As a former Linux/OSS hippie, I’ve known about FreeNAS for a while. I first gave it a try a few years ago. Lifehacker had an article about using it to turn an old PC into a home server. A combination of an aging Celeron CPU, a terrible ISP-provided router, and my inability to properly setup a static IP address left me with little else but frustration and a newly formatted hard drive. That was using FreeNAS 8 at the time, although I never really got to the point where I could test the hardware.
FreeNAS has come a little ways in the intervening three years. They’ve just released the second beta for version 10, and it looks pretty slick. From an enterprise perspective, one feature stands out. You can now manage VMs and Docker containers within the included bhyve hypervisor.
Overall, the UI looks really polished, letting you see all the drives in a volume easily, then letting you drill down to see how each individual drive is doing. For home use, it might be overkill in terms of features, but any tinkerer will tell you they’d rather have too many features than too few.
I think I might give it a try once it goes into general release, not because I need the stability. Evidently they’re still working on their setup wizard, it’s in the beta, but still rudimentary by their own estimation. As I’ve stated, I’ll need all the help I can get.
FreeNAS – Open Source Storage Operating System comments:
The FreeNAS development team is happy to announce the release of FreeNAS 10 BETA 2. We are also very happy to say that we are now “feature complete” and have feature-parity with FreeNAS 9.10. Anyone who’s been following the FreeNAS 10 development effort knows that FreeNAS 10 represents a complete rewrite of the world’s most popular software-defined storage OS. It adds significant capabilities not seen in Open Source storage: new capabilities for hosting virtual machines and containerized applications, and a ground-up rewrite of the user interface with a scriptable command-line interface.
This post will explain what’s new in FreeNAS 10 BETA 2. If you’re entirely new to FreeNAS 10, don’t worry. You can still jump on board with the aid of these resources:
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