Hi Folks,

It gives us great pleasure to announce the first public release of FreeNAS 9.2.0: FreeNAS 9.2.0-BETA

As the name implies, this is not the final release of 9.2.0, but we are confident that it is production quality release nonetheless. This confidence stems from the fact that we have been testing it extensively for weeks now and have done quite a bit of QA on it, as well as living on daily snapshots ourselves. We have bled first so that you hopefully do not have to, in other words, but by all means please test this release as extensively as you can so that any remaining issues can be ironed out before 9.2.0-RELEASE is rolled (hopefully in just 3 weeks, depending on how this testing goes). That is the whole point of a public BETA, after all, so we hope everyone will submit their feedback without delay!

Since 9.1.1 was released, we have fixed 113 bugs in the bug tracker , as well as countless others that were found and fixed independently of the bug tracking system.

We have also made a number of enhancements to the UI and generally done our best to bring more polish to the FreeNAS system, both in usability and performance. Those doing benchmarks against 9.1.1 and 9.2.0-BETA should notice some measurable improvements on any reasonably capable hardware.

The documentation is currently being adapted for 9.2.0, so some rough edges still exist there. In particular, the new FreeNAS API docs are still a little out of sync with what’s on the web site so please see the documentation that comes with the source code (see release notes) for the most up-to-date and definitive documentation.

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!

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. You folks are what make it fun! Thanks!

If you didn’t follow the link in the first line, the bits are in http://iso.cdn.freenas.org/9.2.0/BETA/

Regards,

- The FreeNAS Engineering Team

Release Notes for FreeNAS 9.2.0-BETA

Version 9.2-RELEASE of FreeBSD with performance improvements, bug fixes, and updated software packages. For a complete list see http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/relnotes.html

The Kernel UMA allocator is now the default for ZFS. This results in higher ZFS performance.

Avahi (multicast DNS, aka Bonjour) registration of all services, including the web service, means you no longer need to have a head on the box to know its IP address, even for initial configuration. freenas.local is the default (or freenas-n.local, where n is the # of freenas.local machines already on the local network). This can be changed by changing the hostname.

The built-in admin user account is no longer used and the Admin Account removed. The first time the FreeNAS graphical interface is accessed, a pop-up menu will prompt for the root password. Subsequent logins to the graphical interface will require this password.

The plugin system now offers in-place updates for plugins, also

segregating installed plugins from available plugins to make the UI

less cluttered.

A complete REST API has been created for FreeNAS, allowing a FreeNAS instance to be controlled remotely. See examples/api in the FreeNAS source repository ( https://github.com/freenas/freenas/tree/master ) for some examples of this in action. Complete API docs are available in docs/api.

The "Permit Sudo" field has been added to the add and edit screens for Users and Groups. A column in View Groups and View Users now indicates whether or not "Permit Sudo" has been set.

HTTP and HTTPS access to the FreeNAS graphical interface are no longer mutually exclusive. The fields "WebGUI HTTP Port" and "WebGUI HTTPS Port" have been added to System Settings -> General.

An "Edit" button has been added to the "Hostname" field of System Information to make the hostname easier to change.

The results from the latest ZFS scrub now appear in Volume Status.

Netatalk has been updated to version 3.1.0. See http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/3.1/ReleaseNotes3.1.0.html for a list of changes in this release. There are also a number of changes made to AFP sharing as a result:

The Add Apple (AFP) Share menu has been simplified and a "Default umask" option has been added. The "Server Name" field has also been removed from AFP; in Netatalk 3, this value is automatically derived from the system hostname. "Enable home directories" and "Home directories" options added to AFP.

The AIO options have been removed from CIFS.

Fourteen TLS-related fields have been added to the Advanced Mode of FTP.

An "IPv4 Address" column has been added to the View Jails screen.

A shell button has been added to Jails, making it easy to access the command line of the selected jail.

A "Create directory" checkbox has been added to the Add Storage function of a jail so that the user does not have to first access the jail's shell to make sure that the directory already exists. A "Read-Only" checkbox has also been added to this screen.

A jails templating system has been added, allowing the quick deployment of new jails from existing templates and the ability to create custom templates. Linux jail support has also been added and installation templates are included for Debian-7.1.0, Gentoo-20130820, Ubuntu-13.04, Centos-6.4, Fedora-19, and Suse-12.3.

A link to the online FreeBSD manual pages has been added to Help.

Added bxe(4) driver for Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet 10Gb PCIe adapter.