Version history for FreeNAS (64-bit)

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Changes for v8.2.0 Beta 2 - v8.2.0 Beta 3

Enhancements
GUI: A major refactoring of the plugin structure has been done.
iSCSI: Target reload is now supported for adding and removing (but not changing) targets on the fly. The Logical Unit Controller is used for this, reload wil not function if the LUC is not enabled.
CIFS: Samba has been upgraded to 3.6.4 to address the security issues in 3.6.3
Bugfixes
GUI: Fix a javascript error that affected IE8

Changes for v8.0.4 p1 - v8.0.4 p2

Bugfixes
OS/Third party
Samba has been upgraded to 3.6.5 to address CVE-2012-2011 which is a critical vulnerability. All FreeNAS users who are using CIFS are urged to upgrade.

Changes for v8.0.4 - v8.0.4 p1

Enhancements
GUI
Selecting reboot now causes the screen to turn red during the confirmation dialog, adding emphasis to the fact that this operation will affect availability.
Bugfixes
OS/Third party
Samba has been upgraded to 3.6.4 to address CVE-2012-1182 which is a critical vulnerability. All FreeNAS users who are using CIFS are urged to upgrade.
Create the ldap and nss secret files when LDAP integration is enabled.
Ensure the configuration database is not world readable.
Remove failsafe from the PAM group file, this prevents a situation where the wheel group being empty allowed any user to su to root.

Changes for v8.0.3 p1 - v8.0.4

Changes since 8.0.4-RC1:
Enhancements
GUI
Rename 'loaders' to 'tunables' to target the FreeBSD concept under inspection (kernel tunables) (SF r10235, r10236).
Bugfixes
OS/Third party
Remove sane caps for minimum ZFS requirements for lower spec'ed home user machines added in 8.0.4-BETA1. A better solution will be devised in 8.2.0 with automatic system tuning, similar to legacy's zfskerntune (SF r10271).
CIFS
Correct guest parameter setting in the GUI as it's a global option, not a per-share option (SF r10296).
Allow Guest Only parameter only makes sense when Allow Guest is specified (SF r10300).
Validate guest setting prior to accepting POST to ensure that the value set for Guest is sane.
Changes since 8.0.4-BETA2:
Enhancements
Build
Remove Full_Install from the compressed disk image name to avoid potential confusion when looking at the disk image vs the GUI upgrade image (SF r10154).
Middleware
Do not restart collectd (reporting backend) when deleting snapshots in the GUI (SF r10139).
Tools
Add arcstat.py and arc_summary.py tools originally contributed by jhell (FreeBSD contributor), ported by jhixson to FreeNAS 8.x.
Bugfixes
GUI
Correct window title for snapshot deletion GUI (SF r10138).
Middleware
Catch ZFS snapshot errors when snapshots are done via the GUI instead of failing silently (SF r10152).
Work around interoperability issues with user / group population in the GUI by failing silently in certain cases if AD/LDAP users cannot be retrieved (SF r10140).
Fix case where local and remote paths passed to rsync in Rsync tasks weren't quoted, so paths with spaces in them would not work (FN 1285).
Changes since 8.0.4-BETA1:
Enhancements
OS/Third party
Update transmission to 2.42 (SF r10093).
Add MegaCLI tool (SF r10072, r10073).
Disable periodic tasks in the base system that would negatively impact system performance on NAS boxes with large directory structures (SF r10113).
Bugfixes
Middleware
Fix handling for 'every day' SMART tasks created in the GUI (SF r10088).
Add in several robustness fixes to reduce potential for filesystem corruption on root / boot device. In some scenarios this would also improve performance when fetching data from the root device as well (SF r10095, r10109, r10129).
CIFS
Fix vfs objects modules ordering so shadow copy (aka previous versions) support functions again (FN 935, FN 1186, FN 1275).
Update samba to 3.6.3 to resolve several bugs (both security and non-security related) (SF r10127).
iSCSI
Network field from iSCSI initiator could contain multiple IP addresses, CIDR addresses, or ANY keyword (SF r10082).
Generate istgt.conf properly if and when multiple initiators were specified (SF r10081).

