DIY NAS: with nas4free [step 2]

If you have not done so already, please read the introductory post on building your own NAS, DIY NAS: with freeNAS - step 1.

The good stuff...

1. Boot Disk
2. Install OS
3. Configure System
4. Add Users/Groups
5. Add Disks
6. Build Mount Points
7. Build Shares
8. Enjoy sweet, sweet, sweet, satisfaction...

Bootdisk

First download the NAS4Free-9.1.0.1 image from sourceforge.

I am pretty sure that you can use the LiveCD.iso
The documentation here is a little sparse, but I'm sure a commentor will set us straight.
(have tried them all and failed to take notes :P)

Create a bootable USB stick or CD.
(most users are comfortable doing this, but I will be adding a tutorial post soon)

Install OS

(At this point I strongly suggest disconnecting ALL HDDs except the target boot drive)

Plug in your USB-boot or CD-boot disk and start your NAS. Make sure that you are connected to a monitor and keyboard.

Enter the BIOS menu and set the Boot disk to first priority.

Save & Exit

Wait for nas4free to start. You will eventually be prompted with a menu.

Choose the Install/Upgrade NAS4Free from LiveCD option.

You will be directed to the installer menu...

Since my plan has always been to install to a HDD, go ahead and choose the third option.

Install "Full" on HDD + DATA + SWAP partition"

This next part is why I suggested removing your data disks...

You will first be asked to select the CD/USB disk from a list.

Next you will be asked to select the target disk you want to install the OS to.

Finally there will be some questions about data and swap partitions.
Make sure that the installation has a minimum of 2gb.
Besides that you can play with the numbers here to suit the disk you are installing on.

My setup uses an ancient (seriously ancient), 2gb pata drive.
I disabled the SWAP and just rely on my RAM. You can do whatever you think is best for your disk.

once the install is complete you will be returned to the menu.

Choose the reboot option and remove your boot disk!

If the NAS doesn't start loading nas4free, check that the bios has reverted to using the HDD as the primary boot disk.

When you are returned to the nas4free menu:

You will notice that the option to install has disappeared... this is good.
Select option #2 and configure the network IP address.
You will be asked questions about what you want done... just choose auto for everything and you will probably be fine.
(If you are interested in some sort of manual setup, feel free to try. No one is stopping you, its a free country.)

Once the IP address is set you will be returned to the menu and notified that the webGUI is reachable at your ipaddress:port!

Test it now by opening a browser on some computer connected to your home network and directing it to the address and port that the NAS gave you. Just put in the ip address followed by a colon and then the port number.

You should be greeted with the webGUI login page!

This means that you have done everything correctly so far! Sweet!
You can login using the default user/pass; admin/nas4free.

System Configuration

Here we will work through the many settings in nas4free which need to be setup in order to work correctly.

SYSTEM>GENERAL>GENERAL

• Hostname
• Hostname: keep it simple yo...
• Domain: local
• DNS settings
• IPv4 DNS Servers: 0.0.0.0 
• (this only needs to be in one box. any other boxes can remain empty)
• IPv6 DNS Servers: (leave this empty)
• WebGUI
• Username: this is the username that you will use to log into nas4free's webGUI.
• Only change this if you feel some need to do so.
• All other settings on this page can remain unchanged.

NETWORK>LAN management

• IPv4 Configuration
• This information needs to be setup in your router first. Be sure to give your nas4free box a static ip lease in the router's management. You will need to type in the MAC address and then tell the router what ip address you want for that MAC. This is usually easy on a router you bought at the store. This is usually really a pain in the ass on a router that comes with any form of internet service...
• Type: Static
• IP Address: your nas4free ip address (ie. 192.168.1.105)
• Gateway: your router's ip address (ie. 192.168.1.1)
• Make sure that IPv6 is set to auto and nothing else on this page needs to be changed.

At this point I suggest making a backup of your nas4free configuration XML. This is something you should do OFTEN!

Reboot the server using the webGUI.

Check that everything is working. 

• Is the ip address you entered right?
• Is the server hostname showing up if you look at your network in windows explorer/finder/nautilus?
• Can you still log into your webgui? haha!

Finally you need to add your user credentials for the shares you will be making later!

