Greetings!
The FreeNAS development team is filled with mixed emotions in announcing the second Release Candidate image of FreeNAS 9.2.1!
On the one hand, we’re happy to say that we’ve fixed a LOT of bugs since 9.2.1-RC was released. Lots. You folks have been going crazy with finding and filing the bugs every day! Seriously, we can hardly keep up (but please don’t stop filing them). We have fixed over 164 bugs in 9.2.1 so far, also adding some new features along the way and doing lots of stuff to make 9.2.1 better in almost every conceivable way!
On the other hand, we still have 16 bugs left, and most of them are in SMB (CIFS), so we’re pretty sure we’re going to have to release a 9.2.1-RC3 before this is all said and done since we just can’t release SMB with known breakages. These aren’t “SMB will eat your data” breakages, these are more subtle issues that most people will never hit, but we know they’re there so we have to fix them!
Therefore, we will not be doing 9.2.1-RELEASE on Feb 7th as originally planned. It would have been nice, but quality before schedule! The new provisional release date for 9.2.1-RELEASE is Feb 12th. We don’t have a LOT of work to do, but we’d like to make our next Release Candidate a genuine “we don’t know of any significant problems with this” release, so that means we’ll kick this RC2 out the door and give it around 5 days to get tested (there’s a lot more to FreeNAS than CIFS), then we’ll roll -RC3 when we’ve fixed all the remaining blockers for release and could conceivably just rename 9.2.1-RC3 to 9.2.1-RELEASE if no show stoppers were found!
Please feel free to file bugs against this build, taking care to note in your bug report that you saw it in 9.2.1-RC2 and also note the datestamp of the build, since we will continuing to release 9.2.1-RC2 nightly builds and it’s otherwise very hard to tell which build you saw the problem in if you don’t tell us.
Please download it now and check it out!
Thanks,
The FreeNAS Development Team
Release notes:

• Samba (SMB/CIFS support) upgraded to version 4.1.4. This adds support for SMB3, the ability for FreeNAS to be a Windows Domain Controller, and advanced features like server-side copy support in Windows 2012 and later, along with multiple years worth of improvements over the version of Samba that shipped in 9.2.0. It also enables SMB protocol version 3. Previous versions of FreeNAS limited samba to SMB2 because of random crashes that would occur using SMB3.
• Added the LSI 12G SAS driver as a module to the build. This can be enabled by adding a tunable for mpslsi3_load with a value of YES. This driver is still under development and not yet committed to FreeBSD. It is provided for beta testing only. For production use please consider using a 6G SAS adapter, such as the LSI 9207.
• Fixed a bug with netatalk that prevented share browsing from working in the finder on OSX. Also enabled options for fuller-fidelity AFP copies with Mac OS ACLs (ACEs) now stored as ZFS ACLs.
• Remove the non functional share password field from AFP shares.
• Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, improving the Mac share browsing experience.
• Added additional Web API functionality for manipulating ZFS snapshots.
• Brought back the FreeNAS 8.x volume manager as a “Manual Setup” option. This volume manager allows manual vddv building and offers no seatbelts. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, using the standard volume manager is highly recommended by the development team!
• Made some changes to reporting graphs that segregates reports by type, one type per tab. Add graphs that show individual disk activity (and sort them correctly now!)
• Fixed a bug that prevented building an encrypted volume using multi path devices.
• Update django (used by the WebUI) to 1.6 and dojo to 1.9.2
• Add the following ZFS features: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks
• Add trafshow to the image. This utility gives a CLI view of connections and usage to the FreeNAS box.
• Fix kernel module load for fuse. This is needed for importing NTFS volumes.
• Add the ability to use a keytab for AD joins. This eliminates the need to use the AD Administrator account to join FreeNAS to AD, closing a long standing issue of needing the AD Admin password in the FreeNAS configuration database.
• Updated the LSI 6 Gbps HBA driver (mps) to version 16. Please update the firmware of any mps HBAs to phase 16.