Changes for v8.0.2 - v8.0.3 p1

Enhancements
OS/Third party
Use smaller block and frag sizes for /etc and /var .
Import a build tweak to nuke /var/db/pkg to save ~7MB space.
Other build tweaks to remove non-essential features and packages from the image.
Disable output to /var/log/console.log in non-debug builds to avoid unnecessary duplication in /var/log/messages .
Upgrade ataidle to 2.6.
Upgrade nut / net-snmp to 2.6.2 and 5.7.1, respectively.
Import omnibus build system fixes to fix the fact that the 8.0.3-BETA1 image was broken due to the environment of the build machine where it was produced on. This also fixes other items, such as DDNS because of build environment tainting.
Increase the /var md size from 74MB to 160MB s.t. samba will be able to service requests copying large sets of files, and the rest of the system will be able to play nicely with samba to a certain degree. More tuning is required for larger samba userbases.
GUI
Add kernel tunable / sysctl support.
Middleware
Hide Etc/GMT* timezones as they're behavior is counterintuitive and conflicts with Windows 7 semantics (see r8707).
AD/CIFS
Bump samba from 3.5.11 to 3.6.1.
Address simple failure cases with getting Kerberos tickets (clock skew) and joining AD domains (invalid passwords, bad short domain names, etc) so that users could better rectify improperly configured NAS boxes; this means that if either of these cases fail, the GUI will now inform the user that the 'Active Directory' service is stopped.
Fix cachetool to better prevent potential race condition at boot between winbindd and ix-cache.
Add knob for enabling/disabling Zeroconf/Bonjour (avahi) support in the GUI. For technical reasons outside of the author's control, this feature defaults to off when upgrading FreeNAS. FreeNAS admins anticipating that they will have Mac users attempting to connect to CIFS shares should enable this feature.
AFP
Bump netatalk to 2.2.1.
Add knob for controlling the maximum number of configurable connections (see ticket: 847).
Only advertise services via avahi if they're enabled (see ticket: 852).
Rsync
NFSv4 ACL support (see: r8375, r8414).
Bugfixes
OS/Third party
Fix NTFS volume imports.
GUI
ZFS volume deletion failed when trying to delete zvol with the name 'zvol'.
SSH pubkey saving was broken unless you manually add a newline to the text box.
Fix traceback when trying to edit user if ssh public key was not specified.
Fix the bug in rsync tasks where it would strip the trailing '/' off the end of the destination path.
Fix a validation error when editing users / groups in 8.0.2+ where if one entered in a path that wasn't valid, the GUI would traceback instead of punting the actual validation error.
Fix an issue where if one entered in an invalid path, the GUI would traceback instead of providing feedback stating that the directory provided was invalid.
Middleware
Rsync task/crontab generation was broken with AD usernames and other unsanitized input.
Fix email regressions since 8.0.2-RELEASE-p1 (SMART emails now work with more than one recipient, non-SMTP authentication based emails work again).
Fix an issue where if one autosnap process was killed uncleanly, more autosnap processes could back up and eventually deadlock the system.
Fix an issue where the ZFS scrub cronjobs would execute every 30 days instead of a number divisible by 7, so what would generally happen is that ZFS scrubs would generally execute in the middle of the week.
Fix setting httpd to listen on an interface which is not the first interface.
Add logic to create home directories on demand instead of failing 'silently' if the path to the directory didn't already exist.
Fix 'detaching' NTFS/UFS volumes so that it unmounts the volume in the FreeBSD backend.
AD/CIFS
Change the default workgroup from FREENAS to WORKGROUP as having the same name for the workgroup and the hostname is illegal per the SMB/CIFS protocol.
Cosmetic items
Change "SSH key" in GUI to "SSH Public Key".
Fix GUI trademarks and branding to be more consistent with proper branding, similar to what TrueNAS does today.

Changes for v8.0.1 - v8.0.2

The FreeNAS team is pleased to announce FreeNAS 8.0.2-RELEASE. This can be considered a minor release that fixes a few of the more glaring issues in 8.0.1-RELEASE.
Major changes since 8.0.1-RELEASE:
The email subsystem was not working correctly in 8.0.1-RELEASE, which resulted in the system not being able to send mail, as well as disfunction of the alerting system in the GUI.
Changes since 8.0.1-RELEASE:
Allow decimal numbers for a dataset quota. (r8728)
Fix setting recursive ACLs. (r8270)
Start proftpd after ix-ssl to use the correct SSL cert. (r8246)
Use wildcards in cron and rsync jobs instead of listing all values. (r8214, r8211)
Fix case in iSCSI targets to match the behavior specified by RFC 3722. (r8120)
Known Issues:
CHAP doesn't work with GlobalSAN initiators on OS X.
Upgrades from FreeNAS 0.7 aren't supported.
The installer doesn't check the size of the install media before attempting an install. A 2 GB device is required, but the install will appear to complete successfully on smaller devices, only to fail at boot.
The installer will let you switch from i386 to amd64 architecture and vice-versa, but some files, such as the rrd files used by the statistics graphing package are architecture dependent.

