In November of 2007, I built a file server using the FreeBSD based FreeNAS. I have blogged about it many times. However, I think my experiment is coming to an end.

Back in late 2007, I purchased a refurbished Dell Tower (GX260) which, from my experience at work, was a fairly quiet PC. I added a couple of 500 gig PATA drives to the existing 80 gig drive and configured the server. I upgraded the OS to new releases a couple of times, but mostly, I just left it alone and it worked. However, over the past week and a half, I’ve had problems with it. At first, I thought that my Windows 7 x64 box was crashing it when I tried to do large I/O operations such as backups. However, after much playing around, I’ve not been able to pin it down to that. Last night, I tried one last time to back up the box under Windows XP SP3 and I still had the CIFS/SMB service crash. So, while I have no idea what has caused the box to start behaving badly, it has become unusable.

My choices at this point are:

1. Rebuild with the latest stable FreeNAS image.
2. Go to another OS such as Windows Home Server (WHS).

As much as I love to use and support free open source software (FOSS), I’m really leaning toward WHS. It has the capabilities I need from FreeNAS and some advantages that FreeNAS will never have, such as acting as a gateway to allow me to remote into my home computers. It also has the support of an entire company, whereas FreeNAS is mainly two guys and they are taking FreeNAS in some new directions, that while promising, are just not going to get anywhere very quickly.

And this whole incident has gotten me scared of FreeNAS. You see, one problem with it is that the disks are of a format that is supported only by FreeBSD. There’s no support in Windows or Linux. So, the only way to read the drives is to have a bootable FreeBSD or FreeNAS system. To get around this severe risk, I added a 500 gig drive to my Windows desktop and began a nightly backup of the server to that drive. However, due to the nature of the bug, my backup software got confused and thought that I had deleted most of the files off my server, so it proceeded to delete them off the backup drive as well. And with the CIFS/SMB service unable to work for backing up, I had to resort to using an FTP client on the SSH service to get all the files back over to my backup drive. So, I’ve got my data, but now I’ve had a good scare, so I know I must do something different. (Also, I should mention that I did have one more copy of most of the data on the server stored on yet another hard drive on my desktop box, so I wouldn’t have lost everything anyway, but still scary enough.)

So, I’ll be rebuilding my network and backup infrastructure, and most likely, on WHS. At least I’m going to give that a try. I’ll write some new posts on that as I get it set up. Looks like it should work on my existing FreeNAS hardware, so I hope to get started right away.