5 Key Reasons to Consider Open Source Storage Over Commercial Offerings
Although easy to overlook, storage is the most fundamental part of any computing project—without storage, there is neither code nor data! The right storage solution should be accessible, reliable, easy to maintain, and free from vendor lock-in. In this article, we examine some of the reasons that open source software is a natural fit for this crucial component.
Part 3: Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS with ZFS
Today, we’ll concentrate on exposing the data on your NAS to the network using NFS, Samba, and iSCSI shares. Network File System (NFS) is a commonly used protocol for accessing NAS systems, especially with Linux or FreeBSD clients. We’ll provide an overview of each type of share to help guide you in deciding which is most suited to the clients that will be accessing the NAS.
Let’s examine how non-developer contributors enhance user experience, improve bug reporting, and influence feature requests, all while becoming advocates and evangelists for your open source project.
Contributing to Open Source Beyond Software Development
Open source projects thrive because of the community built around them. However, non-coding contributions are frequently overlooked and under appreciated.
Let’s examine how non-developer contributors enhance user experience, improve bug reporting, and influence feature requests, all while becoming advocates and evangelists for your open source project.
Part 2: Tuning Your FreeBSD Configuration for Your NAS
Building your own NAS isn’t just about having the right storage configuration. It starts with the right hardware, the right OS setup, and finally going through the right choice for your storage – OpenZFS. In this edition of our 4-part article series on how to build your own NAS we discuss about fine tuning your FreeBSD OS for excellent NAS performance.
Improving Replication Security With OpenZFS Delegation
OpenZFS privilege delegation is an extremely powerful tool that enables system administrators to carefully provide unprivileged users the ability to manage ZFS datasets and zvols at an extremely precise level —with much finer control than would be possible with generic security tools like sudo or doas.
Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS with ZFS
Let’s talk about building your own NAS on FreeBSD. The first step – researching hardware. When it comes to researching NAS hardware, it’s easy to get lost in the dizzying array of technologies, vendor datasheets touting performance and reliability stats.
While we can’t tell you what hardware to buy in an article, we can discuss some of the factors to consider as you research which hardware best meets your storage requirements.
Tuning recordsize in OpenZFS
For many people, tuning OpenZFS isn’t really necessary—performance on the conservative default settings is more than ample to get what they need done.
However, To get the best performance, matching the recordsize to your application provides a large performance boost. Learn how to match your dataset to your workload.
Should I Upgrade to OpenZFS 2.1?
Beginning with version 13.0, FreeBSD supports the long-anticipated OpenZFS native encryption. If you’ve used FreeBSD’s GELI encryption in the past, you may wonder if switching to OpenZFS native encryption makes sense.
Check out the differences between GELI encryption and OpenZFS native encryption, and the main benefits of native encryption, let’s take a look at how to create an encrypted database and reroot to an encrypted database.
NFS Shares with ZFS
Why would you use the sharenfs property for NFS configuration and how to do so? FreeBSD’s built-in integration of OpenZFS and NFS makes it easy for any administrator to configure and manage NFS shares. By using OpenZFS’ sharenfs property, managing NFS shares can be added to your arsenal of scripts and procedures for monitoring and maintaining the data stored on OpenZFS filesystems.
The FreeBSD Boot Process
Let’s talk about the FreeBSD boot process. It is very robust and complex, as it is well-thought. Find out what are the differences when you boot from UEFI or legacy BIOS, or from GPT and MBR partitioning schemes. Learn what happens when you use ZFS or UFS filesystem.