FreeNAS ready for the next step !

Hi all,

FreeNAS needs some big modification for removing its present limitation (one of the biggest is the non support of easly users add-ons).
We think that a full-rewriting of the FreeNAS base is needed. From this idea, we will take 2 differents paths:

• Volker will create a new project called "'OpenMediaVault" based on a GNU/Linux using all its experience acquired with all its nights and week-ends spent to improve FreeNAS during the last 2 years. He still continue to work on FreeNAS (and try to share its time with this 2 projects).
• And, a great surprise: iXsystems, a company specialized in professional FreeBSD offers to take FreeNAS under their wings as an open source community driven project. This mean that they will involve their professionals FreeBSD developers to FreeNAS! Their manpower will permit to do a full-rewriting of FreeNAS.

Personally, I come back to actively work in FreeNAS and begin to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8.0 (that is "production ready" for ZFS).

Community Choice Awards 2009 - Your vote is needed

FreeNAS has been nominated as Community Choice Awards 2009 finalist in the following categories

• Best Project
• Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything

You can vote for FreeNAS by clicking on the picture below





Your project, FreeNAS, is a finalist in these

categories:

Best Project

Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything

Sourceforge CCA 09: Vote for FreeNAS!

Thanks to all for your votes on this first round !

FreeNAS has been chosen as a finalist in the categories:

• Best Project
• Most Likely to Chang the Way You Do Everything
  

Now, the "second round" is open : Vote for FreeNAS !!

You can found on youtube a personal video for motivate the voters.

Misc articles about FreeNAS

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/26686-REVIEW-FreeNAS
http://thaed.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/building-a-32-tb-server-a-thought-experiment/

FreeNAS book available

You can find a great book about FreeNAS here. Thanks to Gary Sims.

AMD64 build for 0.7 available

Finally a AMD64 build from FreeNAS 0.7 is available. It can be downloaded in the 'Nightly Build' section.

Actual state of FreeNAS development

Right at the moment we had some problems with systems running >= 2GB RAM. It is not possible to boot FreeNAS on this systems. To solve the problem the current workaround is to reduce RAM to 1GB. I will keep an eye on this problem.

ZFS integration has been done in 0.7, so it is possible to create pools and datasets via WebGUI. The integration of ZFS is not really seamless because of the new workflow ZFS uses, e.g. it is not necessary to mount the disks manually as it has to be done when using 'normal' disks/filesystems.

Till 0.69/0.7 revision 3468 the following changes has been done:
- Included access restrictions WebGUI for mount points, so it is possible to define access rights for each mount point.

- Removed ACPI in kernel, using kernel module instead. Hopefully this will fix misc problems on some systems that do not like ACPI.

- LiveCD creation scripts has been improved, maybe this will also fix some boot problems on misc systems.

- VLAN and LAGG support has been included

- WLAN WEP/WPA should work now