Changes for v8.0.1 RC 2 - v8.0.1

Major changes
django has been updated to 1.3.1 to address multiple security advisories.
istgt has been updated to 20110928
Base system has been updated to FreeBSD 8.2-p3, which addresses http://security.freebsd.org/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-11:05.unix.asc and http://security.freebsd.org/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-11:04.compress.asc
Changes since 8.0.1-RC2
Fix the regex used to validate iSCSI target names so that '-' is an allowed character. (r7827)
Multiple improvements to the UPS service. (r7841, r7842, r7843, r7844, r7845, r7846, r7847, r7848, r7849)
Fix a bug in the GUI where zvols from multiple pools caused GUI corruption. (r7859)
Add a button to zpools that will display zpool status in a tab.
Set each LUN in an iSCSI target to a unique serial number. This allows vmware ESXi to see multiple LUNs per target. (r7878)
Change the encryption type in the LDAP config screen to a choicebox instead of requiring freeform text input. (r7881)
Remove DDP option from AFP server config. (r7883)
Fix typo so that hosts allow and deny actually get populated in rsyncd.conf. (r7906)
Fix deleting snapshots. (r7916)
Add a button to volumes to manually kick off a scrub of ZFS volumes. (r7943)
Fix smartd.conf generation bug. (r7956)
Fix a bug preventing the import of zpools created on Solaris (r7971)
Allow adding a public key for user ssh authentication. (r8002)
Changes since 8.0-RELEASE
There's too much to list here, but the high points are:
Divorced the volume members in the database from the FreeBSD devices. This resolves an issue where FreeBSD can change devices names and the GUI doesn't pick up the updates due to the devices names being hard-wired in the database.
Support exporting ZFS zvols (virtual devices) as device extents via iSCSI. 8.0 was only able to export physical device nodes or file based extents.
The GUI now has an event notification system.
The email backend has been refactored.
Many many changes in the GUI to help it validate and sanitize inputs that are passed to the backend daemons.
Added UPS functionality.
Added rsync client and server functionality.
Added the ability to schedule cron jobs in the GUI.
Vastly improved and reworked snapshot replication.
Errata:
CHAP doesn't work with GlobalSAN initiators on OS X.
Upgrades from FreeNAS 0.7 aren't supported.
The installer doesn't check the size of the install media before attempting an install. A 2 GB device is required, but the install will appear to complete successfully on smaller devices, only to fail at boot.
The installer will let you switch from i386 to amd64 architecture and vice-versa, but some files, such as the rrd files used by the statistics graphing package are architecture dependent.

Changes for v8.0.1 RC 1 - v8.0.1 RC 2

Major changes:
The mail subsystem has been rewritten due to major interop issues with the previous implementation of the mail subsystem and various mail server setups (including gmail). This was done by removing msmtp and replacing it's functionality with python code. (r7756, r7757, r7758 )
The iSCSI target daemon (istgt) has been updated to address interoperability issues with VMWare ESXi 5.0 (r7530, r7652, r7817)
Changes since 8.0.1-RC1
Fix a bug where a failed upgrade after a config was uploaded was resulting in the system "reverting" to using the uploaded config instead of the previous running config. (r7535)
Save config now uses a hostname/date combo in the file name. (r7567)
Fix a bug with replacing devices in place. (r7575)
Add a confirmation password field for dyndns. (r7576)
If the webgui can't bind to the address specified in the GUI bind to the wildcard. Set an alert if this is done. (r7562, r7563, r7570, r7579)
Add a save debug button in the system -> advanced GUI to ease collecting diagnostic information when shell access isn't configured. (r7592)
Allow an interface to accept tagged and untagged packets. (r7604, r7609)
Improvements to ataidle. (r7648)
Reverse the list for ipv4 netmask. (r7663)
Fix openldap authenticating against servers that require SSL/STARTTLS (r7685)
Build python with a larger stack size. This should solve intermittent django stability issues (r7689)
Move the USB 3 driver to a module so it can be disabled for hardware that has issues booting with the module enabled. (r7691)
Allow the iSCSI extent file browser to show files. (r7695)
Allow iSCSI extents to be used by one target->extent mapping. (r7697)
Restrict the iSCSI target name to values allowed by the target and the RFC covering iqns. (r7698)
Restart collectd properly when volumes are created or destroyed. (r7704)
Make timezone changes take effect immediately in django. (r7720)
Use the file browser for editing iSCSI file extents. (r7728)
Ensure that the selection for an iSCSI file extent is a file and not a directory. (r7729)
Allow auto-importer to work when there are zpools that contain subsets of each other's names. eg: tank and tank2 (r7732)
Update django to 1.3.1 to address multiple security vulnerabilities. (r7745)
Fix a bug where the system would attempt to change permissions from an unknown user to root:wheel. (r7762)
Disable building the weekly locate database. (r7765)
Errata:
CHAP doesn't work with GlobalSAN initiators on OS X.
Upgrades from FreeNAS 0.7 aren't supported.
iSCSI daemon cannot create targets with a '-' in them, wait for RC3.
Upgrades from nightly builds to RC2 and on are no longer supported.

