 FreeNAS 11.3 Beta 1 was released on November 5th, 2019. I updated one of the test systems we have to it and I really like the updates to the new interface. This is the first kind of refresh, was an 11.2 of the interface and then 11.3, they've tweaked it, tuned it, improved it. Now, they've been doing it with each one of the updates. U7 should be out just in a few weeks, I believe. And while that does represent seven updates of the 11.2 series, 11.3, they've really polished it up a bit. And I'm gonna get into that in a second here. Now, of course, at your own risk, this is Beta 1, so obviously if this is probably not something good for production. And this is not something I've really worked with much and maybe at some point I'll do a video on there. Setting up FreeNAS as a domain controller, they have some very specific instructions if you're doing that to make sure that the beta works. So if you wanna use or continue to use that, just updating it will bring settings in, but they won't work properly and they have some instructions down below for like the migration process. And it's basically dropping down into Samba level to do each step of the migration, but they have the instructions here. All right, let's talk about real quick how to load it. Drops to the command line. It's not yet supported for an update so you can't switch to the beta train yet when you're doing the update. So you do have to do the command line, but let's talk about what is actually built in here. So new peer credentials for API, creating managing credentials, the SSH connection and SSH keypeer screen have been added as a wizard to make it. So this is it for connecting things via SSH, believe other FreeNAS boxes. And that's actually done here, system SSH connections, add, and you can connect it to, and I haven't really tested this, but another FreeNAS box. So I thought that was kinda cool. They added that. That's something I've used a lot, but I guess I've used a wizard to do when I did my replication demo. So I guess it's kind of an extension of that so the FreeNAS can talk to each other. New transport API as Netcat support, Netcat support for getting improved speed of transfers. Snapshot creation has been decoupled from replication tasks. A lot of replications mainly created. This is kinda cool because it was always kind of a one thing, it was one piece. Now they've got it so you have options and added more expandability in there. Configurable snapshot retention on the remote side. So that's cool. Replication wizard. It sounds like they added this because it was already kind of a replication wizard, but I haven't played with this too much yet. Because I need to set up, I'm gonna set two of them up both on the new one so I can completely understand how the replication wizard works, but it has a couple different, including local replication, which if I'm not mistaken, I didn't test this, but a few people had mentioned in the comments on my replication video. You can replicate between pools on the same system by, instead of specifying a remote free NAS, but by specifying a local host. I think that's still true. Sounds like they just added it in there as a feature. So we go over here and let's build a replication task. On this system, destination, on this system, source, dataset, data. I only have one on here. So that's actually kinda cool. So you can actually replicate internally right here through the replication task and then have another dataset be the destination for the replication. That's kinda cool. And the reason you may wanna do this, the use case would be, so you could go through and have two groups of drives, two separate ones, and then maybe you want to have it copy all of it from these drives over to another set of drives. Because obviously copying out to the same drives, it may have a more limited use case versus when you wanna do it between sets of drives. If not, you'd probably just do normal snapshots because if it's all in the same drive pool, you can just do it. But depending on your use case, that is now done right through here through the replication tasks. Network interface management has been redesigned to streamline the management on both physical and virtual interfaces using one screen. Now, that is something that I guess was a little confusing in the past, and this is the way, well, confusing if you're new to FreeNAS, I should say, it's something because I've been doing it for a while, I never really had a problem with it, but it was the way they handled the networking tasks in here. So it would be all separated. Now they've made it just one. So if we go over here to network summary, here's the default route, here's the VLAN 69 that's set up on here and this. So we can get this and go to interfaces. Now we can add as one type. So we choose the type, is it a bridge, link aggregation, or VLAN. It's not in any separate places. And just for reference, if we go over here, we go to network, and this is the 11.2 U6. This is one of my, this is actually my video storage server. And we go over here to interfaces, add, you choose the nick, name the interface, and you can see that it would VLANs is still a separate piece over here. And of