SlimNAS8Pro: the FAQ.

What is it?

SlimNAS8Pro is a distribution of Logitech (nee Slim Devices) Squeezebox Server designed to run on FreeNAS 8. It targets the high-end of the market: people who care about their music and treat it as valuable data, who have reasonably good hardware to store their collection, maybe a large collection, or who want to easily keep their FreeNAS 8 Squeezebox Server up-to-date.

What isn't it?

SlimNAS8Pro is not for people afraid of the command line. FreeNAS 8 is still being developed and improved, and one feature it presently lacks is the ability to install 3rd-party add-ons using the GUI. To install SlimNAS8Pro onto FreeNAS 8.0.1 RC1, you'll need to know how to ssh into your FreeNAS and enter some basic shell commands. Depending on which release of FreeNAS 8 you're running, you might also have to upgrade some of the bundled software before you can install Squeezebox Server.

And what's this ZFS thing?

If you want to use SlimNAS8Pro, you need ZFS. If you haven't already got ZFS, get it.

ZFS is a paradigm change in storage. It was written by Sun Microsystems to cater for customers with extreme storage requirements: big, fast, reliable and also cheap. Easy to grow. Simple to backup. And it goes a long way towards addressing all of those issues.

ZFS was added to FreeBSD a long time before it was picked up by the competition. FreeNAS 8 adds GUI administration simplicity and combines the richness of ZFS with the flexibility of FreeBSD's GEOM and CAM systems to give you tools so powerful they're dangerous.

What do you mean by "high-end"?

Any box with two similarly sized drives which will run 64-bit (amd64) FreeBSD kernels, and can boot from a USB stick. There is no need for a fast, multi-core CPU unless your FreeNAS is going to be busy with other tasks as well as running Squeezebox Server, which will only use a single core.

SlimNAS8Pro was developed and tested on a Pentium D with two cores, 2GB of RAM and 4 old ATA drives in a mirror pool.

I'm in, where do I sign up?

Go read SlimNAS8Pro's download instructions and installation guide.

Why didn't you write something for normal people?

I see something of myself in the article mentioned in this thread.

Since my job stopped having the word "programmer" in it and I gradually degenerated into a sysadmin, most of my interesting software has been an exoskeleton. Want to change the /music path? Edit the .h and recompile. :)

Earlier this year I built a NAS for my media collection, and I chose to use FreeBSD and ZFS. I've been a Squeezebox Server user since V2 and the SliMP3, and recently I've been building my own binaries while beta-testing SBS 7.6. So when it sunk in that other people might be wanting to do a similar thing with FreeNAS, all the parts were there ready to make a kit.

So here it is. A gift from Dr. Octopus.

Hey, wasn't he the bad guy?

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