Storage Server: Software - FreeNAS

Software: FreeNAS

All hardware has been implemented, all 13 harddisks and one SSD are connected, serial numbers, as well as physical, and logical locations noted.

Cramming 4 2.5" disks in the CD bay

Time to add some software. I will install the latest and the greatest(?) FreeNAS software, V11.

Installation

The installation, due to IPMI being capable of mounting remote images, is a walk in the park. With the machine powered down, I mount the CD image:

At the boot process, I press F11 to get the boot options menu, and I choose the virtual CD:

You will be greeted by the FreeNAS installer screen (well... actually, there's a Grub message before that). Just hit the retrun button, and be patient.
At some point, there will be messages scrolling over your sccreen.

Then, you'll see this - just take option 1: Install.

Scroll to your USB drive, or drives. Slight differences in size (yes, amazingly, 8GB drives are not 8GB drives!) do not matter in this stage; FreeNAS will resize the larger one to the size of the smaller. Select the dirve(s) you want to install on, using the spacebar.

Yeah, I know - I selected these two.

Make up a password.

As I have a UEFI motherboard, I select UEFI.

Be patient...the installations process is quite slow; this may be due to the USB drives - don't know.

At some point you can restart the machine, and you will see the menu in IPMI:

You should now be seeting up a fixed IP-address, or two - depending on your requirements. I will create a volume now, and expand on cost-efficient use of the SSD - after all, I'm Dutch ;).
This continues with: Storage Server: FreeNAS: use your SSD efficiently