Changes for v8.0 RC 5 - v8.0

Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.0 Release
---------------------------------------------------
FreeNAS 8 should be installed to a USB stick or Compact Flash device. It
requires a device of at least 1 GB in size. In a departure from FreeNAS 0.7
releases, the OS drive can not be used as a component for a volume, nor can
it be partitioned for sharing.
Features in 8.0-RELEASE:
FreeNAS 8.0-RELEASE supports NFS, CIFS, AFP, FTP and TFTP as filesharing
mechanisms. It also supports exporting devices via iSCSI as an iSCSI target.
Active Directory or LDAP for user authentication.
The ZFS and UFS2 filesystems are supported. ZFS is the primary filesystem and
enables usage of many features, including quotas, snapshots, compression and
replication that are not available in UFS2.
Errata:
The iSCSI Target software does not properly present multiple LUNs per target
to initiators. For the best results use one target per LUN.
The iSCSI target does not support a configuration reload. Changes to the config
restart the daemon.
Disks with certain configs can get get probed by geom and become essentially
unwritable without manual intervention. For instance, if you use disks that
have previously had a geom_mirror on them the system may pick that up and
the disks will be unavailable until the existing gmirror is stopped and
destroyed.
Some atom based systems with Realtek gigE interfaces have network performance issues
with FreeBSD 8.2
UPGRADES FROM FREENAS 0.7x ARE UNSUPPORTED
The system has no way to import configuration settings from 0.7 versions
of FreeNAS, but the volume importer should handle volumes created with FreeNAS 0.7.
Please note that zpool upgrade is a one way street, and upgraded volumes will
not be usable with FreeNAS 0.7.x
A note about versions:
There's been a huge jump in version numbers. The intention is to have the
version number reflect the base version of FreeBSD used. This RC is based
on FreeBSD 8.2, but this version of FreeNAS is called 8.0 as there are future
plans to add functionality that will get the versions caught up. Once
FreeNAS 8.2 is out, a suffix will be added, such as 8.2.1, 8.2.2, etc.
A note about filesystem technologies:
While this system does support UFS based volumes, such as gmirror, gstripe,
graid3, the primary focus is on ZFS. Many of the features are provided via
ZFS datasets, such as the ability to share subsets of volumes via CIFS.
This delta is likely to increase over time, the compelling reasons to use
ZFS are likely to increase as well. It is highly recommended to use ZFS
for new volumes, even if the underlying device is a volume exported by a
hardware RAID controller.
Files available:
The following two upgrade images are available for versions of FreeNAS 8 that
have GUI upgrade capability.
Filename:
FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-amd64.GUI_upgrade.xz
SHA256 Hash:
9f69e7759347c694c13ce879ba213384405986e7d43c8ed1ca81ff45c762c026
Filename:
FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-i386.GUI_upgrade.xz
SHA256 Hash:
f16f4772718ccd50790eb9effad34ce9b25749ac4cbda775eb732e1f2a7eba67
New installs can be done by using a bootable ISO or by writing an image to a
bootable device directly.
Filename:
FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-amd64.iso
SHA256 Hash:
ec5ac13bfbbdffb015c374e468ab67ac222b9bd119517d62d147f67dcd7bb4bd
Filename:
FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-i386.iso
SHA256 Hash:
1122d7f59264802f595769a1f888c9ecec3719f571d270b545c6d9c3818f6735
Filename:
FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-amd64.Full_Install.xz
SHA256 Hash:
e572ff58e661403786586a4a08e5031a8ada680c287cf45ed3a12a5d693147a9
Filename:
FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-i386.Full_Install.xz
SHA256 Hash:
3f2296a924d34da56b720720806015307c9cf6ff4d649036f23b0961dc0de21a

