FreeNAS offers a stable platform for home and office use. From a simple file server to a connected media hub, it's possible to configure FreeNAS to perform a variety of tasks on behalf of other PCs on the same network. Thankfully, to install the OS, it doesn't require much time or knowledge.
I also want to go a little deeper into FreeNAS this time, so there will be a couple articles popping up in the near future, covering topics like Plex, VM’s and so on. Also, check out my FreeNAS Build. Serving me reliably for almost 2 years. I will guide you through the whole installation and initial configuration including creating the first.
What you need to get up and running with FreeNAS
- Select which storage device you wish to Install FreeNAS to. The FreeNAS OS Takes up very little space, but will consume all available space. If possible, do not waste a Large HD on the FreeNAS Install!! If installing to Flash Drive ( 4gb+) Make sure that the flash drive has been wiped clean.
- Installing FreeNAS OS When firing up your FreeNAS PC, you should see a boot screen that displays FreeNAS as an option. You'll want to select this to continue. If nothing appears, you may need to.
- Welcome ThisGuidecoverstheinstallationanduseofFreeNAS® 11.1. The FreeNAS® User Guide is a work in progress and relies on the contributions of many individuals.
- NOTE: This guide implies you have a working FreeNAS 9.3 instance running with at least two standard jails – one for the web application and one for the SQL database. Anything appearing like this can be considered commands that can be entered directly into the command line prompt. Regardless of.
- In this guide, you’ll learn the steps to install FreeNAS version 11.2 or higher on a device using USB, Solid-State Drive (SSD), or Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to share files and media across your home or work network. Actually, the installation process of FreeNAS is simple, you only need compatible hardware and a USB bootable media with the.
Before you begin, you need to ensure that you have everything you need. This includes the following:
- A device that meets minimum requirements (see the link above).
- 8GB USB drive (for OS).
- 1GB USB drive or DVD (for OS install).
- FreeNAS .iso file.
In order to install FreeNAS on a free PC, you need to make sure the USB drive is bootable and has all the necessary files. Because disks are fading out in favor of removable media, here's how you can get a USB drive ready to go:
- Download FreeNAS.
- Insert your USB drive.
- Download Rufus (a program to create bootable USB drives).
Run Rufus, and select the USB.
- Click the disk image next to Create a bootable disk using.
- Navigate to the downloaded FreeNAS .iso file.
- Select the .iso file.
- Click Start.
The USB drive is now ready to be inserted into the FreeNAS PC to install the OS.
Installing FreeNAS OS
When firing up your FreeNAS PC, you should see a boot screen that displays FreeNAS as an option. You'll want to select this to continue. If nothing appears, you may need to hit the boot menu shortcut for your motherboard (ours is F11) during startup or make sure the USB drive has been successfully set up. Then do the following:
- Select Install/Upgrade.
- Select the spare USB drive (FreeNAS will not install on the one containing the OS so fear not if you select the wrong one) with the spacebar.
- Hit Ok.
- Enter a root password.
- Hit Ok.
- Wait for the OS to install.
- Reboot the PC.
Once FreeNAS has loaded, it's possible to select from various entries on the main menu, or detach the PC from a monitor and log in to the web interface from another PC on the same network. The FreeNAS machine should provide a URL, which is essentially the IP that has been assigned to that particular machine by the network. For example, we access our FreeNAS test machine using 192.168.0.13 in the web browser.
Initial FreeNAS setup
After successfully connecting to the machine from another PC, the web interface will walk you through configuring various settings, including language, keyboard layout, and more. It's possible to exit this wizard and do everything manually. We'll run through the Wizard in our setup process to keep everything simple.
Enter a pool name (can be unique or simply 'storage').
- Click Next.
- Choose RAID setup (can be left on 'automatic').
- Click Next.
- Select desired Directory Service (can be left on Active).
- Click Next.
- Enter share name.
- Select Windows (SMB).
Hit Ownership.
- Enter a username and select Create User.
- Enter a password.
- Create a new group and select Create Group.
- Alter permission boxes to reflect what we have.
- Hit Return.
- Hit Add.
Click Confirm.
- Click Next.
- Only configure this window if you wish to set up email on the server.
- Click Next.
The web interface will now run through the configuration and apply all changes you made. This may take some time.
Setting up volumes
Here's how to set up a new volume:
- Go to Storage > Volumes > Volume Manager.
- Enter a name for the volume.
- Add an available disk.
- Configure the volume layout.
- Click Add volume.
Now you'll need to configure services for sharing and access.
- Click on Services at the top.
- Enable SMB.
That's it. This is a basic setup using FreeNAS that will now allow for connections to be made via OS file viewer programs (Explorer on Windows and Finder on macOS, for example). Simply connect through the respective GUI options or directly by using the same IP address that is used for the web interface. A credentials window will pop up asking for login information. Enter the same user account and password you created back in the wizard.
Mapping Windows
In Windows, you can map the FreeNAS location to a specific drive letter so it appears in Windows Explorer as an internal hard drive. Here's how:
- Open Explorer.
- Right-click on This PC.
- Click on Map network drive....
Choose a drive letter.
- Hit Browse.
- Browse to the network location.
- Click Ok.
- Click Finish.
Now a virtual drive will appear in Explorer, allowing for more convenient access.
Your turn to play around
Now's the time to play around with FreeNAS, exploring different aspects of the OS through the web admin interface. You can activate various services that you may desire to use, remembering that this is quite the capable platform that can be deployed as a media center with full support for popular media services, such as Plex. The best part about learning through trial and error is that it doesn't take long to reinstall the OS if you happen to really mess everything up.
Got FreeNAS up and running? Let us know in the comments what you're using it for.