course, separate again is, you would do link aggregation. So now they've just merged it all into one. So I like that that's definitely a nice feature. And it's consolidation. The alert system has been improved support for one-shot critical errors have been added. These alerts remain active until dismissed by the user. Alert settings have been recognized. Alerts group functionality rather than alphabetically or per alert severity thresholds are configurable. And periodic alert scripts by the alert framework. And this is something I like that they've kind of expanded all this so the system can kind of easily notify you when there's a problem. It did notify you, but it didn't give you certain amounts of granular control over that information. Now they've expanded that a lot. So it's great. Now the dashboard rewrite is something I like. You're gonna notice the dashboard being a lot faster and a lot cleaner. I really like the way they laid this out. So when you go here, matter of fact, when you go from different, let's just drop over here. Now if we do that here, and sometimes I just didn't feel as though it was quite a snappy. And I've had times and I remember in the very first in U1, like right here, how long it took to pull the bandwidth. That was a common thing where it just didn't, it kind of paused a lot. And they've done a lot of enhancements, but I guess they did a lot of code rework to lazy load it better and things like that. Also the way that dynamically loads and has this information on here, this is kind of cool. So I know I have this much free, this much dedicated to ZFS cache and services suck up 1.9 gigs. Also this little graphics, they've added behind each thing to show like the network interfaces on the panel here. This is nice. And then the reporting menus, same thing. It's doing the lazy load. So it's trying to load everything at once. And if I play over here to reporting, there's no lazy load. And what lazy load is if you're not familiar is it can not load some of the things on the screen so it doesn't suck up all the browser memory. And this is a weird thing I've noticed sometimes if I leave free NAS up on the screen for a long time, like in a browser tab, sometimes that browser tab may pause or lock up. I don't know if it's just some memory issues or whatnot, but same problems do not seem to be occurring in the new one. So I think they've just streamlined it and made it a lot more efficient. When you get a lot of detail, I'll leave a link to all this for you through all the detail in here. The ACL manager is probably gonna need its own video. And I bring that up because when you're setting up the services and you do window sharing, I actually go over to your storage and pool and I created just a basic window share and the data set here. And I go to edit permissions. Data set has complex ACLs. So instead of going to normal permissions like if it was a UNIX or NFS share, it says, oh wait, you've set this up as Samba. Let's go advanced. And it gives you group options, group allow, basic permission types, full permissions, flag type, basic advanced. And it lets you dig in a lot more to some of the permissions. And it's got some of the wizards in here. So you can go through here and add ACL item. Actually you can add, add, add, add, add, add. And brand new change and delegate some of these permission types. So who has permission to what? So you can create group owner, everyone. And this is, I'm not dug into all the features and what all it can do, but there is a lot in here it can do. So it also has the option to strip them out if you goof it all up. So I'm gonna take canceled, so I don't have to mess with that. But I like this effect that this gives you way more advanced features for natively handling all the access control lists inside of here. So that's a pretty big improvement they're gonna have. The ice cozy wizard. Let's play with that real quick. So you go to your services and we go over to ice cozy. We have a wizard button. And I already have a Zvol created. It does require that you at least have done that already. So we're on device and we'll go scuzzy wizard. I just created a device called scuzzy wizard. And then was it gonna connect to a VMware, a Zen server, legacy OS or modern, modern OS. So it kind of has some different options on there. So legacy OS extent block 512, modern OS extent block 4K, extent block 512 with Zen compact mode. So now we can just go next. What is the portal? Create a new one. I have an existing portal already created. So it'll work for that. I'm not gonna use any of that and submit. Whoops. Gotta use lowercase. This is one bug I did notice. I actually repeated this kind of on purpose. Maybe mental accident again. It does require that you have it lowercase but it should give you that error at the beginning, I think, not wait till you get through it all. But it remembers the things you selected. Submit and voila, we have now created another scuzzy target in there called the scuzzy wizard. So now we have that. So pretty straightforward on actually, it should not allow me, another bug I found, one of these should be one. Let's go back. Can I change it back to zero or would it give me an error? Oh, they have different targets. I had done this before, that's why it's allowing me in different initiators. Okay, so it allowed me to have the same one because there's gonna be a different choice in there. But you get the idea that they've not as a wizard to make it easier. As you can tell, I play with this a couple times and it's definitely handy when you're starting out and I have a whole more in-depth video on how to set up some of the scuzzy types on there. So that's really cool. Significant improvements to SMB sharing include ZFS user quota support, web service discovery support and improved directory listing performance of our newly created shares. So that's really cool that they've done that. And the middleware WebSockets API V2 rewrite is complete, APF A1's backwards compatibility, but we deprecated and no longer available next range release. Things they got rid of. The legacy web interface, sorry, if you're going to the 11.3 train, you're on the new interface, there's no more legacy support. That has been removed. Warden has been removed, which is the older jails manager. So your older jails are broken. And I thought this was interesting, but I have seen this as a problem. If you leave net data running all the time, it has a memory leak apparently that will cause it to eventually exhaust memory. I don't know if this is something because I'm not seeing this on my Linux servers running this, but apparently it is definitely something I've seen on my 11.2 free NAS where it seems to just start sucking up a lot of memory. So they fix whatever problem by removing it. I can't say they fixed it. They just removed it instead of fixing the problem because well, net data didn't fix the problem. And I'm going to do a video at some point on the true command which provides similar reporting plus advanced management capabilities for single or multiple services. If you're not familiar with the true command product, it is a free for the first 50 servers, which I think is kind of a cool feature and a charge after that. So it still is free for the home users, essentially unless you have more than 50 servers at your house, then well, that's a very special use case you have. But true command expands the easy use and power of true NAS and free NAS. So it's kind of giving you a NAS fleet dashboard, single sign on, customized alerts. And it's something I want to dig into at some point. I'm going to do a separate video on this because I have some clients that were asking me about it because they do manage at a data center level a bunch of true NAS boxes. And they have some free NAS boxes as backup. So I've been on my to-do list. I know a few people are asking about it. It's something I'm going to look into. The built-in Docker template has been removed through Docker and so we deploy through the Linux virtual machine. Now, I have not dove into Docker or the VMs that much because I've played a little bit with them on free NAS. I've not really figured it out. And I see that because I've just had a lot of little quirky issues with it. I don't think that the Beehive system feels as developed as other hypervisors I've used. So not really a, maybe a later point when I learn it better or if I take the time to learn it better, I'll dig into it. But I also just don't really have a use case for it. I know some people do is they want to run one run system, but it really, it doesn't have all those advanced migration features that you get in a lot of the other modern hypervisors. So it's pretty basic for running maybe small virtual machines because you want to have one system that runs it. An ideal weighted or an ideal system maybe would be if you wanted to run some type of MDR software in there for recording, having it inside of that type of, instead of a jail, but actually running as its own VM. And then of course living on a great storage pool with ZFS would be a good use case for it. But I just had some issues with it. Known impacts. The system no longer allows some data set to, to an encrypted pool containing a passphrase and some directory services and some SMB state information stored in the system data set. These services not functionally, the system data set is locked or otherwise unavailable is recommended you move the data set to a non-encrypted pool or an encrypted pool not containing a pass phase. I thought this was a little confusing to me so I'll have to dig into that further. But it sounds like allows moving the system data set to an encrypted pool containing. So you can't move it, but I can have an encrypted one. I'm a little fuzzy on that. So I guess I'll need some clarification later. Time machine over SMB shares has been configured to use auxiliary parameter backups and may fail since middleware now performs SMB, et cetera on there. I've not really used time machine much so I can't really speak a lot to that. The default NFS, NFS form mode changed from special to simple. This change recommended synchronized with Samba to false provide better user experience and the legacy behavior is required. And the following auxiliary parameter to all SMB shares special is important at all shares have the same mode settings so they're in a common caching back end to the CID lookups. So hopefully this doesn't break anything. This isn't the way I have to test is how that works. I'll do some testing later, but I'm not, it is still beta. So we're gonna have to do that. A legacy AD monitoring has been replaced by the family health checks. So I really clock skewed check DC with PDC emulator for FISMO roles, test connection to net log on to share connected DC every 10 minutes and instantaneous start of windbind status of domain transition offline. Once again, I'm gonna have to see how this works. I don't know if I'll really be testing this in the beta. We have clients that do have active directory tied in with their pre-nast and it actually works really well. Ever since the 11-2 they've really come a long way from the, I'm thinking way back to the nine series when this was just a big headache to make work. So you can do it pretty well. So it looks like they're fine tuning it a bit more. And the team has really done a great job. I remember speaking a long time ago with Chris Moraday said they, you know, got some really good talents of people that were good at that integration level of active directory nets which really brought the project on. They've been there a little while now. So we're seeing the results of all that of a lot of fine tuning because whether you like the Microsoft's world or not active directory is the glue that holds our access control list together essentially for delegating out permissions in the world of file sharing. So the reality is as much as I wanna be a Linux fanboy all the time I work in the business world and I have to deal with Windows permissions and everything else and Freenance is actually able to handle that as a file server at scale with all the power of ZFS but still having those nice delegated file permissions that you can do with active directory. Now that's the end of the list here. So I'll be doing some more testing with this. I may wait till beta two when it shows up in there because if you go over here to system like I said you have to do it from the command line. So if I go to updates it is not in the list yet. They have the 11 nightlies but that's not the same as the 11 three series. So I don't think until it's beta two which maybe one they're gonna have this updated on there. So I may wait till beta two before I switch my main system over to it but I do wanna do some testing with it and I do welcome this new UI. I will miss net data which means I will be forced if I wanna look at fancy graphs to load true command. So now I have more of a push to get into and dive into true command and take a look at it. But this was running on a FreeNAS Minix XL plus provided by IX systems. The box I've been doing my testing with for some of the VM stuff and a few different well that last handful of FreeNAS videos that I've done. And it's been just rocking and rolling really well here. Right now it's got a handful. We got about 20 terabytes of space for, I call it the red tanks as a bus from Western Digital Red Drives and it didn't have any problems switching back and forth. I did manage to screw up the install. Don't run the install a second time. Trying to do, well I messed it up. I ran it a second time. The good news is if you're familiar with FreeNAS I have a video about recovering it. All you have to do is go over here to the system and you can go over to the boot environment and switch back to the one that you didn't screw up. So here is the beta that is now on reboot. I deleted the extra one. I somehow installed it twice because I thought, hey it didn't run and it's because I didn't reboot it and I ran the command twice for the update like the show there. But if you have a system that you feel that you wanna do some digging around in and talk about some of the availability and update they have it here, I will also leave you this. Here's an entire read you can do sort of started by Chris Moran. He's talks about some of the overhaul dashboard et cetera, some of the things in here and then a discussion. Now there are some finite discussions in here and some people love it, some people hate it. It's of course the fun of forums and they talk about the different versions that they're going to be running. Because the question that came up to me is which version and why they do what they do when it comes to which version of free BST they're gonna be on. That's all actually discussed and Chris gives all the reasons for the whys of why they do this and how they backport things. So if you want a more in depth read and this is actually still being updated even as of today, which is November 9th there was still a post going back and forth in here. And you know like I said it's a good banter back and forth in discussions but if you want to try this out and you do find problems please file a bug report. And like I said I may switch my main well not my main system to it but the system that manages all my videos which is right here. I may switch this over and see how it works on the new 11.3 train and go from there. All right thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video please give it a thumbs up. 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