14 DAY TRIAL // Jordan Hubbard from the FreeNAS project, an open-source initiative to create a powerful, free, secure, and reliable NAS (Network-attached storage) operating system based on BSD technologies, announced the release of FreeNAS 9.10.
FreeNAS 9.10 is the tenth maintenance release in the current stable 9.x series of the project, thus bringing the latest security patches from upstream, support for new devices, as well as several under-the-hood updates. As expected, FreeNAS 9.10 has been rebased on the latest FreeBSD 10.3 RC3 (Release Candidate) release.
Release highlights of FreeNAS 9.10 include support for connecting to huge Active Directory (AD) domains while the cache feature is disabled, support for sending collected data to a remote graphite server, support for Samba 4.3.4, and various updates to the FreeBSD ports to be on par with the FreeBSD 2016Q1 branch.
"The base OS version for FreeNAS 9.10 is now FreeBSD 10.3-RC3, bringing in a huge number of OS-related bug fixes, performance improvements and new features (new drivers, new CPU chipset support, USB 3.0, etc) and basic support for hosting virtual machines with bhyve," said Jordan Hubbard in today's announcement.
New hardware components are now supported
As mentioned before, FreeNAS 9.10 adds support for new hardware components, among which we can mention Intel I219-V and Intel I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet chipsets, the new Intel Skylake architecture, USB 3.0 devices, along with various network adapters that connect through USB.
Other than that, there's now a new GUI option that allows for nfsv3-like ownership when using version 4 of the NFS (Network Attached Filesystem) file system, rebase of the FreeBSD Jails to the template system of the FreeBSD 10.3 RC2 operating systems, the addition of support for FreeBSD 9.3-based templates, and much more.
If you're wondering what's next for the FreeNAS project, we can tell you that the developers are already working on the major FreeNAS 10 release, which should be available later this year with cool new features like full support for managing containers and VMs. In the meantime, you can download FreeNAS 9.10 right now.