Introducing FreeNAS Corral | Hacker News Reader

Introducing FreeNAS Corral

freenas.org

139 pointspstadler60 comments

Wow, I didn't realise that FreeNAS had come so far. Featureset looks amazing and better than most of enterprise solutions.

I didn't either, and I'm running FreeNAS 9 on my server at home. I didn't realize FreeNAS 10 was such a huge improvement.

Before rushing to upgrade, take note that they are abandoning the plugin system for, what I believe is, a docker-based approach for services. Don't quote me on that second part, but I'm fairly certain you will need to reconfigure any services which are presently running as a plugin.

If you have custom jails, then you really don't need my advice :)

Yes, be careful, your jails won't run on Corral.

I've just migrated yesterday and managed to replace all my jails with Docker containers, although the road was a bit bumpy, at least when it comes to the containers UI which is buggy as hell currently.

All in all I'm delighted. The CLI is great, the UI buggy but definitely better, and no more jails but proper containers instead.

Congratulations to the team and thank you for delivering.

Bear in mind, ixSystems HAS an enterprise solution based on FreeNAS called TrueNAS - we bought two appliances with 72TB if usable storage to handle image storage for our ECM suite which has BILLIONS of small images. The things run like a champ, and outside some minor issues with the AD integration we've taken care of they've been a great storage solution.

Same experience with FreeNAS 9.x and AD.

But... I just upgraded to FreeNAS 10/Corral and the AD integration just worked!

Previously there was a `generate_smb4_conf.py` script that translated the UI selections into a `smb4.conf` file, but our AD had some weird schema issues that required a custom config. I ended up hacking parts of the generator script to get it to produce the right thing. In FreeNAS 10 it seems they switched to samba's Registry Configuration [1].

[1] https://www.samba.org/~obnox/presentations/linux-kongress-20...

My issue was actually the way their HA setup attempted to configure itself with duplicate SPN's - I ended up needing to manually export a key tab with ktpass to use it instead of getting it via winbind.

I've been using FreeNAS 9.10 for just under a year now having originally moved from Ubuntu Server. Its feature set, ease of use and stability really is incredible. Can't wait to try Corral out.

I'm excited to see FreeNAS "Corral" come out and the user interface looks great, however I'm still disappointed that jails are not able to be used.

I'm not sad to see the plugins system gone, it was terrible and I always set up my own custom jails on FreeNAS anyway, but It would have been nice to be able to use jails at least from the command line. I guess they don't want to have to worry about supporting both.

I just wonder about the extra overhead of having to run a virtual machine for every container as opposed to just running a FreeBSD jail. bhyve is also not as established as FreeBSD jails and I wonder about stability. Now you're having to worry about the stability of bhyve and docker. For just running services like emby, syncthing, SABnzbd or the like I honestly think having the option to just run a FreeBSD jail is superior. Considering it is FreeBSD under the hood I don't see why the option is gone.

It's nice to be able to run Docker containers don't get me wrong, but I just wonder if it is really the superior technology.

Well done iXsystems and FreeNAS developers! You blow the doors literally off everything else.

FreeNAS is awesome.

Does anyone know of a way to configure FreeNAS (or an alternative FS, such LizardFS or Tahoe LAFS) that can provide the feature set of Isilon OneFS (not the performance) with an open source implementation?

That is,

1. to add more storage, just add another machine (everything looks like one big volume, irrespective of machine/disk boundaries).

2. replication / error correction / raid works across the entire fleet of machines; that is, you can configure it so that up to 1-disk per node, and up to 2-nodes overall can die without damage to data

3. snapshots

1. Not sure how to get a single global namespace on FreeNAS right now, that might require further upgrades to NFS (or maybe it's in 10 now, I haven't tried).

2. Early in the development of FreeNAS 10 SwiftStack, IPFS, and Riak were planned as features. It's still possible those will make it into the project some day, but for now you're on your own for clustering/multi-node use.