ACCESS>USERS & GROUPS

• Click on the little blue cross to add a new user
• Name: You should just use your windows username here so that you don't have any trouble with the CIFS/SMB shares you may build later.
• Full Name: This is not important to the small net builder, but is crazy important if you have many users in a setting like an office. I always add my full name... you don't have to if you don't want to.
• Password: As above use your windows password for simplicity.
• Don't have a windows password?
• Set one up... you will be happier with this file permission stuff just working.
• Shell: sh
• Primary Group: admin
• you are the admin here right?
• Additional Groups: ftp, sshd, transmission, users, wheel
• You can add them to other groups too if you want, but these are probably the ones you want right now.
• Click "Add"
• Follow any on screen instructions.

All done! Time to add some disks!

Importing disks :D

So there are a few steps to getting your shit shared with nas4free.

STEP 1 - Think Before You Leap

Do you have blank drives or pre-existing data?

• Blank Drives: Skip to the formatting step.
• Pre-existing data: Okay, you aren't going to like this but you are going to have a difficult time keeping your data. The problem is that nas4free is built on the freeBSD kernel and by default it wants your drives to be formatted as UFS. If your data was in a windows computer then it is probably formatted as NTFS. Linux and it is probably ETX3 or 4. Only the UFS format will work properly in nas4free in the long term. When I build my server I had pre-existing data. About 10TB worth of it... Here was my solution... and it sort of sucks if you have a lot of drives with data to add.

STEP 2 - How you are going to save your old data while still formatting all your drives.

The process will go like this: 
The problem is that you want to keep your data so we have to add a blank drive (drive #1). Then add your second drive (drive #2) in read only mode. Transfer all the data from your drive2 to drive1. Then reformat drive 2 and mount is normally as a storage disk. As you have guessed this will repeat for any other disks you need to add...

• You have to buy at least one new blank HDD.
• It should be at least as big as your largest existing drive.
• I would just buy the biggest drive you can since eventually you will probably be getting rid of the smaller drives to add more space to your server.
• Add the new bare drive to your server chassis and plug it in.
• Add disk.
• Format the bare drive to UFS.
• Add disk under Management tab.
• Build a MOUNT POINT for this drive in mount.
• Mount the drive
• Build a share point for the drive using CIFS/SMB or NFS
• This drive is now available on the network and should not ever need to be changed. This is basically he process for adding any new drive to the server. 
• Next we have to add and build a mount point for the drive#2. 
• Make this a read only mount point.
• TRANSFER THE DATA USING NAS4FREE BUILT IN FILE MANAGER.
• This step will take your server offline until the transfer is finished.
• Depending on the speed of your drives, the speed of your motherboard, and the amount of data this can take a long time.
• Most of my drives were 5400prm, connected by sataII, and 1-2TB.
• I usually get decent speeds out of these drives, but when you start a transfer and cannot connect to the server in ANY WAY (no ssh, no gui, no NOTHING!) you start to panic a little. There is no visual feedback letting you know whether or not anything is happening.
• Once your data has been transfered format drive#2 to UFS.
• Delete the temporary read only mount point.
• Build a new mount point for drive#2 using UFS and making it read and writable.
• Build a share point if using CIFS/SMB.
• Thats it... now just repeat for all of your disks.

Sounds pretty crappy huh... I had 10TB of data on 9 disks. It took me a week to finish importing and transferring disks. The final product is also completely susceptible to data loss with disk failure. Any day I might wake up to a dead 2TB disk with no option to recover it. 

This process is the main reason I decided against any sort of RAID redundancy. Were I to build a RAID array, I would have to buy all new disks for the server. Since my bank account fits into an old coffee can hidden in closet this was NOT an option. 

You cannot just buy 10TB worth of disks and add then your existing 10TB disks to an array after it has been built. Everything that I have ever read or tried requires the disks to be 100% empty when creating the array. Life suck for poor people, get over it and enjoy the thrill of having more space at the cost of possible data loss.

In reality, some of the drives in my server have all been running 24/7 for about 5 years. I have never actually had a drive die. The simple fact of the matter is that if a drive lasts 30 days, it will probably last until it is no longer relevant.

STEP 3 - Add and Format

Hint: add disks to your server chassis ONE AT A TIME! It is much easier than trying to figure out which is which by serial number. If you have all blank drives you can disregard this hint.

