FreeNAS 11.0 is Now Here | Hacker News Reader

FreeNAS 11.0 is Now Here

freenas.org

108 pointseatonphil52 comments

Well... that was fast. After the absolute disaster that was 10.0, I think they should have really reconnected with the community to restore their direction. Then, give themselves enough time to implement those changes.

The linked post makes it pretty clear that this is NOT a production ready release. 9.10 continues to be the workhorse. Did they just want to reach a new milestone for the optics?

I thought the post seemed to indicate it was production ready, but then again, they said the same for Coral. The forum post for this announcement indicates that they have no planned 9.10 updates, so I would think that 11.0 is meant to be the next production ready update. The GUI is a beta release, but that seems to be the only non-complete portion, and I would hardly let that hold me back from upgrading.

That being said, I'm holding onto 9.10 for a few months, to see how this release turns out. Moving my jails to docker is a welcome change, but not something I want to jump on immediately.

Docker isn't included in this release (thought supposedly will be coming in something like 11.1). The GUI is stable in 11, there's just an _option_ to use the redesigned, beta UI.

I believe this is just what would have been 9.10.3 just rebranded. They wanted the major number to track the FreeBSD version number.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/this-week-in-fr...

Renaming to 11.0 - As many of you know, we’ve been hard at work on what was to become 9.10.3 in the next few weeks. As part of this update, we have also bumped the base OS version to FreeBSD stable/11. This is a significant enough update that we wanted to take this opportunity to return to a saner form of versioning that more closely follows the underlying OS version. Moving forward you’ll be seeing releases like 11.0, 11.0-U1 (Update #1), 11.1 and so forth, eventually moving to 12.0 once we rebase on FreeBSD 12 (still a couple years off).

Thanks, this explains it perfectly.

FreeNAS 9.x did not include virtualization. If this was just a 9.x.y release, why would it include major architectural changes like virtualization?

At least FreeNas 9.10 does, via iohyve/bhyve [0]. I installed a Ubuntu Server image using it the other day and it worked flawlessly.

[0] Docs are a little spartan, but google searches got me up and running a virtualized linux image in less than 15 minutes. https://doc.freenas.org/9.10/jails.html#using-iohyve

Much saner leadership at the helm of the team that released this one. The leadership/team behind FreeNAS Corral (aka FreeNAS 10) was let go after their abortion.

I upgraded to 10, the issues caused me to just run ZFS on linux with docker and netdata for monitoring. Other than the UX are there really any benefits of using FreeNAS over ZFS on Linux?

I've had occasional issues with ZFS on linux after a hardware problem (sata card died in a weird way) and it left the system in a state where the then stable release would crash upon doing a scrub (git version had a fix for the problem i hit). I ended up booting to FreeBSD to clean it up rather than trying to get dkms going with the git version. That said, no data loss from the incident.

For those curious, data written to that port on the controller card was being corrupted. SATA CRC for communication was still good so i wasn't seeing SMART errors, but i was seeing zfs checksum errors. Was so glad that ZFS was catching it, first time i've seen an error like that.

I found FreeNAS 9 very restrictive and ended up running FreeBSD 10, then 11. At times the learning curve has been vertical, but it's pretty good. I think I'd use ZFS on Linux with Debian if I were doing it over again.

FreeNAS 10 single-handedly made me change my NAS box to a bit of a home-built solution with Proxmox. If they've fixed most of the issues I had with it, I might consider going back, since I tend to prefer BSD over Linux.

I used FreeNAS years ago, version 8 as I recall and it seemed solid but there seems to be a lot of negativity in the comments here. Could someone fill me in with what went so wrong with FreeNAS 10?

FreeNAS promoted a major version to release, turns out it was half baked and they pulled the release a few _weeks_ after. Lost a lot of faith in the community.

http://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-corral-status-release-te...

These disasters always come after "ground up" rewrites. The lesson has been clear since Netscape almost imploded in the 90s, evolve the existing code - don't rewrite.

That's largely due to 'failure bias'. You hear a lot more about failed rewrites than you do successful ones. I've been involved with a number of full rewrites over the years and all of them ended up greatly improving the product and development process.

How large were these products? I've also experienced rewrites that went somewhat successfully, but I can't say we wouldn't have been better off upgrading the existing code in place.

Really glad I didn't upgrade last time. Going to wait really long this time.

hear hear

I'd like to read a document that lists pros/cons of using FreeNAS vs just standard FreeBSD. To me it's not sufficient to just read something like "you're building a NAS, so of course you should use FreeNAS".

Okay, but why? Other than a GUI, what makes FreeNAS better than vanilla FreeBSD? The GUI isn't important to me.

I think I might know one other advantage? From perusing various discussions in the past I've gotten the impression that FreeNAS is more proactive than FreeBSD when it comes to fixing bugs related to storage. Is that true?

Well... using a GUI to get things done is why I went with FreeNAS. I just couldn't be bothered having to learn (and remember, or otherwise relearn every few months!) the various potentially fiddly options needed for samba/nfs/zfs/whatever.

