My NAS Project [Updated]

Hello L1,

Pleased to say that I worked some kinks1 out and have installed FreeNAS 11 (Stable) on my new machine.

Specs for nerds

Dell Poweredge R410
Height | 1U
RAM | 24 GiB ECC
CPU | (2x) Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz
Storage | (4x) Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 300 GB

I am quite excited to finally have a robust solution for my needs/desires.

What I plan to do next is install Nextcloud (documents) and Gitlab (code projects) onto it. I shall update this post to reflect my future changes. :grin:

Update 170529:

So far I wasn't yet able to get nextcloud or Gitlab working via jails. I did however get a dedicated Factorio server up and rolling, and have been enjoying the fruits of my labor. I feel more confident with jails and VM's in FreeNAS and with a little more tinkering I think I should get it.

Update 170612:

I have a better understanding of how the filesystem works. Transferred all my previous videos to my HTPC and even got ZFS working on that for my storage pool. Regular documents have been moved to the fileserver.

I also decided to change my LAN subnet from 10.0.0.0/24 to 192.168.0.0/27. I may move to VLANs sometime in the future, but I figured this would be a good starting point for isolating servers from clients.

I just setup a NFS and mapped it in my fstab. Feels great to have moved all my stuff over.

I removed my directories: ~/Documents, ~/Music, ~/Pictures, ~/Projects; then mapped them to my NFS with Symbolic links.
I.E

ln -s /mnt/nfs/$USER/Documents /home/$USER/Documents

Feels great to have this functionality back.


  1. kinks
6 Likes

FYI a good lightweight alternative to Gitlab is https://gogs.io/. It runs fine in a jail, and various git related tools have no issues using it. Gitlab is good for large enterprise setups, like Tesla.

I have also had a good run so far with Freenas 11, after I accidently destroyed my Freenas Corral installation, and decided to move on.

Have you considered Seafile instead of NextCloud. Iy you have only file sync in mind it should be the better solution.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll take a look.

Still new to the concept of how jails work though.

Thanks, looking into this now. I just liked nextcloud as I have used it in the past and it was pretty fun with the all self-hosted apps available for it.

1 Like

I like the jails setup. They don't seem to take as much resources as vm+docker containers, and perform better in my uneducated opinion. Most importantly if you botch one, you can just delete it and try again without trashing the entire system.

2 Likes

See latest edit. :slight_smile: