 FreeNAS 11.3 Release Candidate 2 was released on January 14th of 2020. My system right here is running FreeNAS 11.3 RC2, been up for three days. It's January 17th and I loaded it when it came out three days ago. Now I started in 11.3 Beta, moved it to RC1, moved it to RC2 as the updates have come out and this server is one of them I actually use for all my video editing. It's not exactly something I would consider but kind of is production for my company, but I guess in terms of YouTube, it's definitely production and I haven't had any problems with it. Actually this entire beta has been very very smooth. I haven't really run into any major problems. This is running on a just so you know super micro system, it's a CPU E5 2620 and connected with a couple 10 gig Chelsea IO network cards and that then interfaces over to my lab server that I do a lot of videos on that's running Zen Orchestra. I've got it set up on both iSCSI connections and on NFS. So if you go over here to storage, here it is lab NFS and Dozer SCSI, both of them are called Dozer. That is the name given to this machine. So what's new in 11.3? So 11.3 overall has a lot of great new features and this is one of them that I think is wonderful. The whole ACL manager, so I talked about this when I first did the video on this. It's gotten much more extensive for each release candidate as we get closer to final release with this. They've done a great job and this is where some people spend a lot of time getting confused is how ACLs work inside of FreeNAS. And a lot of times I've had people where they present an iSCSI extent to a Windows server. That's a way you can use the FreeAS as a backend storage, but then have Windows take care of all the permissions and all the things so you have to worry about nothing. You can also integrate Active Directory into with a Windows server and have Active Directory here and have Windows take care of those permissions. Or you can build users, go here to storage, pools, and I have this particular folder here called In the Shadows and we're going to go ahead and edit the ACLs on it. And you can see how the new access control list looks. It's really nice and it lets you break down groups versus users and add ACL items and apply those permissions recursively. So it's a lot more extensive than it was previously. That being said, it offers quite a bit more dynamic options when it comes to setting these up. Now, I want to say Windows from level one text when he was doing the video that I actually watched where him and Gavir's Nexus were setting up a new server. He said that he wished that SMB shadow copies were enabled by default. And they are now. He said that talking about another system, but he said he wished more Samba systems did this and they've actually done a nice job of integration. Now this was built into FreeNAS before, but they've done some polish on it. And SMB shadow copies are now enabled by default for new shares. No snapshots will only show up in Windows previous tab if the snapshot used size shows changes to the file. And this is important. So Windows users are then able to pretend, so to speak, on a share. Windows thinks it's a volume shadow copy. When reality is you've set up a snapshot. Let's talk about that in action. We did a test and we go over here to periodic snapshots and we have this thing that says in the shadows. Let's look at what that does. Edit. I have a snapshot that runs 0, 15, 30, 45. So it's running constantly every 15 minutes. And the way snapshots work, I've got videos on this. They only will cause a storage change or take up space when there's something different between the snapshots. So it's not like you are creating this massive amount of data. It's only the different changes. This is one of the big advantages CFS has and one of the reasons I really like CFS. Well, let's talk about what that looks like in Windows. So you set that up. You set up a share and here we are. We have this test share and it's called in the shadows. And we can go over here and we're going to click on restore previous versions. And we have a 645 because I mess with the data sum and move some files around at 515 and 5. I've done this over time prepping for this video. And now we can see only the changes. Then there's not one for 530 because the data wasn't different. There's not one for 545. And there's not one between 6 and 645 because once again the data wasn't different. But how does it work in test? Well, we can go here and let's say the user goes, whoops, I deleted two items. How do I get those back? Well, they're here and they can restore previous versions. And let's look at the 645 version. So we're going to go ahead and open the 645 version. And then we can do things like drag the one file back in. Yeah, yeah, we know they might be harmful. And now we have the one file back. So that allowed them to, you know, not call the text support and able to restore it. Now what happens if they do something more catastrophic? Well, let's do this. Let's go here and just like purge it all. They just, oops, the entire folder out of existence. Or maybe they all have a .crypto extension on there. Either one of those is a real challenge for IT departments to restore those quickly. Now that being said about crypto locker, the volume shadow copy is part of what gets attacked and the crypto locker provided they have admin privileges. Well, even if they have admin privileges in this case, provided they don't have admin privileges that are also on free NAS, this actually would allow them to easily restore because the user does have permission to view but not to go backwards and purge the different snapshots. So when they go to restore a previous version, let's go ahead and restore the 645 version here. It just turned seven, so now there's another one. There's a blank version on there. We can go ahead and restore those right back there. Because these aren't really volume shadow copies. These are actually snapshots being presented to Windows as a volume shadow copy. And when we go here to open these, it will not let me delete them. They have any type of delete permissions. I'm hitting delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, nothing. So the user, even if they were an admin on this particular machine and they do have read write permission to this folder because the snapshots are immutable because they're controlled by the free NAS server, they can't actually screw these up. So they can restore different versions of all the files that they're looking for. And of course the other question would be does this work on the system itself in terms of restore previous version of file? Yes, because we just restored it, I don't think there's a previous version, but there should be of this one. Okay, it doesn't see any, because I don't think there