First home brew NAS (FreeNAS)

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meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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Well, following on from all the good advice received here https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...replacing-a-synology-nas-with-a-server.29669/ , we ditched the idea of resurrecting an old enterprise server and set out on the 'roll your own' route. We're almost there.

Hardware comprises:

The components were chosen because they were available to us and either cheap or free rather than as a result of some great plan.

Assembly of the hardware was easy enough with the first snag only arising when we came to boot up for the first time. The motherboard uses UEFI rather than BIOS, something we consider e retrograde step. Under BIOS it was easy enough to assign the desired boot sequence to the appropriate drives but we always struggle with UEFI. Eventually, after much cursing of whoever invented the UEFI, we managed to get it to recognise the USB port as first boot device and installed FreeNAS onto a 120 Gb Kingston SDD. That's the smallest drive we had to hand and so was selected to host the OS. Installation of FreeNAS seemed to proceed exactly as it should (or at least exactly in line with the You Tube tutorial) and so we rebooted the hardware to bring the server online.

Eventually, after much further struggling with UEFI , we got it to ignore the USB port and boot from the Kingston SSD. Did we mention how much we prefer the old BIOS ? Back at our main pc, we opened up a web browser and called up the FreeNAS log in screen. User name and password were input and FreeNAS opened up for us.

Now the learning begins...
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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Have we slammed into a brick wall, oomans ?

We built our new NAS box and installed FreeNAS because we had heard wonderful things about the ZFS file system. Unfortunately, we found this opinion in our research afterwards - The 'hidden' cost of using ZFS for your home NAS In a nutshell, it suggests that ZFS isn't the wonderful flexible system we believed it was. We can continue with our build, saving up for some new disks and installing a whole tranche of them as louwrentius seems to suggest, or we can switch fire and go with a different OS. maybe we'd be better off going to something like Xpenology and simulating a synolgy server (with which we are familiar, owning 2 already).

Our build has a single SSD at the moment upon which the OS (FreeNAS) resides. It has two 3.5 " bays into which we plan to drop a couple of 3.5" HDDS, probably of 4 or 8 TB each depending upon what we can afford at the time. It also has a single 5.25" bay and we plan to fit that with an adapter to house 4 x 2.5" HDD. What, in your opinion, is the best route forward ?
 

spanky34

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May 5, 2016
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I would not run FreeNAS in your case. It's exceptional at running large amounts of disks/data, but it's not really practical in your case. I'd say if you're planning on running 6 or less disks AND you don't have a need for a bunch of IOPS, you might as well go with Synology/Xpenology/Unraid. They're just so much more flexible when it comes to expansion and the way it handles mismatched drives.

I run FreeNAS at home myself on a 12 bay server and absolutely love it. It's rock solid and I have like drives across both of my pools. It just doesn't make sense for everyone to use it and as you've found out, ZFS is not an extremely flexible system.
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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Unraid or Ubuntu server are currently looking to be the main contenders as I research the subject. The capability of adding new, dissimilar discs from time to time appeals and both these OS seem better for that than FreeNAS
 

EngChiSTH

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Jun 27, 2018
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Unraid or Ubuntu server are currently looking to be the main contenders as I research the subject. The capability of adding new, dissimilar discs from time to time appeals and both these OS seem better for that than FreeNAS
How likely is that you will be actually using this functionality ? I think people greatly overestimate the need to 'future proof' and as result overthink and overbuild. What are the real needs storage wise? same for compute/CPU power, what exactly are you planning to virtualize ?

Also you know that you can continue to keep your NAS, do an iscsi share out and give it supported OS (I used Windows ) just fine for the server to use it without it being on the actual server itself?

if I were you, I would stop and think on what the needs are, what the budget it, and go for simple/easy at this time.

for reference, my setup is QNAP NAS (332X, picked for SSD caching and SFP+ built in) and Lenovo S510 running i5-6400 bought in 2016. Still enough for everything I want including being a domain controller and running few Hyper-V VMs (pi-hole for DNS filtering which I think is an awesome project, and unifi controller). I put a cheat Connect X3 SFP+ card into Lenovo and have 10Gbe switch (Brocade 6450) so devices could talk to domain controller and key services, along with talking to NAS on good speed. Backups go to NAS which is also serving media.
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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How likely am I to add new disks ? Pretty likely indeed: I've done so several times with my existing Synology NAS as my data collection grew. At the moment I have almost 12TB of data and it expands by a couple of TB per year, hence I want to have growth potential. Photos and videos aren't getting any smaller as camera technology improves. After looking closely at Ubuntu server, Unraid is beginning to appear to suit my needs better.
 

EngChiSTH

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Jun 27, 2018
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How likely am I to add new disks ? Pretty likely indeed: I've done so several times with my existing Synology NAS as my data collection grew. At the moment I have almost 12TB of data and it expands by a couple of TB per year, hence I want to have growth potential. Photos and videos aren't getting any smaller as camera technology improves. After looking closely at Ubuntu server, Unraid is beginning to appear to suit my needs better.

You know your needs the best - if your needs truly have that growth requirements than yes, Ubuntu may be the good call for you.
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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UBUNTU fell by the wayside: as far as we can tell most admin has to be done from the command line and we prefer a GUI. Yes, we know: we're an amateur. So, that seems to leave Unraid as the last standing mainstream option.
 