Changes for v8.0 RC 4 - v8.0 RC 5

The ability to create "stacked" ZFS configurations is now present in the GUI.
This also goes hand in hand with the ability to add devices to ZFS volumes.
For ZFS the volume wizard will now accept an existing volume name when adding
volumes. If an existing volume name is specified, the volume being created will
be added to the existing volume as a stripe. In this manner one can create complex
volumes such as RAID 10, RAIDZ+0, RAIDZ2+0, RAIDZ3+0 in the same manner as
conventional RAID controllers build complex volumes. Simply start with the subgroups
and build up from there. The top level group is implicitly a stripe, there is no
provision to build a mirror of mirrors, or a RAIDZ of mirrors, or a mirror of RAIDZs
Under settings -> config there are now buttons to save, restore, or reset to defaults
for configuration. If you are intending to recreate volumes and wish to reset to
defaults delete the volumes before resetting to factory defaults.
The email settings now contains a "Send Test Email" button. This uses the saved
email settings, it can't be used to test new settings before they are saved.
The GUI contains functionality to replace components in volumes. Mainly useful
for replacing failed drives in arrays, it can handle replacing devices in place or
migrating devices depending on is the new device has the same or a different device
name in it. Due to a bug in FreeBSD's ZFS implementation, occasionally ZFS will
attempt to hold on to the old device. The GUI contains a detach button for such
cases.
Spare, Cache, and Log devices can now be added to ZFS volumes at any time through
the GUI.
Notable bug fixes:
AFP has received more attention. In particular shares are browseable, and time
machine works.
The GUI to select users and groups are far friendlier when the system has access
to large numbers of users and groups.
The email backend supports SSL/TLS properly, and several errors were fixed in the
backend that creates the config file it uses.
Multiple VLANs with the same parent were not being started properly, in addition
using a lagg device as a VLAN parent was not not working properly.
Active Directory now starts up properly after rebooting the system.
Setting the GUI to HTTPS now persists on reboot.

Changes for v8.0 RC 3 - v8.0 RC 4

Release Candidate 4 contains both bug fixes and new functionality over previous
Release candidates and betas.
FreeNAS 8 should be installed to a USB stick or Compact Flash device. It
requires a device of at least 1 GB in size. In a departure from FreeNAS 0.7
releases, the OS drive can not be used as a component for a volume, nor can
it be partitioned for sharing.
New in 8.0-RC4:
Snapshot functionality has been added. There are features to create periodic
snapshot jobs, create one time snapshots, clone snapshots (which can then be
exported as shares like any other dataset) and rollback to previous snapshot.
VLAN interfaces are fully supported. VLANs can be created from the GUI or
from the CLI menu on the console.
NFS shares can be set to use the full range of maproot and mapall options. In
addition, tuning is available for the NFS service to boost performance past
gigE networking speeds.
Users and groups available to the system from any source (local users, LDAP, AD)
are now presented anywhere a user or group is specified, whether it's volume
permissions, samba anonymous user, or NFS maproot.
Several functions in System -> advanced were hooked up, a few were deleted.
Powerd now works, toggling between the CLI script and a normal login works,
the MOTD updates properly, and the serial console works.
The kernel modules to support several RAID controllers were added, as well
as the modules to enable mount_smbfs to work from the CLI.
Thanks to several users in the community, multiple issues with AFP have been
resolved.
Several ZFS options have been exposed to the GUI, and the ability to edit
ZFS options such as quotas, compression, reservations on existing volumes
and datasets has been added.
Notable bug fixes:
Several errors that were causing volume creation to fail have been resolved.
User passwords were not propagating to the password files properly on creation,
this was causing issues with ssh access as well as samba access.
iSCSI device extents were not being dropped from the database correctly when
they were deleted, leading to devices "vanishing" from the GUI.
A bug in the way FreeBSD handles empty removable devices was causing processing
of the disk list to fail. If the kernel placed certain removable disks before
traditional disks the failure of the processing would stop the GUI from recognizing
all of the latter devices.
Lockd and statd were not starting when the NFS service was started.
Errata:
The iSCSI Target software does not properly present multiple LUNs per target
to initiators. For the best results use one target per LUN.
Disks with certain configs can get get probed by geom and become essentially
unwritable without manual intervention. For instance, if you use disks that
have previously had a geom_mirror on them the system may pick that up and
the disks will be unavailable until the existing gmirror is stopped and
destroyed.

