FreeBSD NAS

19 Nov, 2023

Motivation

I personally use vanilla FreeBSD on a low power PC to handle all my data needs. This setup has served me well over the time, which is why I want to dedicate a few lines of text to it.

Assumption

I assume that the reader uses sudo in this article. You can of course become root by using su or you might leverage doas. This is up to you. sudo works well for me personally, YMMV.

FreeBSD

The installation itself is very easy to do and takes just a couple of minutes. There is nothing special here, it is your standard FreeBSD install with the settings/tweaks you want to do. I, in general, leverage ZFS for the root (/) filesystem - but this is not a requirement. (Chose what works for you)

ZFS setup

Currently I have two 8TB (Two different manufacturers: Seagate and WD) drives in there for my storage needs. The most important part here is creating a ZFS Mirror.

First, I determine what devices I have to work with.

$ sudo camcontrol devlist

Output:

<ST8000DM004-2U9188 0001> at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,ada0)
<Samsung SSD 750 EVO 250GB MAT01B6Q> at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (pass1,ada1)
at scbus2 target 0 lun 0 (pass2,ada2)
<AHCI SGPIO Enclosure 2.00 0001> at scbus4 target 0 lun 0 (pass3,ses0)

You can see here that there are two hard disks currently in the system (The system disk being a SSD).

Next, creating the ZFS Mirror:

$ sudo zpool create nas mirror /dev/ada0 /dev/ada2

The array is now mounted under /nas. From this point on I can set up all the necessary software.

One thing left to do is setting the permissions of the newly created filesystem as follows.

$ cd /nas
$ sudo chown x:x -R .

Beware: Make sure you pick the correct username/uid.

NFS

Now it is time to setup NFS and the given share(s).

I start by editing /etc/exports.

$ sudo vi /etc/exports

Following, the content of my /etc/exports file.

/nas 10.0.7.5

Simple stuff in fact.

Last thing to do is configuring /etc/rc.conf.local.

Hint: You could use /etc/rc.conf directly, but separating your changes from the main rc.conf file is a good thing.

Added lines to /etc/rc.conf.local:

rpcbind_enable=“YES”
nfs_server_enable=“YES”
mountd_enable=“YES”

I could have started the NFS service at this point and be done, but I always reboot the system to make sure everything is on point.

$ sudo reboot

After the machine is back up again I will mount the NFS share over on my desktop/laptop system.

(client)$ sudo mount -t nfs 10.0.5.50:/nas /mnt/nas -o rw

Success! Everything is pretty much ready to go.

One last final thing to do, or what I do, is edit the /etc/fstab file on my system to auto mount the share.

(client)$ sudo vim /etc/fstab

Adding the following line.

10.0.5.50:/nas /mnt/nas nfs rw,nofail 0 0

Final Notes

In general, the possibilities are endless. FreeBSD does provide much more than what is described here.
To be fair, this is more of a “quick and dirty” howto to get the ball rolling.

Yet Another SysAdmin