Updated August 15, 2018: We updated this guide to include the latest info on installing FreeNAS.
FreeNAS is an open source network-attached storage (NAS) operating system based on BSD and the ZFS filesystem with integrated RAID support. FreeNAS operating system is totally based on BSD and can be installed on virtual machines or in physical machines to share data storage via a computer network.
Using FreeNAS software you can easily build your own centralized and easily accessible data storage at home and same can be managed via a dedicated web interface originally written in PHP language, later re-written using Python/Django language from scratch.
FreeNAS supports Linux, Windows and OS X and numerous virtualization hosts such as VMware and XenServer using protocols such as CIFS (SAMBA), NFS, iSCSI, FTP, rsync etc.
Home users can build FreeNAS storage to store there videos, files and stream from FreeNAS to every network devices or to smart TVs etc. If you are planning to build torrent site, you can use FreeNAS to setup one for you. There are several plugins available for FreeNAS which is as follows.
- Own-Cloud = To build Own cloud Storage.
- Plex Media Server = To build Own video streaming server.
- Bacula = Used as a network backup server.
- Transmission = Create torrent server.
Features of FreeNAS
- Support ZFS file system.
- Support inbuilt RAID with parity support, cronjobs, Smart tests.
- Supports Directory services such as LDAP, NIS, NT4, Active Directory.
- Support NFS, FTP, SSH, CIFS, iSCSI Protocols.
- Supports for windows based file-system such as NTFS and FAT.
- Periodic Snapshot and replication support, rsync.
- Web interface with GUI and SSL.
- Reporting systems such as email notification.
- Disk Encryption and much more features are available.
- Adding UPS for Backup power systems.
- A Rich GUI graph reports for Memory, CPU, Storage, Network etc..
In this FreeNAS 4-article series, we will cover the installation and configuration of FreeNAS with storage and in later articles will cover setting up a video streaming & torrent server.
My Server Setup
Download FreeNAS 9.2.1.8
To set up a FreeNAS operating system, you will need to download latest stable installation ISO Image (i.e. version 9.2.1.8) from the FreeNAS download page, or you can use the following links to download image for your system architecture. I’ve included download links for CD/DVD and USB bootable images of FreeNAS, so select and download images as per your requirements.
CD/DVD Images
- Download FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x86.iso – (185MB)
- Download FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x64.iso – (199MB)
USB Images
- Download FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x86.img.xz – (135MB)
- Download FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x64.img.xz – (143MB)
Installing FreeNAS System
1. Now its time to install and configure FreeNAS. As every Operating system FreeNAS too have the similar steps for installation and it won’t take more than 2 minutes to Install.
2. After you download FreeNAS ISO image from the links above, if you’ve a CD/DVD drive, burn that ISO image to a disc and then boot it, or if you’re using USB Image you can directly boot it.
3. After booting the system with FreeNAS image, by default it will start the installation, if not we have to press enter to continue the installation.
4. For installing FreeNAS, we have to choose Install/Upgrade. This will install the FreeNAS if its not existed.
Install FreeNAS
5. In this step, we need to choose where FreeNAS should be installed. We have total 9 drives, so here I’m using first 5 GB ada0 drive for my FreeNAS installation and other 8 Drives are used for Storage (will be discussed in next part of this series).
Choose ada0 drive from the listed drives and press Enter to continue.
6. After selecting the drive, on the next screen you will warned for data loss, If you have any important data in that selected drive, please take a backup before installing FreeNAS on the drive.
After pressing ‘Yes‘ all the data in that drive will be destroyed during installation.
Warning: Please take a backup of selected drive before starting FreeNAS setup.
Freenas 11.1 Install Guide
Drive Data Loss Warning
7. After few minutes it will take us to the end of the installation process. Choose OK to reboot the machine and remove the installation Disk.
8. On the next screen, choose the 3rd option to reboot the machine and remove the setup Disk.
Reboot System
9. After FreeNAS setup completed, we can get the console setup menu to add the DNS IP Address to access the FreeNAS web dashboard.
By default at first it will assign a dynamic IP address and we have to configure it manually. Here we can see that, we’ve got a dynamic IP address as 192.168.0.10 now we have to configure our static ip.
Note: First let me configure the DNS, I have a valid name resolver at my end, so let me configure my DNS settings.
Freenas 11 Setup Guide
10. To configure DNS choose number 6 and press enter, then we have to enter the DNS information such as domain, IP address of DNS server and Press Enter.
Configuring the DNS settings before IP Address will resolve the name from DNS. In your side, if you don’t have a valid DNS server you can skip this step.
Configure DNS for FreeNAS
11. After configuring DNS settings, now it’s time to configure network interface. To configure the interface, press 1 and select the default first interface.
Use the following settings for configuring static IP:
Freenas
Finally, at last choosing IPv6 no and pressing enter will configure the interface and get saved automatically.
12. After configuring network interface settings, you will see that the IP address has been changed to 192.168.0.225 from 192.168.0.10. Now we can use this address to access FreeNAS GUI from any one of the web browser.
Confirm FreeNAS IPaddress
13. To access the FreeNAS GUI interface, open the web browser and enter the ip address which we had used to configure the interface setup.
At first login, we need to define a PASSWORD for the root user to access GUI interface. Set a strong password for your storage server and continue login.
14. After login, you will see informations about FreeNAS server such as domain name, version, total memory available, system time, up time, system load, etc.
FreeNAS Server Information
That’s it, In this article, we’ve installed and configured the FreeNAS server. In the next article we will be discussing on how to configure FreeNAS settings in step by step process and how can we define storage in FreeNAS, till then stay tuned for updates and don’t forget to add your comments.
Read More: http://www.freenas.org/