Changes for v8.0 RC 2 - v8.0 RC 3

Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.0 Release Candidate 3
---------------------------------------------------
Release Candidate 3 contains both bug fixes and new functionality over previous
Release candidates and betas.
FreeNAS 8 should be installed to a USB stick or Compact Flash device. It
requires a device of at least 1 GB in size. In a departure from FreeNAS 0.7
releases, the OS drive can not be used as a component for a volume, nor can
it be partitioned for sharing.
New in 8.0-RC3:
There is a volume importer in the storage application. This has been tested
in scenarios that are limited to what can be devised in our labs. It has in
no way been subjected to the conditions in may encounter in the wild. USE AT
YOUR OWN RISK. The process is believed to be non-destructive, and where it's
been observed to fail it has not touched the volumes. That being said, valid
verified backups are recommended for volumes that are used for this. In real
world conditions it may, in the words of pjd@, "Hurt your teddy bear."
Since the ZFS upgrade procedure is non-reversable, this must be run manually.
Please do not upgrade your pools unless you are absolutely sure you'll
never want to go back to other systems.
For clarity, zpool upgrade is a ONE-WAY street. There is no reversing it,
and there is no way for a system with an older version of ZFS to access
pools that have been upgraded.
Support for 3ware 6bps RAID controllers has been added, as has the CLI
utility tw_cli for managing 3ware RAID controllers.
The GUI supports access via HTTP or HTTPS protocols.
Link Aggregations can be created and configured from the CLI interface.
Notable bug fixes:
- A bug that prevented AFP from properly sharing ZFS Datasets has been fixed.
- The firmware upgrade via GUI process is more streamlined and bugs in
it have been fixed.
- iSCSI support has been thoroughly tested and improved.
- Split anonymous/authenticated access to CIFS shares is now supported.
Errata:
The iSCSI Target software does not properly present multiple LUNs per target
to initiators. For the best results use one target per LUN.
Creating device extents then deleting them in the iSCSI config does not
properly cause the disk to show back up on the free list. A GUI reload
is required to properly populate the list.
Disks with certain configs can get get probed by geom and become essentially
unwritable without manual intervention. For instance, if you use disks that
have previously had a geom_mirror on them the system may pick that up and
the disks will be unavailable until the existing gmirror is stopped and
destroyed.
Occasionally passwords for users are not properly propigated to the CIFS
database. This will expose itself as failure to authenticate to CIFS
shares. The easiest workaround is to edit the user and re-enter and save
the password.
UPGRADES FROM FREENAS 0.7x ARE STILL UNSUPPORTED
The system has no way to import configuration settings from 0.7 versions
of FreeNAS, nor is there any sort of volume importer yet that will preserve
data on existing volumes. Attempting to upgrade from 0.7 will result in the
loss of your configuration, your data, or quite likely, both.
Usability of this Release Candidate:
At this point the feature set of FreeNAS 8 is complete enough to perform file
sharing tasks via NFS or Samba, using local users, AD, or LDAP, as well as
allowing the system to operate as an iSCSI target. The base technology of
FreeBSD, ZFS, Samba, and NFS is very stable and very well tested. While there
isn't an upgrade path from other storage solutions, including previous FreeNAS
0.7 releases, the system is suitable for new deployments provided the
featureset is a good match for the requirements.
A note about versions:
There's been a huge jump in version numbers. The intention is to have the
version number reflect the base version of FreeBSD used. This RC is based
on FreeBSD 8.2, but this version of FreeNAS is called 8.0 as there are future
plans to add functionality that will get the versions caught up. Once
FreeNAS 8.2 is out, a suffix will be added, such as 8.2.1, 8.2.2, etc.
A note about filesystem technologies:
While this system does support UFS based volumes, such as gmirror, gstripe,
graid3, the primary focus is on ZFS. Many of the features are provided via
ZFS datasets, such as the ability to share subsets of volumes via CIFS.
This delta is likely to increase over time, the compelling reasons to use
ZFS are likely to increase as well. It is highly recommended to use ZFS
for new volumes, even if the underlying device is a volume exported by a
hardware RAID controller.
Upgrade images:
The following two upgrade images are available for versions of FreeNAS 8 that
have GUI upgrade capability.
Filename:
FreeNAS-8.0-RC3-amd64.xz
SHA256 Hash:
a981bb30f727faf3f1d1bec5a013668f6c83f16b71b1d7dea5c4c739bd31d450
Filename:
FreeNAS-8.0-RC3-i386.xz
SHA256 Hash:
beb003f4211fc1f3678b0fde68dcbad0b486778a79fed6ba4fce804426ea9b62

