
FreeNAS Corral is being relegated to “technology preview” status - tachion
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/important-announcement-regarding-freenas-corral.53502/
======
myrandomcomment
So I have a FreeNAS mini. I upgraded and it did not go well. I was worked with
someone from iXsystems to get things working again (they are a great company
to work with). Everything was fine until the box just rebooted the other day.
It came back up fine but I had enough and reverted to 9.10. The funny part was
I had ask my contract should I upgrade to the 10.04 release the day before.
The answer was strange, "no, I can tell you more tomorrow." Now I know why.

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.

------
awinder
Just in case FreeNAS people are lurking around here, all the talk about jails
support does not speak to me in the slightest. Utilizing jails has been one of
my #1 pain points with FreeNAS. The quality of user-supplied jails was so poor
in my experience, I got out of the practice of using pre-build jails and just
had to start wiring up my own.

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.

~~~
quasse
I was really looking forward to having Docker available. I run 5 or 6 jails at
home and they have been the absolute biggest pain point for me. At some point,
the jail booter image was shipped with a broken version of pkg that didn't
start misbehaving until later, and I haven't found any solution but to
manually recreate each of my jails.

Docker would be such a breath of fresh air at this point.

~~~
rsync
"I was really looking forward to having Docker available. I run 5 or 6 jails
at home and they have been the absolute biggest pain point for me."

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 ...

------
plasticbuddha
On the one hand, I have to give credit to IX for realizing they made a
mistake, admitting it openly, and changing course. On the other, as someone
who very painfully upgraded their home/lab devices to Corral, the idea of
rolling it back is a miserable experience. Also, the idea of moving forward
with it was impossible considering the crippling performance issues I
experienced with it.

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?

------
johnbrodie
I _just_ built a FreeNAS box, and was relying on Corral to let me do
virtualization. The box is overbuilt for home NAS use, and the plan was to use
Corral to spin up docker and/or Debian VMs to give me a more familiar base in
which to spin up other useful services.

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 :/

~~~
bbatha
`zfs export` is your friend. Its very easy to move a zpool to another machine
so long as it has zfs support and you haven't enabled any incompatible feature
flags. I recently moved my zpool from FreeBSD 11 to ubuntu 16.04. It was as
simple as:

    
    
        sudo zfs export pool
        sudo shutdown # RIP freebsd machine
        # install ubuntu...
        sudo zfs import pool

~~~
jlgaddis
That is:

    
    
      s/zfs/zpool/g
    

(I do it all the time, too.)

------
_Codemonkeyism
I run several FreeNAS installations on HP MicroServers.

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.

~~~
myrandomcomment
Why? I run a FreeNAS mini at home with all Apple serving NFS to them. I have a
single AFP share for Time Machine backups. At work we have a TrueNAS and 50+
MacBook Pros with a Time Machine share and NFS shares for anything else.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Mostly left over temporary files and directories MS Office uses to lock
things, or during saving, or Apple uses to safely delete files. Some
applications like Affinity can't often save to network shares from FreeNAS.
Users then save to Desktop and afterwards to the network shares. Also lots of
permission problems, especially in mixed Apple/Windows setups. Only good thing
are ZFS snapshots b/c users often delete files they didn't want to delete in
the first place.

~~~
snuxoll
> Also lots of permission problems, especially in mixed Apple/Windows setups.

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.

------
deagle50
I ran FreeNAS for a long time and finally gave up on it and ZFS for media
storage and apps. After a brief stint with OMV/snapraid/mergerfs I bought
unRAID and I've been very happy. The Docker integration is second to none for
a home media server.

------
Chaebixi
> we decided to undergo a thorough engineering review of the product and
> started to look deeper into the Plan 9 filesystem code, which allows VMs to
> access the host’s filesystem.

That's interesting. Was it actually based on Plan 9?

~~~
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd
They are talking about Plan 9's network file system protocol. I'm not sure
what they were using it for. I've seen it used as the easiest way to share a
host file system with a Qemu/KVM guest OS.

------
PuffinBlue
I'm curious - has anyone here faced trouble with Corral? Did you revert? What
were your experiences?

~~~
leonroy
Works fine, but little bugs and regressions like lack of form entry validation
on some config fields for instance mean you could create a completely invalid
config. I didn't try and find out what happened with an invalid config but did
report the bug.

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.

------
JosephLark
This is a superlatively bad title editorialization.

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".

~~~
galacticpony
If you read the article, you'll see that what Corral is right now (i.e. the
supposed "next generation") is in fact being abandoned. It's a dead-end, at
the very least.

------
fusiongyro
Good on them. It sounds to me like they hired a cowboy who did 90% of the work
and then left for a shinier new project. It's hard to admit a mistake like
this, I hope others follow their example. And don't trust the cowboy!

~~~
awinder
Read alternatively, it came off extremely amateurish to straight up admit (or
blame, depending on reading) that they're making a wholesale switch off a
product line that was in development for a wild, and after public release.
There's dozens of things that went wrong to get them to this point, 1 dev
leaving shouldn't have even risen to the point of being mentionable.

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.

~~~
myrandomcomment
Hey, they made a mistake and then owned up to it. It is a great reason to go
forward with them. Most companies never are this honest.

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.

~~~
awinder
If Apple released 10.13, waited 2-3 weeks, and then explained that one of
their big devs left the company so ~ shrug ~ everyone just downgrade, we're
gonna re-do it again but throw everything away, and oh yeah, here's a THIRD
beta UI we've got in development because apparently we've learned 0 lessons,
people would absolutely claim amateur hour. And they'd be right.

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.

~~~
myrandomcomment
They are not Apple. They are a smallish company in Silicon Valley that sold
servers and built a business around being an alternative to NetAPP / EMC on
the storage side. Mistakes where made. It is growing pains. If that does not
work for you then please go buy from EMC / Dell.

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.

~~~
snuxoll
One should also note as far as their enterprise product, TrueNAS, is
concerned, there was never an upgrade to "Corral" pushed in the first place
since it lags behind FreeNAS releases to ensure everything works correctly and
any gotchas have been ironed out.

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).

~~~
myrandomcomment
Correct. Our work systems are on TrueNAS and left alone. I upgraded my FreeNAS
because it was my home system and I wanted to see how things looked as a
preview for when they pushed things into TrueNAS. It was broken so I reverted.
The best part is it was so simple just to go back and it all worked.

