
FreeNAS 11.0 is Now Here - eatonphil
http://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-11-0/
======
metalliqaz
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?

~~~
psadauskas
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...](https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/this-week-in-
freenas-4-21-2017.53798/)

 _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)._

~~~
walterbell
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?

~~~
ac29
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](https://doc.freenas.org/9.10/jails.html#using-iohyve)

------
colek42
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?

~~~
simcop2387
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.

~~~
simcop2387
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.

------
voltagex_
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.

------
tombert
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.

------
mbell
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?

~~~
robbiet480
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...](http://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-corral-status-release-technology-
preview-status/)

~~~
slededit
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.

~~~
mbell
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.

~~~
slededit
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.

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

~~~
metalliqaz
hear hear

------
PhantomGremlin
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?

~~~
justinclift
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. :)

------
zer0zzz
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!

------
eberkund
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TS6vvpP1yQ&lc=z123fhi43onhefl4f04chdag0si4fhqaf3c)

------
_Codemonkeyism
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.

~~~
ac29
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.

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

~~~
justinclift
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.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Cifs.

~~~
justinclift
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

------
grizzles
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.

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

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

~~~
justinsaccount
[https://www.minio.io/](https://www.minio.io/) would be nice.

~~~
justinclift
It's definitely Minio. :)

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

[https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15658](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

------
awinder
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.

------
myrandomcomment
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.

~~~
GeorgeHahn
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.

~~~
myrandomcomment
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.

------
zmix
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.

~~~
mybeardisgray
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.

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

~~~
Ajedi32
Same. My current system is starting to show its age, so I might as well update
the hardware along with the software.

------
pmarreck
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

------
b3lvedere
"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.

~~~
nfriedly
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.

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

------
Zinc64
Looks like we should still wait for the next one.

