In the last post, Jordan provided an overview of the FreeNAS 10 middleware and architecture. In this post, we’ll provide a sneak peak at the upcoming M2 milestone by demonstrating how to install and navigate this version of FreeNAS 10. This is useful if you are curious about the status of the M2 milestone and it is required if you wish to spin up a development environment. The next post will demonstrate how to install the necessary development tools once you have M2 installed.
As of this writing, the M2 milestone is expected to be complete on August 15, at which time a public demo will be available. This means that M2 is under rapid development and that any screenshots and instructions shown in this blog post may change. While the M1 milestone, which ended in mid-June, concentrated on the design of the middleware, the primary goals of the M2 milestone are to provide the following functionality:
- Installer.
- Network configuration.
- Pool creation.
- The ability to create at least one type of share, but hopefully both NFS and AFP.
- Usable dashboard, including drag-around functionality.
- System configuration as well as power management, reboot/logout, and update management.
Mockups are available so that you can preview the layout of each UI element and you can track the status of the ongoing work at the FreeNAS 10 bug tracker.
It is recommended to install M2 into a virtual environment as it is still very much in the testing/preview stage. When creating the virtual machine, make sure that the virtual disk to install into is at least 16GB in size and that you create at least one more virtual disk to use as storage.
Installation images are available from http://download.freenas.org/10/Nightlies/M2 and, at this time, the installation is identical to the instructions for 9.3. Once installed, the system should boot into a prompt:
You may or may not automatically receive an IP address. In this example, the system did not. In this case, type shell which will open up a root command prompt (this is similar to clicking Shell on a FreeNAS 9.3 system). If the network does have a DHCP server, use these commands to try to get a lease, replacing em0 with the name of the interface:
killall dhclient
/sbin/dhclient em0
If the DHCP lease fails or there is not a DHCP server, manually set an IP address that is appropriate for the network and will not conflict with other IP addresses. Again, replace em0 with the interface name.
/sbin/ifconfig em0 192.168.1.2
Once you have an IP address, point your browser to it. You should receive a login screen.
Type root into the “Username” field and press enter. The icon in the far upper right with a green dot and the word “root” indicates that you are logged in as the root user. Click that icon if you wish to “Logout”.
The left frame contains the configurable elements. Those in white text are under active development and their functionality will increase and bugs will decrease as M2 progresses. If an element looks different than its mockup, its layout is still under active development. Any element with grey text has not been added yet, meaning that it will appear as development on M2 progresses.
If you click “API Docs”, a new tab will open with links describing the RPC Interfaces, Events, Tasks, and JSON schemas used by FreeNAS 10.
If you click “Toggle Debug Tools”, a new frame will open at the bottom of the browser:
Click “Terminal” to open a root shell. A drop-down menu is available in that tab for selecting the shell type.
As M2 matures and stablizes, future blog posts will demonstrate its features.