Today we have the latest maintenance release dubbed FreeNAS 11.3-U3. For those few STH readers unfamiliar, FreeNAS is an immensely popular NAS storage platform built on FreeBSD. It is also one of the easiest DIY ZFS storage server solutions available. That makes it perhaps the most popular open-source storage platform out there with regular releases. As an example, we recently covered FreeNAS 11.3-U2 released with 150 Bug fixes and Updates about a month and a half ago. Since it impacts many users, this is a big deal for the community.
FreeNAS 11.3-U3 Released
Overall, this was a release focused on bug fixes rather than on adding new functionality. You can see the full list of over 100 bugs fixed in the Jira FreeNAS 11.3-U3 tracker. The key areas for bug fixes were:
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Network Interfaces section updates
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Allow mounting NFS shares with either Kerberos or default security when Require Kerberos for NFSv4 is disabled
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Import a Samba 4 patch for an Apple Time Machine bug
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UI visual improvements
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Improve Active Directory auto-rejoin
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Merge FreeBSD patches and update FreeNAS Kernel to 11.3-RELEASE-p8
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Improvements to the alert system
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Make fstab handling for Jail mount points more robust
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Temperature reporting fallback for drives on a SCSI HBA
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SMB sharing improvements
You can read more about the details on the FreeNAS sites and in the bug trackers.
How to get FreeNAS 11.3-U3
If you are installing FreeNAS on a new system, you can just download the latest installer. If you have an existing system, navigate to system -> Update and you should see the new version pop up with the option to upgrade.
You can see the 11.3-U2 upgrade options as 11.3-U3 in the screenshot above. We know many readers will want to hold off on updates, even maintenance bugfixes like this to let others test the upgrade first and find any issues. We have already done two machines at STH. We also have machines now tracking TrueNAS CORE’s developments.
Final Words
As the new updates to FreeNAS 11.3-U3 are rolling out, many eyes are on what is next. We are only a few months to the TrueNAS CORE rebranding for the popular ZFS NAS software. These new releases will help converge the solutions.
There were not many new features in this release, and fewer bug fixes than in the last release cycle (11.3-U1 to 11.3-U2.) One has to wonder whether these were simply more complex bugs to fix, or if development is slowing due to the TrueNAS CORE rebrand or the global situation. In either case, for the open-source community, getting an update to a popular tool is always a welcome occasion.
Important to note that some have experienced SMB issues following the update – very small sample though.
Yep, i’m one of those with SMB issues, only one though, when restarting FreeNAS after this update i can’t connect to my SMB shares even though the SMB service on FreeNAS is turned on, i have to toggle the switch from On to Off, then back to On for it to work properly
Don’t really restart my NAS that often so not a biggie, other than that it works as intended
Do you have to do that on/off toggle thing every time you boot or just the first boot after the update?
Everytime
I saw a workaround in the FreeNAS forum that for one user it worked if they changed the settings for Administators Group in the SMB settings but when i do that i get the following error:
” Failed to identify Windows SID for group: failed to call wbcGidToSid: WBC_ERR_DOMAIN_NOT_FOUND Could not convert gid 1000 to sid”
It has the problem after every boot.
And 11.3-U3.1 has been released, but users are still complaining about services not starting at boot. Better wait a few weeks before upgrading production servers.
11.3 U3 took a working configuration previously running 11.2 U8 and made it totally unstable. The webgui became unresponsive to most options including configuration of pools and shares. In order to regain control I had to switch to the legacy web interface (not horrible, but I miss the extra eye candy). Will see what else broke, but no, 11.3 U3 is not a happy place to be.