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Comment by grk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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