As mentioned previously, I decided to go for the USB memory stick installation rather than the optical drive installation. To do this, download the latest .xz image from the FreeNAS website, and use the xzcat utility piped through dd to write to the memory stick. Note: Satisfy yourself first you know the USB memory stick's device. On my system it is /dev/sdb but in most instances would be /dev/sda. Get this wrong and you could wipe your system accidentally.
linux-2jex:/ # cd /tmp linux-2jex:/tmp # xzcat FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x64.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=64k 3231+217215 records in 3231+217215 records out 2000000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 848.691 s, 2.4 MB/s linux-2jex:/tmp #
Once the memory stick is ready, ensure your FreeNAS server's BIOS has been set to boot from a USB drive, then reboot with the stick in place. BSD loads and goes straight into the console like the image below. You must be connected to your LAN at this point, and if so your router should have assigned an IP address by its DHCP server. The assigned IP address can be clearly seen.
Now go to another computer on this network and point a browser to the IP address shown in the console output. In my case it was 192.168.0.9. All being well, your new FreeNAS will send you the following screen back.
Now's the time to correct a couple of settings before we move into the next chapter - configuration. Click on the Settings tab, and you'll see the screen below. Set the timezone and Console Keyboard Map, and of course your Language if necessary. Click Save
Click on the Advanced tab and check Show console messages in the footer - this will give you a good indication of what is going on in your box!
Cool! Now time for configuration