Introduction

The primary purpose of a server is of course to provide all kinds of services permanently and to look after important data. FreeBSD is ideally suited for this. These services and data can be managed in various ways. With TrueNAS, for example, via a convenient website. But even without this website, the administration of such a server is not a problem and is even advantageous in many situations. Pure access via SSH is very lean, very secure and, above all, very direct. The system is fully controllable and offers the necessary transparency to rectify errors.

FreeBSD is a free and complete unixoid operating system which can be installed on your own hardware. With field-proven ZFS support, it is the ideal basis for the secure storage of data. Jails can be used to run many services very easily, very lean and very securely, because for FreeBSD it doesn't matter whether one or 100 jails are running at the same time. In addition, there is a full-blown virtualization, which is excellently suited for starting other operating systems under FreeBSD.

Goals

The aim of this series of articles is a kind of ‘replacement’ for a TrueNAS CORE or TrueNAS SCALE, which is purely console-based. Without dependence on a provider who could discontinue entire product guidelines overnight and without large management frameworks. We want it to be absolutely simple and straightforward (KISS). This article series is a collection of articles and tips that have been put in a sensible order to achieve our goal: A FreeBSD server providing jails, virtual machines, docker and file shares. Supplemented by backup and monitoring .

Who is this guide for? For purists who absolutely understand their system and want to maintain absolute control.

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Basic conditions

Here in the instructions I assume that:

  • FreeBSD has been installed on a small SSD (zroot) with ZFS as filesystem and is accessible via SSH,
  • the VMs and jails run on two mirrored SSDs (work) and
  • the data is located on a couple of hard drives with raidz2 (data)

This has the following advantages:

  • The base system is separated from the data, the few configuration files are quickly backed up and restored. There will only be a few services that run naked on the base system and are therefore also part of the backup
  • The VMs and jails need permanent and fast access to the data, which is well served by mirrored SSDs and is also fun with larger VMs, e.g. Windows
  • The actual user data can be stored on the ‘large’ data pool. This is about available space for your own data and this is distributed across multiple hard disks with raidz2. Two of the hard drives can fail before data is lost

This arrangement and distribution of data is only an example and can be customized to suit individual requirements. In particular, use for domestic requirements quickly scales upwards. However, there should always be at least one dedicated hard drive for the operating system and two or more hard drives for the data. Whether as a mirror or Raid5 depends on the amount of data and your budget.

Article overview

So: FreeBSD is installed and has an IP address on the network. What now?

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