... and it did turn out to be a good intro for getting back into FreeBSD anyway, as I needed to add driver support for Mellanox cards. :D

That being said, I still use it as my main NAS here, and would do so again. I can happily forget 95% of the command line stuff I'd otherwise need to remember, and put that time to good use on other things. :)

I moved to kubuntu LTS and zfsonlinux ( have a couple btrfs volumes too) after iXsystems provided me with absolutely the worst service possible on my appliance I bought from them. I got tired of restrictiveness of the platform, lack of features etc. I used unraid for a little while instead of freenas and aside from being btrfs only i found it was much much nicer to use. I really love being able to make good use of kvm on Linux now too.

Edit: forgot to mention how I absolutely hated how brittle the upgrade process of some of the plug-ins was too!

I see it says they are using Angular now, does that mean they have finally implemented a proper front end routing system that doesn't break the browser's forward/back functionality? I was really disappointed when one of the developers told me that they intended to do it this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TS6vvpP1yQ&lc=z123fhi43onhe...

I sound like a broken record, but I want no glorious new features, I want easy configuration for OS X clients - and not learn about arcane commands I need to give to Samba.

Whats broken on OS X? I use FreeNAS with Windows and Linux. Windows works fine, and Linux doesn't require any special commands or config of Samba.

There are a myriad of problems, from locking directories, Affinity Photo corrupted files, MS Office temp files, permission problems, ...

Out of curiosity, is that with files shared over cifs or nfs?

I've been having better luck with cifs when using OSX with a FreeNAS 9.10 server, but do still seem to have the occasional weird file locking problem.

Cifs.

Damn. Yeah same here.

When 10 came out, there was mention of a newer major version of Samba being included. I'm not sure what version is included in this 11.0 release, but if it's a major release or two higher than that in 9.10, then I'm kind of hoping it'll help.

That being said, upgrading my NAS isn't a high priority task. It's working "well enough" for now as is. :D

afp is an abomination, but it's Apple's abomination, and it has run fine for me on FreeNAS 9.3, 9.10, and so far 11.0 seems okay.

There are quite a few irrelevant features.

Does it do everything Drobo does? That's all I want in an open source storage system.

The answer to that is a no, you need to resilver the disks if you add a new HD.

They need to focus on iterative improvements to their core value proposition. That's how they will win me back as a customer.

You'd have to take that up with the ZFS folks.

What S3-compatible object storage service they pre-packaged? I just hope it's not the owncloud.

https://www.minio.io/ would be nice.

Docs seem to indicate that it is: http://doc.freenas.org/11/services.html#s3

It's definitely Minio. :)

This kind of worries me though, as Minio is written in Go:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15658

I've not seen issues with Go on FreeBSD yet personally though, so I'm hoping it's extremely rare. Or that it gets fixed by someone before I hit it. :D

I ran into upgrade pain where jails created before a certain time (had to have been in the not-so-distant past because none of my jails are particularly old) lost networking post-upgrade. I rolled back to the previous release since I didn't have time to deal with it, but this is now 2 releases with some major caveats.

I upgraded to Coral release and regretted it. The good news was downgrading was simple.

However I think I will pass on this 1.0 release of the new GUI for now.

The 9.x GUI is still the default.

Thank you. Since that is the case I upgraded. Seems to work fine. The new GUI is much less of a train wreck then the Coral one. It seem responsive. I will play with it for awhile and see...

For what it's worth, I made the same mistake and have since discovered that ZFS on Linux is a smooth experience. Raided a pair of SSDs and now enjoy a (single) real command line and native docker containers.

This is for a home setup for sharing the family media file collection with the devices on the local network. Having the GUI just makes it simpler. I also own a FreeNAS mini so...along with a few TrueNAS at work.

Why not use SmartOS (if you're fine with having your NAS in seperate VMs) or OmniOS (for a traditional server approach), both Solaris derivates, with native ZFS and Solaris Zones, both have the Linux KVM ported, so you can run a Linux machine as a Solaris zone, etc.? What you get is not a NAS, but a Home-/Fileserver.

OpenSolaris derivatives have incredibly restrictive hardware compatibility. Therefore, the likelihood of existing hardware being supported is poor and the list of potentially purchased hardware is short.

I've been fine with FreeNAS 9. Rather than upgrade, I will most likely build a new system instead.

Same. My current system is starting to show its age, so I might as well update the hardware along with the software.

Got burned by upgrading to 10 (and then making it work for me, which is now wasted effort), what a clusterfuck... The only thing 10 was missing for me personally were jails, but I wasn't a hardcore user of them

"FreeNAS 11 requires 8GB of RAM to run properly" That's quite a lot, but then again it has tons of features.

I remember FreeNAS running on 1GB RAM years ago.

I think that's mostly due to the ZFS file system. It needs a ton or RAM to work well. I believe older versions of FreeNAS used or at least had the option of using a different FS that was less memory-hungry.

Oh boy, well let's wait and see if this release blows up on the launchpad...

Looks like we should still wait for the next one.

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