3. Snapshots and Snapshot Replication are a core feature of FreeNAS since 8. I don't know where the 10 docs are but in 9.10 they're here: http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#snapshots

If you dont know, take a look at https://infinit.sh

Interesting. The features I asked for are almost all in "enterprise" and there's no price quote yes (or even a mention of whether enterprise is open source - I am willing to pay for a good system, but not for one I can't support myself)

What is the status of ipfs integration? I know it was part of the v10 roadmap, but I don't see any mention of it in Corral and have been unable to figure out if it features in the Corral roadmap. Corral looks like it would be a great UX for farming disk space for ipfs/filecoin in the future. Thanks.

Dropped from the 10.0 release. No idea if/when it will make it in. It was working in ALPHA, but only as an experiment.

Is it possible to run Windows 10 as guest in Bhyve? I was planning to build my workstation on Ubuntu as host OS. Running few VMs inside - two windows, two linux and managing my ZFS pool (host os directly)... but if FreeNAS can run Windows VMs, it would be ideal...

I'm wondering, what's the usecase for Docker there?

I could see lots of use cases for running small apps directly on your NAS. Maintenance tools, monitoring, etc.

Synology has lots of "apps" that run on their NAS solution: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/app_packages/all_app. This could easily cover that use case.

They've always had the functionality to run software like Transmission inside a Jail. I guess they just moved that functionality to docker to be more "hip".

FreeNAS 9.10 includes 28 plugins. Docker Hub has 500,000 images.

It goes beyond just being "hip". It's about mindshare, which is extremely important when you want user-contributed plugins.

As I understand it, the plugin system is poorly documented, and it seemed like most of the popular ones were being maintained by one guy:

https://github.com/josh4trunks/freenas-plugins

Reminds me of the joke, "How do you get docker to be secure? Run it inside a (FreeBSD) jail."

Having not looked at it that's my guess what they are doing. Everything related to it is in a jail. Making it secure regardless of dockers questionable security.

Of course jails are the underlying mechanism of that Docker port on FreeBSD that someone did once… But I'm not sure they're using that. Linuxulator is not perfect, and they announced "Docker support" not "imperfect Docker support" :D I bet they're using something like boot2docker in a bhyve VM.

I'm trying to find out. Oddly enough searching the FreeNAS docs on the website for "docker" returns nothing.

I've seen reference to jails mostly regarding running docker and to a lesser extent bhyve.

Anyone running running corral or a recent snapshot that can say what secure tech docker is running in?

It's described a bit in the video [1] they seem to use VMs as docker hosts.

[1] https://youtu.be/x4IBKUmC5ns?t=1374

That's correct. The first time you use docker it automatically configures a boot2docker VM.

What's FreeNAS like from a security point-of-view nowadays? How is it with security updates being pushed out? How about default configuration?

You can set up email notifications to have your server email you when new updates are available. They come out semi-frequently; maybe monthly. You can install them from the web interface pretty easily; major updates usually require a reboot.

By default I think the only way to access FreeNAS is through the web interface (which seems fairly secure, though I'm not really all that familiar with FreeNAS's codebase). No SSL by default, but you can set it up with self-signed certs almost trivially using FreeNAS's GUI. You can enable SSH access and other services manually, and those services come with their own set of security concerns you need to be aware of.

Does this version still require a tiny slice of every data-storage drive be used as swap?

I've got hardware built up but am still debating NAS4FREE vs FreeNAS.

In FreeNAS 9.10, that's configurable via the webUI.

Haven't tried the released version of Corral though, so unsure if it's carried through.

Yes, but I believe it can be disabled as in 8.x and 9.x.

The only thing stopping me using FreeNAS was that I can't run CrashPlan on BSD. What are others doing for offsite backups?

Tarsnap. It's the best offsite, secure, cloud storage out there.

http://rclone.org/ + amazon cloud drive?

You can't? I thought there was a Crashplan plugin? (Also, even if you can't run it on BSD, couldn't you just setup a VirtualBox jail and run Crashplan on that?)

There's a FreeBSD port for CrashPlan using Linux compatibility, can that be used?

https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/linux-crashplan/

You can now run CrashPlan in a docker container on Corral. (In 9.x it's available as a plugin.)

Awesome! Thanks.

Looks like I lost all my backup configs (from windows via iSCSI and from my Macs via time machine) :/

Does it support heterogeneous drives?

