Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.0.4-RELEASE

Posted on by Phil

Enhancements

GUI

  • Rename ‘loaders’ to ‘tunables’ to target the FreeBSD concept under
    inspection (kernel tunables) (SF r10235, r10236).

Bugfixes

OS/Third party

  • Remove sane caps for minimum ZFS requirements for lower spec’ed home
    user machines added in 8.0.4-BETA1. A better solution will be devised
    in 8.2.0 with automatic system tuning, similar to legacy’s
    zfskerntune (SF r10271).

CIFS

  • Correct guest parameter setting in the GUI as it’s a global option,
    not a per-share option (SF r10296).
  • Allow Guest Only parameter only makes sense when Allow Guest is
    specified (SF r10300).
  • Validate guest setting prior to accepting POST to ensure that the
    value set for Guest is sane.

Enhancements

Build

  • Remove Full_Install from the compressed disk image name to avoid
    potential confusion when looking at the disk image vs the GUI
    upgrade image (SF r10154).

Middleware

  • Do not restart collectd (reporting backend) when deleting snapshots
    in the GUI (SF r10139).

Tools

  • Add arcstat.py and arc_summary.py tools originally contributed by
    jhell (FreeBSD contributor), ported by jhixson to FreeNAS 8.x.

Bugfixes

GUI

  • Correct window title for snapshot deletion GUI (SF r10138).

Middleware

  • Catch ZFS snapshot errors when snapshots are done via the GUI instead of
    failing silently (SF r10152).
  • Work around interoperability issues with user / group population in the
    GUI by failing silently in certain cases if AD/LDAP users cannot be
    retrieved (SF r10140).
  • Fix case where local and remote paths passed to rsync in Rsync tasks
    weren’t quoted, so paths with spaces in them would not work (FN 1285).

Enhancements

OS/Third party

  • Update transmission to 2.42 (SF r10093).
  • Add MegaCLI tool (SF r10072, r10073).
  • Disable periodic tasks in the base system that would negatively
    impact system performance on NAS boxes with large directory
    structures (SF r10113).

Bugfixes

Middleware

  • Fix handling for ‘every day’ SMART tasks created in the GUI
    (SF r10088).
  • Add in several robustness fixes to reduce potential for filesystem
    corruption on root / boot device. In some scenarios this would also
    improve performance when fetching data from the root device as well
    (SF r10095, r10109, r10129).

CIFS

  • Fix vfs objects modules ordering so shadow copy (aka previous
    versions) support functions again (FN 935, FN 1186, FN 1275).
  • Update samba to 3.6.3 to resolve several bugs (both security and
    non-security related) (SF r10127).

iSCSI

  • Network field from iSCSI initiator could contain multiple IP
    addresses, CIDR addresses, or ANY keyword (SF r10082).
  • Generate istgt.conf properly if and when multiple initiators were
    specified (SF r10081).

Enhancements

Build

  • Add .img suffix to simplify mounting full disk image for Windows and
    OSX users (FN # 1236).

OS/Third party

  • Update firefly to 1696_6 for iTunes 10.5.2+ compatibility.
  • Add in sane caps for minimum ZFS requirements for lower spec’ed home
    user machines.

AD/CIFS

  • Automatically create AD/LDAP user home directories (FN # 1203).
  • Add ‘allow trusted domains’ knob in the CIFS global configuration
    (FN # 998).

iSCSI

  • Restrict portal input in the GUI to prevent scenarios where
    incorrect input would prevent iSCSI from starting (FN # 1231).

rsync

  • Add rsync+SSH functionality (FN # 990).
  • Add functionality to differentiate rsync pushing from pulling
    (FN # 394).

Bugfixes

GUI

  • Fix disks / partition parsing when importing volumes (FN # 1202).
  • Restrict users from creating cronjobs / rsync tasks with long
    usernames (FN # 1061).

Middleware

  • Correct smbpasswd parsing when debug level isn’t set to minimum
    logging (FN # 1224).

AD/CIFS

  • Escape samba AD/LDAP passwords (FN # 1225).
  • Ensure guest accounts are disabled if checked (SF r8276).

Enhancements

OS/Third party

  • Update ataidle from 2.6 to 2.72 based on maintainer’s (brucec@FreeBSD)
    recommendation due to interoperabilities with 2.6 and certain chipsets.
  • Fix the inadyn port so that it works on i386.

Bugfixes

Middleware

  • Fix a regression for DHCP users where /etc/resolv.conf would be nulled
    out if DNS servers weren’t specified in the GUI.

AD/CIFS

  • Disable AIO by default and change the default AIO read / write size to
    4kB. This was done provided feedback and the fact that the build fixes
    actually enabled AIO, whereas prior releases didn’t enable it by
    default. This can cause issues with machines that don’t have the
    resources to service AIO requests quickly enough, where previously they
    would be able to service requests at near line speeds, whereas after
    they are unable to service requests that quickly.

NFS

  • Add in logic to start lockd and mountd when NFS is enabled s.t. FreeNAS
    doesn’t need to be manually prodded to start the services, or rebooted
    in order for the services to become effective.

Enhancements

OS/Third party

  • Use smaller block and frag sizes for /etc and /var .
  • Import a build tweak to nuke /var/db/pkg to save ~7MB space.
  • Other build tweaks to remove non-essential features and packages from
    the image.
  • Disable output to /var/log/console.log in non-debug builds to avoid
    unnecessary duplication in /var/log/messages .
  • Upgrade ataidle to 2.6.
  • Upgrade nut / net-snmp to 2.6.2 and 5.7.1, respectively.
  • Import omnibus build system fixes to fix the fact that the 8.0.3-BETA1
    image was broken due to the environment of the build machine where it
    was produced on. This also fixes other items, such as DDNS because of
    build environment tainting.
  • Increase the /var md size from 74MB to 160MB s.t. samba will be able
    to service requests copying large sets of files, and the rest of the
    system will be able to play nicely with samba to a certain degree.
    More tuning is required for larger samba userbases.

