Can you encrypt the contents of a drive?
He was talking about the need to do so as he’s gained popularity he wants to protect against physical theft.
According to a google search FreeNAS will do full-disk encryption on its pools using the GELI feature of the ZFS filesystem. It ought to allow for decent passphrase sizes.
What are you defending against? Encryption as a buzzword is useless, get a sticker that says encrypted and slap it on your server chassis.
If you encrypt the drives, they will need to be unlocked at each boot up and will be wide open as long as the server is online. If someone picks up the whole thing and walks it out of your house or office this is useful but who "steals" a rack or large sever? If they are on your network they'd have full access to copy anything off.
Setting ACL and permissions would be more useful.
You can create smaller storage containers that would in practice be like encrypted zip folders on the NAS that you unlock and lock as needed.
If you have external drives that you rotate out for backup purposed you can encrypt those...
There's so many different encryption setups that I hate to see it used in such general terms. Figure out what works for your needs and learn something new.
But yes, FreeNAS/TrueNAS is the shit.
(post is archived)