So you know what’s awesome? Refreshing the page while writing a post, so you have to do it all over again. Thanks, NoScript.
Anyway, AS I WAS SAYING BEFORE IT GOT DELETED, it pays to do all your research before taking on a project. I forged ahead with my FreeNAS server with a few assumptions based on other things I had read about the technology.
The first assumption: you can add disks to a RAID after it’s been built. I knew you could replace disks, but adding one changes the total RAID size, which breaks the RAID. I’m pretty sure you can do this with other tools, but I guess the one FreeNAS uses is not able to do this.
My second assumption: you can create Samba shares that only some users can access. This seemed pretty obvious to me, but I guess it’s all-or-nothing, as far as what users can see. Who would have thought?
The good news is that both of these issues will be fixed in the next major update, 0.7, which will include full support for ZFS. From what I have gathered, ZFS creates an layer of abstraction between the devices and the file system that allows the file system to grow. Also, this information would not have changed my decisions in what hardware to purchase, although it might have delayed it. This way I just have a couple weeks/months to play around with it before I can upgrade and create a real server instance.
All of this information was found on LearnFreeNAS.org, which is run by Gary Sims, a long time friend of the blog. I would like to invite our thousands of wealthy readers to head over to his website and purchase many copies of his new book, which I hear is life-altering.
I will continue to update here, even though everyone’s too busy reading Sam’s SQL tutorials.