are any previous versions of those files I only did deleting. But you get the idea. They're able to restore previous version, which is obviously great and wonderful for your clients or yourself. If something happens to the PC, you can make sure it's all working good. Now, something else to talk about is the SCSI wizard, iSCSI wizard. They did an update on that. So a couple of things we have, the way the wizard works now is just literally a few clicks. So I'm going to run over here, and that's why I said I had it working fine. I actually used the wizard, deleted the drives and everything out of the iSCSI, and it worked perfectly fine. I had no problems with it using the wizard to create it and it reattached. For I do you have a volume, a Z-val ready for it. So we're going to go over here to iSCSI and show you what the wizard looks like. Now the first thing I will comment when you do the wizard, it does not say this, but if you use capital letters and you get to the end, it brings you back to the beginning and says don't use capital letters. It will let you go next once. So let's go here. But it won't give you the error until the end. It does probably use some input validation there. So use lowercase letters and they have it defined here. So is it a VMware? Is it a Zen server one? Is it legacy OS, modern OS? And so you have a couple of templates and just a couple of settings to make it coherent for what you want to do or optimize I should say for what you want to do. So that's definitely a great feature right there that they've added. Now one quick note because I wanted to highlight this, this is something I ran into in RTFM, save the day. If you don't follow this order, you start creating the snapshots but didn't create the Samosher or created the Samosher and then started creating the snapshots, that makes a difference because the periodic snapshot test to be created at least one snapshot before creating the SMB share. If not, you have to restart Samosher. So I was confused while they weren't showing up when I first started testing and then restarting Samosher fixed it. Just a side note of if you start a snapshot process you may have to restart Samosher but if you did it beforehand then created the Samosher, no problems and stop start Samosher is all you have to do inside of there to make that work. Other than that, I haven't had any problems with it. Like I said, it's worked really well. I don't want to recreate the entire pool. So that is not something I did but it does have a large pool creation assistance. I want to play with that. I want to get something with a whole lot of drives in it so I can walk through that. It's kind of cool that they helped to automate the way it does repeated VDev layouts because there's different strategies you may want to use when setting up a large pool of not just putting everything in one but creating a series of VDev to make up the pool for different optimization. ZFS performance optimizations across the board from any different workloads. One thing about this when you do the upgrading you're going from the stable version 11.2 to the release candidate version 11.3 it will ask if you'd like to upgrade your ZFS pool. One thing to note and it warns you about this by the way is that is a one-way operation. So it is a slightly newer version of the ZFS when they do these optimizations and they change it but that also stops you from going back. Now if you wanted to go back you go here to system. We're going to go over here to boot environment. Here is the initial install and I've talked about this before where you can just go through and you want to activate a previous version. The way each new version of FreeNAS installs you can reactivate and restart the slice so to speak. So it creates a series of it like essentially boot partitions and you can reactivate a previous one as needed in order to do that. This particular machine I did reload on 1228 that's why there's not any really old previous versions and I usually get rid of a lot of the old stuff so that's why there's a default install, initial install. I'd actually backed up and restore it to do some more testing. I may work on a video and ask a few people to ask me about how you go through and do something like restore and reboot of a FreeNAS and the most important thing I tell people is please, please, please back everything up and they've also done a nice job here so when you save the config export pull encryption keys with this. So you can get the keys it was two places before they're putting it down looks like to one place which is great because if you do encrypted pools and I do you never know what I'm saving on there and I don't want to have to worry about whether or not it's encrypted so I always encrypt because a penalty for performance isn't really there for encryption therefore always make sure you back up the pool because I've had people say hey I don't have that key and I lost my pool. I'm sorry that's exactly how this was designed it's unbreakable encryption so there's no rebuilding that data back but I've also this is pseudo production for me because I use my videos on here I do still replicate and it's still replicating to the old version of FreeNAS perfectly fine they've done a great job with replication and that is something that I'll be doing a video on it because they've actually made it easier to replicate between systems and it actually was able to I went ahead and deleted the replication I had set up because it did give an error when I tried to import the previous replications and I said delete them and replicate again it had no problem replicating using the wizard that they have now it seemed to work fine even though the other one's running an older version of FreeNAS it seemed to be completely compatible so that was good to hear but I will be updating all of my systems to the latest version once it comes fully out and you know it's working and of course we test and ours and then we move it out and upgrade our clients so my impressions of FreeNAS 11 RC2 have been great I love all these different features that they're adding on there I like to see the progress on the project and of course I will be diving in more because they're working a lot on the plugins because they're breaking out the plugins that are supported by system versus the plugins from the community that way people and they've got an entire roadmap people are going to start writing their own plugins and make it easier to distribute the plugins and add more to it so they're doing more around the framework on there so we're probably going to see from the community especially a lot more plugins and things like that that are coming so awesome and thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel out in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time