What's on my FreeNAS

The two greatest banes in my technological existance thus far have been…

1. preventing the default behaviors of my OS and text editors from changing without my concent, and
2. keeping up with where my data lives in the myriad of technologies I’ve adopted.

While there’s not a whole lot I can do about issue 1, this post is aligned at aiding in situation 2 by documenting every configuration I make to my FreeNAS server. In a perfect world, I write a terraform provider for FreeNAS, and then run a production FreeNAS server, and also a staging FreeNAS server where I test that my terraform code really works. Sadly, this is not that world. I’m instead going to blog on my configuration changes to FreeNAS.

ZFS Pools/ Arrays

Storage -> Pools -> Add

• Create x1 three HDD and one SDD (cache) ZFS Pool where ‘all your data goes’. Note: My needs are of much less than 2TB of data. Some will find it important to create more pools for high performance iSCSI exposure, but this is not the case for me due to frugality.

Datasets (folders)

Storage -> Pools -> 3dot button for your pool -> Add Dataset

I’ve made the following Datasets

• archive (NFS read, smb)
• movs (NFS read)
• creative (NFS r/w IP limit)
• hoarding (NFS r/w IP limit)
• backups/repo_backups (NFS r/w IP limit)
• infrastructure/burp_certs (NFS r/w IP limit)
• infrastructure/freenas_file_system_backups (NFS r/w IP limit)
• infrastructure/gitlab_repos (NFS r/w IP limit)

Save Config (HDD encryption codes)

System -> General -> Save Config

You put this secret file on your secret bearing USB drive and delete it from your dev laptop?? Well… assume you can leave it on your dev laptop I guess maybe…

Plugins

I avoid plugins because I avoid configuring software manually. Here’s the list of software I need.

• SyncThing - This is for backing up crap on your phone. I just followed the GUI to install to http://192.168.1.96/syncthing/.
  • There are bugs with the install, and you will get file creation errors like synchthing folder missing and synchthing folder marker missing, so follow this first google hit that talks about the problem https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/syncthing-directory-access-denied.49697/
    • So there’s a really defensive guy on that forum apparently, sorry about that, it’s kind of an odd forum. The actual solution I used was to…
      • iocage exec syncthing to get in the jail
      • mkdir /sync_folders && chmod 0777 sync_folders && chown -r syncthing /sync_folders to create a place where syncthing can write to
      • Then in the SyncThing Web GUI, goto Actions -> settings -> Default Folder Path and make it be /sync_folders

Jails

• DLNA Server - https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/how-to-install-minidlna-into-iocage-freenas-11-2.68978/

An HTTP server

This is for some preseeding that is required for another project. One novelty here is that the entire configuration for this “plugin” lives on my ZFS file system, so I don’t even have it tracked into github, but I’m not worrying about bit rot (and it’s simple to re-write if the server catches fire).

Run this to create and configure the Jail

# Create and configure the new jail
iocage create -n http_preseed -r 13.1-RELEASE vnet="on" ip4_addr="vnet0|192.168.1.77/24" defaultrouter="192.168.1.1" allow_raw_sockets="1" boot="on"
iocage stop http_preseed
mkdir /mnt/ultra/iocage/jails/http_preseed/root/mnt/iso
mkdir /mnt/ultra/iocage/jails/http_preseed/root/mnt/gp
iocage fstab -a http_preseed "/mnt/ultra/infrastructure/iso /mnt/iso nullfs ro 0 0"
iocage start http_preseed

# Console into the jail
iocage console http_preseed
pkg install -y nginx

# Copy configurations
cp /mnt/iso/nginx.conf /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
cp /mnt/iso/motd.template /etc/motd.template

# Start webserver
service nginx enable
service nginx start

An SSH server

iocage create -n sshd_jail -r 13.1-RELEASE vnet="on" allow_raw_sockets="1" boot="on" ip4_addr="vnet0|192.168.1.78/24" defaultrouter="192.168.1.1"

iocage console sshd_jail
pkg install -y openssh-portable
sysrc sshd_enable="YES"
service sshd start
pkg install -y python 

pw useradd harmless

pw user add harmless -c harmless -u 1111 -d /home/harmless -s /bin/csh
mkdir -p /home/harmless/.ssh
<ADD PUBLIC KEY>
chown -R harmless /home/harmless