Now that my FreeNAS system has been up a few days, I have noticed a few things I thought I’d share.

First, make sure you use a good password if you have any Internet services enabled. Also, it’s a good idea to use a user ID that is not obvious. In checking my logs, I noticed a few people have been trying to hack into my box. Mostly, they are trying to find an FTP ID and password that will work. Do not use ‘administrator’ or ‘admin’ as your user ID.

Second, I have discovered that when my drives spin up, sometimes they don’t spin up fast enough to avoid read and write timeout errors. I believe this has probably corrupted some data on the writes. The solution I am testing is I have changed the timeout setting.

Here’s how to change the timeout value:
1. From the webGUI, select System/Advanced.
2. Select the Command Scripts tab.
3. Click the + sign.
4. Add the following command: /sbin/sysctl hw.ata.to=10
5. Select “PostInit” from the dropdown.
6. Save the command.
7. Reboot FreeNAS.

This will set a 10 second timeout instead of 5 seconds. You can avoid the reboot by selecting Advanced/Command and executing the command manually.

One other tip. I mentioned in my Home Computing Part I article that I use RSYNC to do a nightly copy of my data from my primary drive to my backup drive. In order to get read/write access to this data, execute the following command: chmod -R 777 /mnt/data3

This can be done from Advanced/Command in webGUI or from a shell.

That’s all for now.