Community: Configuration

The Community edition comes with a single pre-configured volume. Unlike the Enterprise edition, there is no configure.flexfs CLI — the free server manages the volume directly with fixed settings determined at install time.

The “free” Volume

The installer creates a volume named free with the following configuration:

Setting	Value	Notes
Name	free	Fixed; cannot be renamed
Block size	2 MiB	Fixed at creation
Compression	lz4	Fixed at creation
End-to-end encryption	Disabled	Not available in Community edition
Max blocks	2,621,440	5 TiB of data
Max inodes	5,000,000	Maximum number of files and directories
Retention	7 days (604,800 seconds)	How long deleted metadata and block data are preserved
Volume ID	Deterministic UUID	Derived from the bucket name and key prefix

The volume ID is generated deterministically from your bucket and prefix, so reinstalling with the same bucket and prefix produces the same volume ID and the same object key prefix. That by itself does not bring the filesystem back — see Reinstalling with the same bucket.

Viewing the Volume Token

The volume token is the credential that mount clients use to authenticate with the server and access the free volume. It is auto-generated during installation and stored in the free server’s credential file.

To view the volume token:

grep '^volumeToken' /root/.flexfs/free/creds

Example output:

volumeToken = "$TOKEN"

Tip

In the Community edition, the volume token is automatically embedded in the mount client deploy script served at /deploy/install-mount.sh. When you run the one-line mount command shown after installation, you do not need to provide the token separately — it is baked into the script.

Credential File

The full credential file at ~root/.flexfs/free/creds contains all of the free server’s configuration in TOML format:

cat /root/.flexfs/free/creds

The file includes:

Field	Description
accountToken	Internal account-level authentication token
metaToken	Token used for free server to metadata server communication
volumeToken	Token that mount clients use to access the volume
volumeID	UUID identifying the volume (derived from bucket + prefix)
provider	Cloud provider code (e.g. aws, gcp)
region	Cloud region (e.g. us-east-1)
api	Object storage API (e.g. s3, gcs)
bucket	Storage bucket name
prefix	Key prefix within the bucket
metaAddr	Metadata server address (host:port)
retention	Data retention period in seconds
blockAddr	Custom S3 endpoint (if configured)
blockUser	Static credential username (if configured)
blockPass	Static credential password (if configured)

Caution

This file contains sensitive credentials. It is created with 0600 permissions (owner read/write only). Do not share or expose this file.

What You Cannot Change

The following features are not available in the Community edition:

• Creating additional volumes
• Changing block size, compression, or quotas
• Enabling end-to-end encryption
• Creating proxy groups
• Creating multiple volume tokens or mount-path-scoped tokens
• Managing resources with configure.flexfs

If you need any of these capabilities, consider upgrading to Enterprise.

Reinstalling with the Same Bucket

Because the volume ID is derived deterministically from the bucket name and prefix, reinstalling the Community edition against the same bucket and prefix produces the same volume ID, and therefore the same object key prefix. The auto-generated tokens will be different.

Danger

This does not recover your filesystem. Metadata — inodes, directory entries, attributes — lives only on the metadata server’s local disk under --dbFolder (/root/.flexfs/meta/data by default) and is never written to the bucket. A reinstall starts with an empty metadata database, so the volume mounts empty even though the blocks are still in object storage, and the installer’s overwrite path removes /root/.flexfs outright.

The orphaned blocks are not left in place either: the metadata server runs an object reconciliation pass every Saturday at 03:00 local time that deletes blocks the metadata store does not account for.

To move a Community installation to another server, stop the service and preserve the metadata database directory. See Backup and Recovery.

Next Steps

• Community: First Mount — install the mount client on a remote host and mount the filesystem