EngChiSTH

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Jun 27, 2018
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UBUNTU fell by the wayside: as far as we can tell most admin has to be done from the command line and we prefer a GUI. Yes, we know: we're an amateur. So, that seems to leave Unraid as the last standing mainstream option.
... Ubuntu with its many flavors is right now one of the most common and simplest (in terms of use) *nix OS. if you are having issues with Ubuntu, how committed are you the DYU path overall? No comment on UNRAID (have not used it), when I was researching "NAS OS" before I also heard of OMV (openmediavault) which is a NAS/storage appliance built of Debian, you may want to check them out as well..
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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DYU ? Don't recognise that particular TLA.

As aforementioned, we're familiar with Windoze and OSX as operating systems, and have tinkered with Linux and FreeBSD but only through GUIs. No particular desire to join the ranks of hardened code warriors at the high table of the command line: if we can do things through a GUI it'll allow us to allocate more of our limited cerebral capacity elsewhere.
 

EngChiSTH

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Jun 27, 2018
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DYU ? Don't recognise that particular TLA.

As aforementioned, we're familiar with Windoze and OSX as operating systems, and have tinkered with Linux and FreeBSD but only through GUIs. No particular desire to join the ranks of hardened code warriors at the high table of the command line: if we can do things through a GUI it'll allow us to allocate more of our limited cerebral capacity elsewhere.

Sorry, Do It Yourself - DIY.
also, this is not all or nothing type of thing - if you planning to run linux build of any kind (including unraid), sooner rather than later you will want to be at least familiar with command line. funny you mentioned Windows, they are starting to move everything I can see towards PowerShell and command line too (configuration, settings management ,etc) ..

what I tried to say earlier was given that Ubuntu is specifically meant to be as accessible as possible , how serious are you about the whole thing and the do it yourself part? more of question to ask yourself..

or the other way to ask the same question - are you looking for a toy or a tool? if it is a tool, pick a budget , and get exactly that - appliance level functionality, flexibility (lack thereof) , support, and stability. Tool <>DIY approach. if it is a toy, then whatever you want to do would work (including ancient hardware kludged together or some tinker box with ARM processor inside) just dont necessarily expect stability, support, or data safety related to that. Have backups (if that is your storage server). many of them.

Nothing wrong with both approaches, I also have both tools (NAS) and toys in my own 'homelab'. i just prefer to know what I am getting into and set my expectations upfront so I am not disappointed. i.e. I would not trust toy to be my primary storage server but that is just me..
 
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meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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How serious are we? Very.
Does that mean we have to do things at a nuts and bolts level ? No.

For example, we could actually get out a key and transceiver and communicate by Morse, but these days we prefer to pick up a phone and talk, let the clever electronics do the work and communicate with almost anyone in the world at a speed that far surpasses what we can do in Morse. We've rarely touched a command prompt since DOS was pushed aside by Windows. Yes, occasionally we'll open up a terminal but only as a last resort: click, point, drag and drop seems so much easier.

On the server front, we like our two Synology boxes but wanted to try making our own. DIY hardware is cheaper and just as capable, probably more so. We also get to experience the fun of learning something new. For now we plan to take it easy down at the shallow end, see what we can achieve by standing on the shoulders of giants. It's looking like Unraid is the way to go, for now at least . :D
 

EngChiSTH

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Jun 27, 2018
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Got it, you are looking for a 'toy'. Either way, good luck in your adventure! remember to have fun along the way.
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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Yes, it's a toy, not an enterprise server storing our plan for world domination*, and we'll definitely have fun with it.

* That Plan is definitely secured at a nuts and bolts level, archivally permanent non electronic storage media, air gapped and surrounded by wire, minefields and vicious dogs.
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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A thought occurs to us, and though the ultimate answer may be "Try it and see", we thought we'd ask the question of you larger brained species here first.

If we set our BIOS (UEFI to be accurate, which is a far more complex and unpleasant kettle of fish) to boot first from the USB stick and then, if that isn't present, from a specified hard drive, could we set up our system t be a dual purpose Unraid server (booting from USB) and a Linux machine (booting from the specified hard drive) ? The specified hard drive wouldn't be included in the Unraid array, and when using the machine as a Linux box we wouldn't access the drives in the Unraid array. Hopefully, the two OS would be blissfully unaware of the presence of the other and no problems would occur.

Or has our small brain missed a fundamental reason why this won't work ?
 

EngChiSTH

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Jun 27, 2018
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Would you ever want two running concurrently ? or only one at the time?

what you propose may work but relies on USB , bios boot order tweaking, remembering to press relevant key to put from USB ,etc. would probably work, may be there is an easier way to do it.

if you never see running these at the same time (or need to have unraid up when you are playing with linux) - simpler would be to just install your primary OS (whichever it is) to be default in the boot loader and install secondary OS as an option. Linux bootloader would do it very easily, i have a laptop with lubuntu as primary and windows 10 as another OS on its own space on the hard drive. no issues.

if you do see a need to run concurrently, cant unraid host the VM containing whatever linux you want?
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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We can't see a need to run both Unraid and Linux simultaneously. Regarding the rest, isn't that what we proposed? That is, when switched on the USB stick will normally be present and the system will boot as an Unraid server. Occasionally, however, we'll remove the USB stick and then switch on, in which case the system boots up as the Linux distro installed on the hard drive
 

meles meles

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Jul 28, 2020
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Okay, so we have made progress. We now have an UNRAID trial version running on our server. It's headless, tucked away in a quiet corner of the sett, and accessed through our main pc. The array comprises 3 x 4TB HDD with a fourth 4 TB HDD as parity disc and a 120 Gb Kingston SSD as the cache drive. It's just spent all night doing its set up and zeroing of discs to establish parity and we're now going to copy some data from our Synology NAS to it and see how it performs.

Next task will be to learn about Docker....