FreeNAS Corral is being relegated to “technology preview” status
forums.freenas.org
forums.freenas.org
It is brave of a company to just kill something like this and say we got it wrong. Good for them. Thankfully the way FreeNAS works it was simple enough to revert.
The docker switcharoo in Corral had me excited and I was able to spin up my existing FreeNAS 9.x workflows very easily, but if you're going back to jails thinking that it'll solve problems, let me be at least 1 person to say -- the jails infrastructure has been abysmal for my experience, and I give a hearty thumbs-down to doubling-down on it.
Docker would be such a breath of fresh air at this point.
Can you elaborate a bit ?
I have done a bit of work with FreeBSD jails and have some sense of their pros and cons ... were you using pre-built jail userlands that you got from some third party (ie., you did not build or replicate yourself) ?
Genuinely curious ...
The problem probably lies in the toolset that shipped with FreeNAS up to this point. So doubling-down on it might actually make a difference and make people utilize one of (Free)BSDs biggest strengths properly in FreeNAS.
I was hoping this latest release could be used as a reliable backup target in my enterprise, but now I will use this as an opportunity to look at every other possible alternative. At this point I don't trust that Freenas or IX will be here for the long haul. So, what alternatives are the rest of you considering?
Now that Corral isn't happening, would it be better to just virtualize the system and then have Debian VMs as needed? I wonder if I can migrate to a virtualized system without losing the data already in the ZFS pool :/
sudo zfs export pool
sudo shutdown # RIP freebsd machine
# install ubuntu...
sudo zfs import pool s/zfs/zpool/g
I think you should be fine just creating a jail and manually installing Virtualbox in it...I'm looking into that myself. For a Debian VM you should be fine using iohyve even on the current release.
What I want is not some fancy UI but help with running FreeNAS with Apple clients. Which is currently hard to do (this is partly due to FreeNAS and partly due to Apple).
If it's not possible, say so. If it is possible, add a switch for Apple clients and export volumes the best way possible (also with MS Office hacks) - without the need to hack and tinker for a long time.
If you just stick with SMB this shouldn't be an issue. The unfortunate reality is the permission model different file sharing protocols use is different, which is why FreeNAS asks you upfront which permission model you want to use when you create a ZFS dataset.
If you're running a mixed environment and Windows is anywhere in that mix, just use SMB and save yourself the headache.
Simplest is to go all NFS for everything or all SMB for everything. Both work.
Except freenas was so hard to configure and integrate. I removed it and tried a windows server instead. After installation, the network shares were accessible right away from my other windows machines. So much easier.
It's in the official docs too if you wanted more information about it.
But for your own use, you might have much better success on a mac client system with macfuse/sshfs.
I don't bother to connect my mac to my (FreeBSD) file server via smb/samba at all anymore - I just use sshfs.
I wish I could do that with my Sonos system and then I wouldn't have to run samba at all ...
That's interesting. Was it actually based on Plan 9?
1. Upgrade did not come back up with disk mounted. 2. Changed import of encryption key so it would not mount volumes without user doing it. 3. LAG did not come up on reboot, has to be created again. 4. 1000 snapshot on 8 core FreeNAS mini took 20 minutes to mount all the file systems. 5. SMB shows started but no shares. Have to restart it. 6. GUI to slow in Firefox, asked to kill the script. 7. GUI completely locked up Chrome page. Had to kill.
* Docker containers failing after running for ~24 hours due to networking problems with boot2docker vm.
* Failing to automatically import my zfs pools on upgrade
* UI "freezing" or generally stopping correct functioning (requiring reboot)
* UI login failing requiring reboot
I reverted back and forth a few times, I will probably stay with Corral until the next 9.10 release.
And the 'cli' command error'ed out on every subcmd. So I don't know what happened or when, but it broke.
I am going to fall back to 9.10.2 and let a bunch of other people test 9.10.3 before I upgrade.
Another big issue was that Chrome was the only supported browser which is something you expect from a beta.
On top of that all the excellent docs from 9.10 were not updated for Corral so literally all Corral had were a few Wiki pages on a new site with a request for contributors to help fill in the blank pages. Very odd behaviour for a release but clear why now.
It's a real shame, I upgraded my backup (personal) NAS which will have to be manually downgraded once iX release a FreeBSD 11 backed version of FreeNAS.
I tried to also create them using the standard NAT settings, but the would generally not get through. Only one of the 6 odd off the self containers I was trying to use
The GUI was slow, annoying, kept logging me out, buttons needed clicked several times, or required a refresh to work. I lost my NFS settings and could no longer get a working configuration for my kubernetes pods on other devices, which worked before. I would try and change the few settings available and it wouldn't allow me to save as if I hadn't changed anything.
Basically, it was a bit of a shit show but I persisted for a couple of weeks hoping it'd get better. After several upgrades, nothing much had changed so I reverted.
I don't like to kick them while they're down, but it seems like a project that got caught up with modernising by rewriting a whole bunch of code, whilst I suspect many would have been happy with them just adding the VM and docker stuff into the old interface/middleware. But it sounds like they're persisting with yet another rewrite, so...
How do you get "FreeNAS Corral is dead" from the original title "Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral" which is about moving FreeNAS Corral back into a technology preview (alpha? beta?) instead of full release. This doesn't mean it is "dead".
I don't even host mission-critical data on my freenas instance, it's mostly a first-line backup for me + internal apps I run for the house, and I'm hesitant to go forward with them following this.
I run FreeNAS at home and have a rack of iXsystem servers and a TrueNAS at work. We are buying more. Great team, great support.
I haven't even gotten to why they went from a new React UI to an angular 2 based UI, which, I just can't even on that one yet.
Also IIRC Apple pulled an iOS release or 2 in the last few years for major issues.
I have worked at a few startups that have sold for a few $100M or gone public for a few billion. Stuff happens. It is how you handle it. They owned up to it fully and have a path forward. That is much better then most.
I understand ixSystems also sells the FreeNAS Mini, which is target at home users and small business - but anyone who uses any network storage product for production or mission critical use should be wary of any upgrades coming from the software vendor without thorough testing. I stayed far away from Corrall on my FreeNAS server at home explicitly because so much of the UI and underlying infrastructure was changed, didn't seem reasonable to upgrade without letting people braver than I am test (plus, I rely on iSCSI support for my VM's - that was missing).