In part 1 of this series, I covered the requirements and hardware. In part 2 I covered the initial configuration of the new server. In this part I’ll cover setting the server up as a file server.

The main use case for this new server is to be the main file and media server for our home. To achieve this I needed NFS, SMB and AFP access to the imported datasets.

NFS access is available by default in ZFS, but to get SMB and AFP access requires software to be installed. As indicated in part 2, you are strongly discouraged from installing software in the global zone. The supported approach is to create a new zone and install the software in there.
Zones are sort-of virtual machines in that each thinks it has exclusive use to hardware and are separate security containers. Where SmartOS differs from VMWare is its hybrid approach to supporting virtual machines. It does this by supporting multiple “brands” of zones:

• “joyent” branded zones appear to be running SmartOS itself. They have no kernel of their own, they re-use the global zone’s kernel and just provide resource and security isolation.
• “lx” branded zones appear to be running a specific version of Linux. As with “joyent” zones, they re-use the global zone’s kernel but translate the “brand”‘s system calls into those supported by SmartOS. This gets you the benefits of the software that normally runs on the brand, but without the overhead of having two run the brand’s kernel on top of the SmartOS kernel. The result is near bare-metal speeds. Currently (Sept 2015), SmartOS supports Ubuntu, Centos, Debian, Fedora (maybe others).
• “kvm” branded zones are more like any other KVM virtual machine: allowing just about any other operating to be installed.

First attempt using an Ubuntu branded zone

This failed, so I’m not going into the detail

You could install Ubuntu in a kvm branded zone, but using an Ubuntu version of a lx zone avoids running two kernels. Base images for many Ubuntu variants exist in Joyent’s public repository, so I simply followed the instructions in the SmartOS wiki to:

1. import the base Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server image
2. Create a json file that describes the new zone
3. Create the new zone using the json file.
   At the end of this, I had an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine called capella, on the same IP address as the old server and with direct access to the ZFS datasets containing the files from the old server.

I now followed the guide at outcoldman.comcoldman to install SAMBA and the guide at … to install Netatalk.
At the end, I had a functioning Samba server, but I had trouble with netatalk. My Macbook Air running Mavericks couldn’t connect to Capella using AFP. Investigation showed that the 14.04 version of lx-ubuntu was missing the uams_dhx2.so security module that was needed to support Mavericks.
Note: SmartOS freely admit that branded zones are still being developed

Second attempt using a native SmartOS zone

Rather than spending too much time on this, I exploited one of the major advantages of using SmartOS. I simply deleted the zone, downloaded a basic joyent brand zone, created a new json file and created a new joyent branded zone. It took 5 minutes! I used the following json

{
"hostname": "capella.agdon.net",
"alias": "capella",
"brand": "joyent",
"max_physical_memory": 4096,
"image_uuid": "5c7d0d24-3475-11e5-8e67-27953a8b237e",
"resolvers": ["172.29.12.7","8.8.4.4"],
"nics": [
{
"nic_tag": "admin",
"ip": "172.29.12.11",
"netmask": "255.255.255.0",
"gateway": "172.29.12.1",
"primary": "1"
}
],
"filesystems": [
{
"type": "lofs",
"source": "/data/media",
"target": "/import/media"
},
{
"type": "lofs",
"source": "/data/home",
"target": "/import/home"
},
{
"type": "lofs",
"source": "/data/home/git",
"target": "/import/home/git"
},
{
"type": "lofs",
"source": "/data/public",
"target": "/import/public"
},
{
"type": "lofs",
"source": "/data/software",
"target": "/import/software"
}
]
}

I then installed Samba and Netatalk as before. This time all was well and I now had a functioning NFS, SMB and AFP file server.

I reconfigured the clients to access the new server and I was back where I was before I changed hardware. Simples!

Next Step, install Plex media server, SABNZBD, CouchPotato and Sickbeard to create a fully functioning media server.