FreeNAS

Storage liberated!

Features

• ZFS
  • Replication
  • Data integrity
  • Encryption
  • Snapshots
• Easy web manager
• Jailed plugins
• Lots more!

ZFS

• Automatic striping across devices
• Fault-tolerant / self healing
• Copy-on-write (COW)/ snapshots
• Machine independent
• Volume manager

ZFS COW

• On write, copy block and write to the copy
• When copy finishes, pointers are updated to reference block copy + freshly written data
• Want snapshots?

ZFS Snapshots

COW allows for a few different kinds of “snapshots” to be created:

• snapshots: point in time reference to a set of blocks.
• clones: filesystem that references blocks at a point in time.

Think of clones like a directory that contains old data symlinked in.

ZFS Self Healing

• Every block has a 256-bit checksum associated with it.
• Validated every read.
• Data can be healed from another copy if checksums do not match.
• scrub reads everything, should be used regularly on low access data!

ZFS Partitions?

We don’t need no stinking partitions?

• vdev: files, hard drive partitions or entire disks.
  • Usage of entire drive is recommended as it simplifies things greatly.
• zpool: a collection of one or more vdevs (think of a zvol as a raw disk device).
• datasets: chop up a zpool to allow differing permissions, quotas and compression per dataset.

Web Manager

• The web manager covers a very broad range of tasks

Word of caution: The web ui does not use https by default. Only access it from a trusted network during initial setup!

Jailed Plugins

• Utilizes FreeBSD’s jail(8) and PC-BSD’s Push Button Installer (PBI).
• Allows for isolated applications.
• Fine grain access control to zpools can be leveraged.

Setup

[if you don’t see a live demo - the presenter needs more beer!]

Uses

What can’t you use it for? :P