Upon searching for a local file-serving solution, I chanced upon FreeNAS (which was based on FreeBSD.) While FreeNAS offered a very flexible GUI to enable network services, it was essentially a stripped-down version of FreeBSD that lacked tools that were normally present in a vanilla FreeBSD installation. Additionally, FreeNAS’s installation menu did not provide a ‘fixit shell’ that I could use to create a custom ZFS root layout. As I was already using a barebones FreeBSD system for web hosting, I decided to alter it slightly to make room for indefinite data storage (ZFS).
I re-installed FreeBSD (8.2) on a ZFS root with GPT following this guide. I had to additionally run /stand/sysinstall as root to configure my network settings, and to install the Samba package as well as other miscellaneous packages.