So…

I needed a break from my political ranting. It’s frustrating to know that politicians dumb things down to manipulate masses of people and those same people follow along blindly. The media simply reiterates the puke and it brainwashes people into believing whatever these idiots are serving up in the Koolaid cups.

To give myself a lesson in FreeBSD and FreeNAS I put together a VirtualBox system to test with and configured it to emulate some changes I would like to make in my production system. The changes are mostly security based to make sure services don’t step on or corrupt each other and a reasonable amount of redundancy is achieved.

Here’s the layout I packaged in VirtualBox. Please realize this is all virtual and I’m not using any real hardware. My VM instance utilizes 4 cores and 8 gig of RAM, a bridged LAN adapter with a static IP address attached from within FreeNAS.

2 60 GiB  SATA Mirrored boot drives for FreeNAS OS

2 100 GiB SAS Mirrored Drives for Jails and VM instances

5 120 GiB SAS Drives in RAID Z2 for a data volume

So the desired result would be redundancy for both the boot drive and the jailed applications while keeping them both away from data stored in the volume. Here’s what it looks like in my initial layout:

The last picture is my production system. It’s real hardware.

For me the data is the most important piece. I can rebuild the boot drive and jailed applications without ever touching the data volume. Since both the boot and jails are on RAID1 striped drives I do get redundancy if one of the drives in the  boot RAID1 volume fails. I also get the security of the exposed application being in a jail.

I need to thank a bunch of people at the FreeNAS Forums for their efforts. I have been able to find every answer to my questions simply by reading. The FreeNAS documentation is very good also.