Setting up a NodeJS application on a FreeBSD 10 system was impossible when using ZFS as a file system. This was a real pain for me because when I tried out various stuff in jails rendered the whole system unusable, forcing me to reboot and this is not something one would do in a production environment.

Here’s the bug report: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=209158

Although I couldn’t read it from the bug it seems to be resolved now with FreeBSD 11-RELEASE because I’m running two Node applications on FreeBSD without any of the issues that were reproducible each time.

FreeBSD is the ideal system to use when building a server. It’s reliable and rock-solid and it’s file system ZFS not only offers anything you would expect from a file system but is also easy to set up and to maintain. This is why I chose it to power my NAS. In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I already described my intentions and the hardware assembly. Now it’s time to bring it to life.

After a long while I finally decided to build a new NAS / home server for my various needs. Though there are many solutions available, I chose to build one on my own as I want as much flexibility as possible. So I set out to buy all components needed for the system with upgradability and budget in mind.