z1, Z2, Z3) together with a highly reliable file system that scales. For a storage practitioner like me, working with ZFS is that there is always a “I get it!” moment every time, because the beauty is there are both elegances of power and simplicity rolled into one.

Continue reading →

First looks into Interplanetary File System

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

The cryptocurrency craze has elevated another strong candidate in recent months. Filecoin, is leading the voice of a decentralized Internet, the next generation Web 3.0. In this blog, I am not going to write much about the Filecoin frenzy but the underlying distributed file system that powers this phenomenon – The Interplanetary File System.

[ Note: This is still a very new area for me, and the rest of the content of this blog is still nascent and developing ]

Interplanetary File System

Tremulous Client-Server web architecture

The entire Internet architecture is almost client and server. Your clients like browsers, apps, connect to Web services served from a collection of servers. As Web 3.0 approaches (some say it is already here), the client-server model is no longer perceived as the Internet architecture of choice. Billions, and billions of users, applications, devices relying solely on a centralized service would lead to many impactful consequences, and the reasons for decentralization, away from the client-server architecture models of the Internet are cogent.

Continue reading →

Setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS Part 1

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

I have started to enhance the work that I did last weekend with Nextcloud on FreeNAS™. I promised to share the innards of my work but first I have to set the right expectations for the readers. This blog is just a documentation of the early work I have been doing to get Nextcloud on FreeNAS™ off the ground quickly. Also there are far better blogs than mine on the Nextcloud topic.

Note:

Nextcloud 17 (latest version is version 21)

Continue reading →

My 2-day weekend with Nextcloud on FreeNAS

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

In recent weeks, I have been asked by friends and old cust0mers on how to extend their NAS shared drives to work-from-home, the new reality. Malaysia went into a full lockdown as of June 1st several days ago.

I have written about file synchronization stories before but I have never done a Nextcloud blog. I have little experience with TrueNAS® CORE Nextcloud plugin and this was a good weekend to build it up from scratch with Virtualbox with FreeNAS™ 11.2U5 (because my friend was using that version).

[ Note ] FreeNAS™ 11.2U5 has been EOLed.

Nextcloud login screen

So, here it how it went for my little experiment. FYI, this is not a How-to guide. That will come later after I have put all my notes together with screenshots and all. This is just a collection of my thoughts while setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS™.

Dropbox® is expensive

Using cloud storage with file sync and share capability is not exactly a cheap thing especially when you are a small medium sized business or a school or a charity organization. Here is the pricing table for Dropbox® for Business :

Dropbox for business pricing

I am using Dropbox® as the example here but the same can be said for OneDrive or Google Drive and others. The pricing can quickly add up when the price is calculated per user per month.

Continue reading →

Plotting the Crypto Coin Storage Farm

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

The recent craze of the Chia cryptocurrency got me excited. Mostly because it uses storage as the determinant for the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm in a blockchain network. Yes, I am always about storage. 😉

I am not a Bitcoin miner nor am I a Chia coin farmer, and my knowledge and experience in both are very shallow. But I recently became interested in the 2 main activities of Chia – plotting and farming, because they both involved storage. I am writing this blog to find out more and document about my learning experience.

[ NB: This blog does not help you make money. It is just informational from a storage technology perspective. ]

Chia Cryptocurrency

Proof of Space and Time

Bitcoin is based on Proof-of-Work (PoW). In a nutshell, there is a complex mathematical puzzle to be solved. Bitcoin miners compete to solve this puzzle and the process uses high computational processing to solve it. Once solved, the miners are rewarded for their work.

Newer entrants like Filecoin and Chia coin (XCH) use an alternate method which is Proof-of-Space (PoS) to validate and verify the transactions. Instead of miners, Chia coin farmers have to prove to have a legitimate amount of disk and/or memory space to solve a mathematical puzzle, conceptually similar to the one in Bitcoin mining. In the beginning, this was great for folks who have unused disk space that can be “rented” out to store the crypto stuff (Note: I am not familiar with the terminology yet, and I did not want to use the word “crypto tokens” incorrectly). Storj was one of the early vendors that I remember in this space touting this method but I have not followed them for a while. Their business model might have changed.

Continue reading →

Before we say good bye to AFP

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

The Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) file sharing service in the MacOS Server is gone. The AFP file server capability was dropped in MacOS version 11, aka Big Sur back in December last year. The AFP client is the last remaining piece in MacOS and may see its days numbered as well as the world of file services evolved from the simple local networks and workgroup collaboration of the 80s and 90s, to something more complex and demanding. The AFP’s decline was also probably aided by the premium prices of Apple hardware, and many past users have switched to Windows for frugality and prudence reasons. SMB/CIFS is the network file sharing services for Windows, and AFP is not offered in Windows natively.

MacOS supports 3 of the file sharing protocols natively – AFP, NFS and SMB/CIFS – as a client. Therefore, it has the capability to collaborate well in many media and content development environments, and sharing and exchanging files easily, assuming that the access control and permissions and files/folders ownerships are worked out properly. The large scale Apple-only network environment is no longer feasible and many studios that continue to use Macs for media and content development have only a handful of machines and users.

NAS vendors that continue to support AFP file server services are not that many too, or at least those who advertise their support for AFP. iXsystems™ TrueNAS® is one of the few. This blog shows the steps to setup the AFP file services for MacOS clients.

Continue reading →

Is Software Defined right for Storage?

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

George Herbert Leigh Mallory, mountaineer extraordinaire, was once asked “Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?“, in which he replied “Because it’s there“. That retort demonstrated the indomitable human spirit and probably exemplified best the relationship between the human being’s desire to conquer the physical limits of nature. The software of humanity versus the hardware of the planet Earth.

Juxtaposing, similarities can be said between software and hardware in computer systems, in storage technology per se. In it, there are a few schools of thoughts when it comes to delivering storage services with the notable ones being the storage appliance model and the software-defined storage model.

There are arguments, of course. Some are genuinely partisan but many a times, these arguments come in the form of the flavour of the moment. I have experienced in my past companies touting the storage appliance model very strongly in the beginning, and only to be switching to a “software company” chorus years after that. That was what I meant about the “flavour of the moment”.

Software Defined Storage

Continue reading →