Changes for v8.0 RC 1 - v8.0 RC 2

Release Candidate 2 contains fixes for issues that were encountered in RC1. It
does not contain the list of new functionality that was scheduled for RC2, but
it contains enough fixes that it was a significant improvement over RC1.
FreeNAS 8 should be installed to a USB stick or Compact Flash device. It
requires a device of at least 1 GB in size. In a departure from FreeNAS 0.7
releases, the OS drive can not be used as a component for a volume, nor can
it be partitioned for sharing.
New in this RC:
GUI Firmware upgrades are supported, but do to a bug in the interaction between
FreeBSD, lighttpd, and python they work intermittantly. There is a work-around
which wasn't implemented in time for RC2. The procedure involves running
commands from the CLI shell.
# mount -uw /
# echo 'server.network-backend = "writev"' >> \
/usr/local/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
# mount -r /
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/lighttpd restart
The upgrade procedure takes advantage of nanobsd by writing the OS to the
"inactive" slice. If you are running off slice 1 the firmawre will be written
to slice 2, and vice versa. The boot label is automatically updated, but
during the initial boot the slice can be choosen manually, allowing for an
easy reversal of an undesirable upgrade.
To use the GUI upgrade feature, first configure a storage volume. This is
used for temporary storage space of the image. The temporary location is
selected from system -> settings -> temporary directory. Once that is
configured, select the Firmware Update tab. Browse to the firmware on your
machine and choose it. Currently there are two firmwares available:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8/FreeNAS-8.0-RC2-i386.xz/download SHA256 ff31a6e69244d264e1f5e2a395e36aa308256ebfce708112ae22adbd2de2e083
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8/FreeNAS-8.0-RC2-amd64.xz/download SHA256 29a131e11e4df9ae1a15d45bbd157ca672acc707d3eb98ae71a56ba175e1093d
Enter the correct SHA256 hash, and upload the firmware. It will report success
on completion, go ahead and reboot the FreeNAS box at that point and it will
boot off the new firmware.
Upgrading via the install iso is still supported, simply boot off the new ISO
and select your boot device from the menu. If you are upgrading from a
snapshot older than RC1 this is the only supported upgrade method.
The bugs in the FTP configuration are sorted out. The GUI will now
generate valid configurations or refuse to save invalid values with an
appropriate error message.
The system now will send email about LSI RAID controller events if the email
service is properly configured.
Configuration bugs in the AFP service have been squashed, although there are
still mixed reports concerning AFP.
Errata:
Volumes created with previous snapshots, betas, or builds from the sourceforge
repo contained a bug in their GPT labeling scheme. This labelling can result
in reduced performance when the underlying device is a hardware RAID 5 or 6
array. It is recommended that if the underlying storage device is a hardware
RAID controller using RAID 5/6/50/60 that volumes be deleted and recreated.
The iSCSI service can generate broken configs for some scenarios. These will
get fixed as feedback is received, as the number of initiators and their various
configurations creates a large matrix of possibilities. The initiators that are
fairly well tested are the MS Software initiator, the VMware ESXi 4.x initiator,
and the FreeBSD initiator.
Link Aggregations, also know as LACP/LAGG/interface bonding, require a reboot
to take effect. This is not enforced by the GUI or by the CLI. Furthermore
there is no way to create a Link Aggregation from the CLI, so the initial setup
is at best non-intuitive. From the CLI you can configure a physical interface
so that the web GUI can be accessed, then from the web GUI a Link Aggregation
can be created, then the physical interface can be deleted, the box rebooted,
and then from the CLI the link aggregation can be selected for configuration.
Once it is configured the box should be rebooted a final time.
Replacing failed drives in arrays isn't possible through the GUI, and due
to the drives being GPT labeled replacing them via the CLI isn't easy either,
nor is the replacement procedure documented at this moment. While the
documentation will be available very shortly, the real solution will be via
the GUI.
The GUI is still HTTP only. That will be rectified shortly, but for the
moment accessing the GUI over a hostile network (such as the internet) is
not a good idea.
Some Mac users are reporting substandard CIFS write speeds. The exact
conditions for this are unknown.
UPGRADES FROM FREENAS 0.7x ARE STILL UNSUPPORTED
The system has no way to import configuration settings from 0.7 versions
of FreeNAS, nor is there any sort of volume importer yet that will preserve
data on existing volumes. Attempting to upgrade from 0.7 will result in the
loss of your configuration, your data, or quite likely, both.
IMPORTING EXISTING STORAGE VOLUMES IS UNSUPPORTED
We will get that working very shortly, for now, don't feed disks with data
you care about to FreeNAS 8
Usability of this Release Candidate:
At this point the feature set of FreeNAS 8 is complete enough to perform file
sharing tasks via NFS or Samba, using local users, AD, or LDAP, as well as
allowing the system to operate as an iSCSI target. The base technology of
FreeBSD, ZFS, Samba, and NFS is very stable and very well tested. While there
isn't an upgrade path from other storage solutions, including previous FreeNAS
0.7 releases, the system is suitable for new deployments provided the
featureset is a good match for the requirements.
A note about versions:
There's been a huge jump in version numbers. The intention is to have the
version number reflect the base version of FreeBSD used. This RC is based
on FreeBSD 8.2, but this version of FreeNAS is called 8.0 as there are future
plans to add functionality that will get the versions caught up. Once
FreeNAS 8.2 is out, a suffix will be added, such as 8.2.1, 8.2.2, etc.
A note about filesystem technologies:
While this system does support UFS based volumes, such as gmirror, gstripe,
graid3, the primary focus is on ZFS. Many of the features are provided via
ZFS datasets, such as the ability to share subsets of volumes via CIFS.
This delta is likely to increase over time, the compelling reasons to use
ZFS are likely to increase as well. It is highly recommended to use ZFS
for new volumes, even if the underlying device is a volume exported by a
hardware RAID controller.