DISKS>MANAGEMENT

• Click the little blue cross to add a new disk.
• I have no idea if the scan functions will work on blank drives.
• I do not trust it to work on drives that already contain data in NTFS form.
• Disk: choose the disk you are adding
• There should only be one disk available if you are adding them to your case one at a time.
• Description: this is up to you...
•  This description is only displayed in the webGUI.
• Hint: With all disk naming follow a simple convention. FOR EVERYTHING!
• Here are a few rules I follow...
• NO SPACES! If you want to mount these using FSTAB in linux you cant have spaces... plus spaces suck...
• NO CAPITALS! If you want to work in the CLI at all capital letters suck.
• My personal naming convention goes like this:
• [size][manufacturer][number]
• Say I just bought two new Western Digital 2TB drives and A friend gave me an old 1TB Seagate drive. I would name them as follows...
• 2.0tbsshdd1
• 2.0tbsshdd2
• 1.0tbsghdd1
• This is my personal preference. Name yours however you like! Many people have far fewer disks than I, and thus they are able to use names like "Storage" or "Movies" for various disks.
• S.M.A.R.T.: enable
• Preformated File System:
• "none" for bare drives
• "NTFS" for drives that you are transferring data from.
• Click "Add"
• Follow any on screen instructions.

If your disk was blank, it is now ready to format.

If your disk was full of data, it is now ready to be mounted.

Choose your next step accordingly.

DISKS>FORMAT

• Disk: here select the disk you want to format.
• File System: UFS (gpt and soft updates)
• This is a matter of personal choice. I don't feel that the zfs file system is mature enough to use. I know that fat32 is historically riddled with issues in freenas/nas4free. So too is EXT2. I have never even tried to use Software RAID, if you are going to do this you should probably go with ZFS.
• Volume Label: name this volume... I can never remember the rules for naming volumes... I don't think that you ever really use this name again... probably... right? Just do whatever nas4free says when it doesn't like your name.
• Minimum Free Space: I set this to 8GB. This gives nas4free a little room to breath for defragmenting the drive. Probably more importantly it gives you a slight buffer for adding files to the disk. My file server is set to auto-download tv with Sickbeard running on my Raspberry Pi. If the disk fills up I don't want new episodes to fail to download, instead nas4free warns me that the disk is full, but allows SabNZBD+ to use some of the buffer space on the disk.
• Advanced Format: Most modern high capacity disks can use advance format sectors. Go ahead and enable it, if the format fails try turning it off.
• Don't erase the MBR: do not select this.
• Press "Format Disk"
• You will see some printout on the webGUI.
• Eventually you should see that the format was successful.
• Your disk is now formatted and ready to be mounted in nas4free.

STEP 4 - DISKS>MOUNT POINT>MANAGEMENT

Time to mount your freshly formatted disk, but first we have to build a place to mount it to.

Click the little blue cross to add a new mount point.

• Type: Disk
• Disk: choose the disk you just formatted.
• Partition Type: this part always throws me...
• "GPT partition" - this is supposed to be for GPT formatted drives.
• "MBR partition" - this is supposed to be for UFS and NTFS drives
• Try MBR first in any case. If you cannot get your mount point to save, it is probably because the Partition Type is wrong.
• Partition Number: 1
• File System: UFS (or NTFS if you are adding this disk to transfer data)
• Mount Point Name: this is up to you...
• Hint: you will probably use this A LOT! Here are the rules I follow again...
• NO SPACES! If you want to mount these using FSTAB in linux you cant have spaces... plus spaces suck...
• NO CAPITALS! If you want to work in the CLI at all capital letters suck.
• My personal naming convention goes like this:
• [size][manufacturer][number]
• Say I just bought two new Western Digital 2TB drives and A friend gave me an old 1TB Seagate drive. I would name them as follows...
• 2.0tbsshdd1
• 2.0tbsshdd2
• 1.0tbsghdd1
• This is my personal preference. Name yours however you like! Many people have far fewer disks than I, and thus they are able to use names like "Storage" or "Movies" for various disks.
• Description: Here you can add a note to remind yourself about this drive. This note only appears in the nas4free webGUI.
• You might make a note here for NTFS drives that are being added to transfer data... just sayin'...
• Read Only: Check this if you are adding an NTFS drive! 
• You do not want the system to try to write on your NTFS disk. There is a slight chance that it will corrupt the file system if you do.
• For UFS disks that are being added to a permanent mount, do not check this... If you do then you wont be able to write any data to your disk, and that would be stupid.
• File System Check: Check this item. Unless...
• I began having issues with this when I implemented NFS and the Raspberry Pi Sickbeard/SabNZBD+ servers. I was getting a kernel panic crash and my disks would not have a chance to sync the write buffers before a hard reboot. This meant that my disks had to be fsck'd manually from the nas4free shell. Eventually I decided to disable this on all my disks. My doing this is a bandaid on a larger problem that I have no time to solve.
• Owner: Root
• Group: Wheel
• Mode: Just put a check mark in every single box.