Yes, you can put drives of similar sizes in raid groups ("vdevs") together and then stripe together dissimilar groups. You can also put them all together in one big group, but in that case the group will act as though all the drives are the size of the smallest one and waste the rest of the space.

Example disks:

* 2x 500GB

* 4x 1TB

Example of first option:

* Mirror of 500GB: 500GB

* RAID-Z of 1TB: 3TB

* Total Usable Storage: 3.5TB

* Total Overhead (Redundancy): 1.5TB

* Pool fails if any two drives of the same size are lost

Example of second option:

* RAID-Z1 of all: 2.5TB (Effectively RAID-Z1 of 6x500TB)

* Total Usable Storage: 2.5TB

* Total Overhead (Redundancy): 500TB

* Total Wasted: 2TB

* Pool fails if any two drives are lost

Terminology/facts in case any reader doesn't know:

* A mirror is what you'd think, basically RAID 1.

* A RAID-Z(1) is a RAID group with a single disk worth of redundancy, like RAID 5.

* RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3 are two- and three-disk redundancy groups respectively.

* ZFS can stripe together any number of similar or dissimilar groups of drives, but if any one such group is lost the entire pool is corrupted.

Edited for formatting

Edit Edit: These behaviors are due to ZFS, not choices made by the FreeNAS developers.

The answer is complicated. ZFS wasn't designed with a small number of heterogeneous drive sizes in mind.

If you don't care about redundancy then you can span a volume across as many odd drives as you want free and clear.

If you do care about redundancy, you need sets of similar drives put together and then it only makes sense if you have a large number of drives.

Raidz has performance penalties and should only be used with a large number of vdevs unless you care little about speed.

An array of mirrors is the best way to go for small to medium sized zfs installations which means pairs of same-sized drives and only 50% available space.

Awesome.. I moved away from FreeNAS to Ubuntu 16.04 ZFS.. Now, back to FreeNAS..

Damn nice. Can it import btrfs volumes?

No, FreeNAS is ZFS only.

I was hoping it could read them so I can migrate.

Couldn't you just NFS export and copy or even use rsync?

Sure, with another NAS :)

I doubt FreeBSD can read btrfs volumes directly; however if they let you set up a fully virtualized VM (i.e. appears like its own hardware and you could install Windows under it), then you could create the correct sized VM, install your OS, then migrate.

The ideal case would be to get a new ZFS system and copy over the network. Depending on how big your data is, and how many spare drives you have, you could probably do something hacky like creating a small ZFS pool on linux, empty a btrfs drive, and then move it over to ZFS. At that point you could export that system and switch over to FreeNAS. But the end result wouldn't be optimal, pretty far from it.

edit: just to clarify ZFS under Linux isn't hacky, ubuntu 16.04 makes it pretty nice, rather this particular suggestion is hacky.

Btrfs is in the Linux kernel. FreenNAS is BSD, not Linux based. You can of course rsync the data from one system to the other over a network cable; and you can also use -c,--checksum option to do checksum verification (super slow but if you care enough to use Btrfs and ZFS you care about data integrity presumably).

You might want to check out Rockstor - it's basically the same thing except with Linux and btrfs.

http://rockstor.com/

I was on Rockstor before - but the number of "rock-ons" (approved docker images) was too low, and raid5 btrfs comes with a giant warning, so I swithed to FreeNAS Corral. It's brilliant. More a beta than the name suggests, but a really impressive piece of work.

Hah, that's funny, I tried FreeNAS initially (an earlier version, though) and gave up because it didn't like some of my hardware.

I'll grant you that raid5 is unstable and the "official" selection of rock-ons is pretty limited. FWIW, adding your own rock-ons isn't very hard - basically drop a json file in a folder and refresh the page. They also accept PRs, so I've added a couple to the official list myself: https://github.com/rockstor/rockon-registry

oh, shiny. I wonder if there is a way to make this run on my Synology...

For any future readers / searchers, it looks like the link was changed [0].

[0] http://www.freenas.org/blog/introducing-freenas-corral-an-op...

Thanks. Updated from http://www.freenas.org/blog/introducing-freenas-corral-world....

According to the release notes, you can update to Corral and roll back to 9.10 via the GUI.