Changes for v0.7.1 - v0.7.2

Samba 3.5.4.
AIO setting from WebGUI.
AMD CPU on-die digital thermal sensor.
Advanced Format 4KB sector (UFS/GPT data partition). (data partition in the boot disk is always aligned to 32KB)
ZFS cache/log device and 4KB device in the pool.
Logical Block Length of iSCSI disk.
Virtual machine guest support (VMware and VirtualBox).
iSCSI boot/install (experimental).

Changes for v0.7 - v0.7.1

Majors changes:
Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.9.
Upgrade istgt to version 20100407.
Upgrade msmtp to 1.4.19.
Upgrade transmission to 1.92.
Upgrade PHP to 5.2.12 (Thanks to Xin LI).
Upgrade fuppes to 0.660.
Upgrade rsync to 3.0.7.
Upgrade inadyn-mt to 02.18.14.
Upgrade netatalk to 2.0.5.
Upgrade bash to 4.0.35.
Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.26.
Upgrade proftpd to 1.3.2e.
Upgrade iSCSI initiator to 2.2.4.
Upgrade sipcalc to 1.1.5.
Upgrade nano to 2.2.3.
Minors changes:
Add iSCSI target removable media control.
Modify Samba default buffer size.
Modify Tuning values.
Add new MIB in System|Advanced|sysctl.conf.
Add English, Italian and Polish UTF-8 with English menu in File Manager (quixp lorer) and set European language files to UTF-8.
Set all European WebGUI languages to UTF-8.
Restrict NFS sharing directory with alldirs.
Add serial console support.
Add aio(asynchronous I/O) support but default is disabled.
Modify /mnt and /tmp permission.
Add custom script in email report (FR 2964946).
Add Japanese in File Manager (quixplorer).
Add incomplete directory in Services|BitTorrent.
Bug fixes:
Fix bug in istgt script.
Fix Samba 'Unknown socket option IPTOS_LOWDELAY' messages. Thanks to Daisuke Aoyama. (BR 2894782|2858262).
Fix mt-daapd/firefly error 'Undefined symbol avcodec_decode_audio' (BR 2895960).
Fix bug in iSCSI initiator script (BR 2916334). Thanks to Daisuke Aoyama.
Set home dir for Quixplorer users. Thanks to Daisuke Aoyama.
Remove useless character in email (BR 2928068).
Every reboot increases the number of 'proc' entries in fstab on 'full' installations (BR 2929029).
Fix message in console menu 'Reset WebGUI password' (BR 2929338).
Fix initial resolv issue.
Fix full install upgrade error.
Fix nsswitch error when ldap is enabled (BR 2936505).
Fix transmission umask does not work (BR 2945242).
Fix WebGUI allows usernames longer than 16 characters (BR 2934168).
Fix cannot check WebGUI default port.
Fix fail to apply if webserver authentication is enabled and documentroot is missing.
Fix scheduled self-test does not work when one digit is contained in config.
Fix transmission script does not support spaces (BR 2872949).
Fix default configdir is wrong (BR 2896621).
Fix no tm option on AFP share (BR 2950743).
Fix SMART error on SMART disabled devices.
Fix the partition problem when installation on the disk > 1TB.
Fix union /var is useless (BR 2964649).
Fix warning in quixploler when using Russian.
Fix transmission_user = root does not work.
Fix spaces in password does not work for su, etc.