Press "Add" and you should be redirected to the Mount point list!

The list may give you some instructions, follow them until you see an "OK" under status for your disk.

If need be go to the "Tools" tab and mount your disk. Then check back at the list for the OK status.

STEP 5 - Setup the CIFS/SMB Service

My guess is that most of you are going to want to use CIFS/SMB so that your windows devices will be able to interact with the NAS using their usernames and passwords.

SERVICES>CIFS/SMB

• First lets set up CIFS/SMB(aka samba)
• Authentication: Local User
• Max Protocol: SMB2
• Netbios Name: "add your server name here"
• This will appear in your windows Network list
• Workgroup Name: this should match your windows workgroup
• Find this on your windows computer.
• Case matters here.
• Large Read & Write: Enable
• Store DOS attributes: Enable
• Asynchronous I/O: Enable
• AIO Read/Write: 4096
• Auxiliary Parameters: add this if you are having issues transferring large sustained files!
• socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=1048576 SO_SNDBUF=1048576
• Save & Restart (this only restarts CIFS/SMB)

STEP 6 - Building a Share Point

Head over to the "Shares" tab.

• Click the blue cross.
• Name: i use the same name that I used for my disk
• ie. 2.0tbsshdd1
• Comment: I use the same here as I used for the name of the share and the disk.
• Path: Click on the browse button and choose the disk you want to add to this share. 
• What you are seeing here is the contents of /mnt/
• These are the mounted disks... do you see why it is nice to have them labeled with nice clear names?
• If you do not see the disk you want in the disk you want, it is not mounted correctly! Figure out why...
• Browsable: Enable
• Guest: Enable
• Inherit Permissions: Enable
• Recycle Bin: Disable
• With this disabled, deleted files are IMMEDIATELY deleted!
• With this enabled, windows will take move deleted files to a hidden recycle bin folder within this drive. This is fine too, but I don't like trying to manage the file bins when only one of the 8 devices connected to my network actually runs Windows.
• Hide dot files: Enable
• Shadow Copy: disable
• Everything else is probably fine...
• Click "Add"
• You should be redirected to the Share list.
• You may now be greeted with instructions... follow them if you are.

Once everything looks normal, you should be done with this disk!
You can open it up on your windows computer if you did everything right!

Try copying a file to the disk.

Try deleting a file on the disk.

If it gives you an error, something is wrong...

If you have no disks that contain data, just rinse and repeat for your remaining blank disks.

If you have just finished with your first blank drive and now need to add your data disk, please go back to the mount point step and follow the instructions again while making slight changes as per the notes to add your NTFS disk in read only mode. Then continue to STEP 7 below.

STEP 7 - Transfer your data if need be...

Some of you have now added your first blank disk, then gone through the last step again and added your data filled drive in read only mode.

Now open the file manager in the web gui.

ADVANCED>FILE MANAGER

Here you will be asked to log in.

Use the root account or else you will not be able to copy/paste/delete anything.

• Browse to /mnt/"read only disk"
• Select some data.
• Click Copy
• I like copy rather than cut in case there is some sort of crash or issue or some other kind of nonsense.
• Browse to the place you want to paste the data.
• Press paste.

At this point the page will start to look like it is trying to load/refresh.

It will stay like this for a LONG time. Your data is now being copied to the new spot that you choose.

YOU CANNOT CONTACT THE SERVER IN ANY WAY WHILE THIS IS HAPPENING!

THE WEBGUI WILL NOT WORK.

THE SSH WILL NOT WORK.

THE SHARES WILL NOT WORK.

BE PATIENT! 

IT WILL FINISH EVENTUALLY!

Once the transfer is finished, you can go ahead and check the data from your windows explorer. If everything looks good, go back to the portion on formatting a disk and format your data disk to UFS. Follow the instructions for building mount point again and delete the read only NTFS point. Be sure to add this new disk to the share list too.

Finally you have all the information needed to add disks in any configuration to your NAS!