GUI

  • Add kernel tunable / sysctl support.

Middleware

  • Hide Etc/GMT* timezones as they’re behavior is counterintuitive and
    conflicts with Windows 7 semantics (see r8707).

AD/CIFS

  • Bump samba from 3.5.11 to 3.6.1.
  • Address simple failure cases with getting Kerberos tickets (clock
    skew) and joining AD domains (invalid passwords, bad short domain names,
    etc) so that users could better rectify improperly configured NAS boxes;
    this means that if either of these cases fail, the GUI will now inform
    the user that the ‘Active Directory’ service is stopped.
  • Fix cachetool to better prevent potential race condition at boot between
    winbindd and ix-cache.
  • Add knob for enabling/disabling Zeroconf/Bonjour (avahi) support in the
    GUI. For technical reasons outside of the author’s control, this
    feature defaults to off when upgrading FreeNAS. FreeNAS admins
    anticipating that they will have Mac users attempting to connect to CIFS
    shares should enable this feature.

AFP

  • Bump netatalk to 2.2.1.
  • Add knob for controlling the maximum number of configurable connections
    (see ticket: 847).
  • Only advertise services via avahi if they’re enabled (see ticket: 852).

rsync

  • NFSv4 ACL support (see: r8375, r8414).

Bugfixes

OS/Third party

  • Fix NTFS volume imports.

GUI

  • ZFS volume deletion failed when trying to delete zvol with the name
    ‘zvol’.
  • SSH pubkey saving was broken unless you manually add a newline to the
    text box.
  • Fix traceback when trying to edit user if ssh public key was not
    specified.
  • Fix the bug in rsync tasks where it would strip the trailing ‘/’ off
    the end of the destination path.
  • Fix a validation error when editing users / groups in 8.0.2+ where
    if one entered in a path that wasn’t valid, the GUI would traceback
    instead of punting the actual validation error.
  • Fix an issue where if one entered in an invalid path, the GUI would
    traceback instead of providing feedback stating that the directory
    provided was invalid.

Middleware

  • Rsync task/crontab generation was broken with AD usernames and other
    unsanitized input.
  • Fix email regressions since 8.0.2-RELEASE-p1 (SMART emails now work
    with more than one recipient, non-SMTP authentication based emails
    work again).
  • Fix an issue where if one autosnap process was killed uncleanly, more
    autosnap processes could back up and eventually deadlock the system.
  • Fix an issue where the ZFS scrub cronjobs would execute every 30 days
    instead of a number divisible by 7, so what would generally happen is
    that ZFS scrubs would generally execute in the middle of the week.
  • Fix setting httpd to listen on an interface which is not the first
    interface.
  • Add logic to create home directories on demand instead of failing
    ‘silently’ if the path to the directory didn’t already exist.
  • Fix ‘detaching’ NTFS/UFS volumes so that it unmounts the volume in
    the FreeBSD backend.

AD/CIFS

  • Change the default workgroup from FREENAS to WORKGROUP as having the same
    name for the workgroup and the hostname is illegal per the SMB/CIFS
    protocol.

Cosmetic items

  • Change “SSH key” in GUI to “SSH Public Key”.
  • Fix GUI trademarks and branding to be more consistent with proper
    branding, similar to what TrueNAS does today.
  • The email subsystem was not working correctly in 8.0.1-RELEASE, which
    resulted in the system not being able to send mail, as well as of the
    alerting system in the GUI.
  • Allow decimal numbers for a dataset quota. (r8728)
  • Fix setting recursive ACLs. (r8270)
  • Start proftpd after ix-ssl to use the correct SSL cert. (r8246)
  • Use wildcards in cron and rsync jobs instead of listing all values. (r8214, r8211)
  • Fix case in iSCSI targets to match the behavior specified by RFC 3722. (r8120)

There’s too much to list here, but the high points are

  • Divorced the volume members in the database from the FreeBSD devices.
    This resolves an issue where FreeBSD can change devices names and the
    GUI doesn’t pick up the updates due to the devices names being hard-wired
    in the database.
  • Support exporting ZFS zvols (virtual devices) as device extents via iSCSI.
    8.0 was only able to export physical device nodes or file based extents.
  • The GUI now has an event notification system.
  • The email backend has been refactored.
  • Many many changes in the GUI to help it validate and sanitize inputs that
    are passed to the backend daemons.
  • Added UPS functionality.
  • Added rsync client and server functionality.
  • Added the ability to schedule cron jobs in the GUI.
  • Vastly improved and reworked snapshot replication.
  • CHAP doesn’t work with GlobalSAN initiators on OS X.
  • Upgrades from FreeNAS 0.7 aren’t supported.
  • The installer doesn’t check the size of the install media before attempting
    an install. A 2 GB device is required, but the install will appear to
    complete successfully on smaller devices, only to fail at boot.
  • The installer will let you switch from i386 to amd64 architecture and
    vice-versa, but some files, such as the rrd files used by the statistics
    graphing package are architecture dependent.
  • There are known interoperability issues with FreeNAS and Samba 4.x being
    used as a PDC due to Samba 4.x not conforming to the Microsoft CIFS
    specification and the way LDAP queries are executed on FreeNAS. Please see
    the following support ticket for more details:
    http://support.freenas.org/ticket/1135 .
  • Shadow copies via CIFS do not work in 8.0.3. Please see
    https://support.freenas.org/ticket/1186 for more details.