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Comment by shric | Hacker News Reader

I've never tried FreeNAS, but am surprised it took so much maintenance. I've been using FreeBSD with an HP Microserver and ZFS for the same purpose for about 10 years. I just install the updates and everything just works. Curious what kind of maintenance is taking up your time?

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For me, the issues were mostly related to the period of time I started using FreeNAS, and getting a bit too creative with plugins and jails.

On the first part, there was a period of time when the project was going through some upheaval (quite a few years ago now) and I had some issues with upgrades.

This goes hand in hand with the 2nd thing - I was trying all sorts of plugins and using it as a BT and newsgroup client. These did not upgrade well.

I suspect that a fresh vanilla build (TrueNAS now) would probable be zero maintenance. I need to upgrade my drives (a bunch of 1TB drives from the era I built it), and I’ll probably use this opportunity to start fresh.

Those projects that start easy, and then suffer from: hmm, let's try that, then let's try these add ons, etc. And everything works, for years, and then you need to return to them, but can't remember anything! And then, it turns out, that you don't have the time you used to have. And even though you loved tinkering late into the night, 10 years later, hight has become precious. For sleeping. Or trying to sleep!

I was going to ask the same thing, as someone who's run FreeNAS on the AMD-based HP Microserver for nearly 8 years now.

The only fiddly bit to setup for me was LetsEncrypt auto-renewals, but once I had it automated I never needed to touch it again.

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