Recently (and related to my last post), I was in the market for a free iSCSI implementation. Having read the wikipedia entry on NAS and then the article on SAN, I decided to try out FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, and borrows heavily from Monowall. It’s a super small download, and the full installation stays that way. I was really impressed by the ability to run it right off the CD. Of course, if you want your changes to be permanent, you have to adjust the configuration slightly. FreeNAS allows you to either run from the CD forever, and store the configuration on a USB stick/Floppy disk or you can install it on a hard drive and run it from that. All configuration can be done from a web interface, and it even let’s you do Software RAID. Having done Software RAID from the command line before, this is a pretty huge deal, and they make it really simple. I had determined that what I really needed was SAN, not NAS, so I wanted to use FreeNAS to provide an iSCSI ‘target’ to my Windows server. It took a couple tries, but I finally figured out that one needed to have fully configured an iSCSI target on FreeNAS before you could enable it and save your changes. I installed the iSCSI initiator software on Windows Server 2003, and then logged onto the iSCSI target. Things were looking pretty good. Upon trying to format the iSCSI drive, I got an error. I went back to the instructions from the FreeNAS knowledgebase and determined that I needed to follow the instructions to make the iSCSI target 1 MB smaller than the partition size. It worked, and I was able to format it just fine. Things got a little bit trickier when I decided to try using 2 drives as part of 1 target. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, but it didn’t at all. Instead, I used the software RAID to build a RAID0 device, and then used that device as my iSCSI target. Everything should have been working now. Unfortunately, there appears to be some issue with the iSCSI support in FreeNAS, because I could write data just fine, but as soon as I tried to look at the data, it locked up my server. Not cool.

I left work Friday feeling pretty frustrated. Monday morning, I said a quick prayer while I was getting ready for work. God answered quickly. I started searching for issues between the iSCSI initiator and iSCSI on FreeNAS. I stumbled across an article comparing file-sharing performance between FreeNAS and Openfiler. It basically said Openfiler was the superior option if you wanted a NAS sharing files via SMB (the Windows sharing protocol). That was pretty much irrelevant to me at this point, but I now had another option to try in my quest for iSCSI.

Openfiler is based on rPath, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (if my memory serves me correctly). Linux is a bit more familiar territory for me, but it didn’t really make a difference, as all configuration is again done on a web interface. It also includes ‘Linux Enterprise iSCSI’ which sounded promising. You can’t run it from the CD, although they do have a VMware image if you want to try it out before installing it on real hardware. The interface was quite slick, and since I had already mastered the iSCSI stuff on FreeNAS, doing it on Openfiler didn’t take long. I was able to quickly create a RAID0, and exported the entire drive as an iSCSI target. Initiated it on the Windows server, formatted it, and I was in business. Reading and writing worked great, and shortly thereafter, I had a backup of our email system dumping files to my new iSCSI device. I intend to get an actual server with hardware RAID for production use, but this will certainly get me by until that time.

The win goes to Openfiler for making it all ‘just work’. Now, if only I can get things straightened out with our Quantum Autoloader, we’ll really be cruising (with dual rocket-boosters even).