Announcing FreeNAS 9.2.1-RELEASE

Greetings, FreeNAS fans!

After one BETA, two Release Candidates, and many nightly builds (which many of you tested, to our everlasting gratitude) we are, as always, proud to announce the public availability of FreeNAS 9.2.1-RELEASE.

FreeNAS 9.2.0 was a great release, and we’re pleased to say that FreeNAS 9.2.1 is even better! Since 9.2.0 was released, we have fixed over 189 bugs, added new features, polished the UI, and improved the performance of FreeNAS even further!

The documentation has also been updated for 9.2.1, though the source code (see release notes) is still a useful reference for features like the web API, which comes with several examples in the source tree.

Should you encounter any bugs in this release, or wish to submit enhancement requests, please visit http://bugs.freenas.org and by all means file a bug! We use the bug tracking system quite religiously and screen bugs on a daily basis, so filing a bug report is the best way of making sure that any issues do not get lost! Since no release engineering process is ever truly finished, we are already planning for 9.2.2 and will aim to fix any “fit and finish” bugs we deem appropriate for the next software update.

We also have the FreeNAS forums for general discussion and encourage everyone to use them. Finally, the FreeNAS developers also hang out in the #freenas IRC channel on FreeNode in their copious spare time should you wish to discuss things more in real-time.

We are very proud of this release and the hard work that has gone into it. We are also tremendously grateful to the many people who have taken the time to file bugs, fix bugs and send us pull requests, post helpful comments in the FreeNAS forums, or otherwise be a part of the ever-growing FreeNAS community. We hope you will install 9.2.1 at your earliest opportunity – we have been running it in production for some time and are very happy with the level of “fit and finish” in this release!

For the first time, we are also publishing an Errata List for 9.2.1 so people will know about known-issues that were not deemed severe enough to be “show stoppers” for this release. They will be addressed in due course in 9.2.2, and we will also update the Errata as necessary should any other problems of significance be found.

Again, if you didn’t follow the link in the first paragraph, the bits are in http://download.freenas.org/9. 2.1/RELEASE/

Thanks!

The FreeNAS Engineering Team

Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.2.1-RELEASE

Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.3. This adds support for SMB3, the ability for FreeNAS to be a Windows Domain Controller, and advanced features like server-side copy support in Windows 2012 and later, along with multiple years worth of improvements over the version of Samba that shipped in 9.2.0. It also enables SMB protocol version 3. Previous versions of FreeNAS limited samba to SMB2 because of random crashes that would occur using SMB3.

Added the LSI 12G SAS driver as a module to the build. This can be enabled by adding a tunable for mpslsi3_load with a value of YES. This driver is still under development and not yet committed to FreeBSD. It is provided for beta testing only. For production use please consider using a 6G SAS adapter, such as the LSI 9207.

Fixed a bug with netatalk that prevented share browsing from working in the finder on OSX. Also enabled options for fuller-fidelity AFP copies with Mac OS ACLs (ACEs) now stored as ZFS ACLs. Remove the non functional share password field from AFP shares.

Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, improving the Mac share browsing experience.

Added additional Web API functionality for manipulating ZFS snapshots.

Added IPMI network configuration support for machines with that capability (enabled by setting ipmi_load tunable to YES).

Brought back the FreeNAS 8.x volume manager as a “Manual Setup” option. This volume manager allows manual vdev building and offers no seat belts. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, using the standard volume manager is highly recommended by the development team!

Made some changes to reporting graphs that segregates reports by type, one type per tab. Add graphs that show individual disk activity.

Fixed a bug that prevented building an encrypted volume using multipath devices.

Update django (used by the WebUI) to 1.6 and dojo to 1.9.2

Add the following ZFS features: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks

Add trafshow to the image. This utility gives a CLI view of connections and usage to the FreeNAS box.

Fix kernel module load for fuse. This is needed for importing NTFS volumes.

Add the ability to use a keytab for AD joins. This eliminates the need to use the AD Administrator account to join FreeNAS to AD, closing a long standing issue of needing the AD Admin password in the FreeNAS configuration database.

Updated the LSI 6 Gbps HBA driver (mps) to version 16. Please update the firmware of any mps HBAs to phase 16.