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FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux
dnaumov writes "FreeNAS, a popular, free NAS solution, is moving away from using FreeBSD as its underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers, can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux."
From the last page of comments, it looks like one company is already forking it to keep it on FreeBSD.
Half of the comments are users who picked FreeNAS for it's ZFS functionality worrying that they were stuck on FreeNAS 0.7.
Greater hardware compatibility? Sure, for some desktop computer hardware, but FreeBSD is fine for everything a NAS needs.
Release 0.6x:
- User authentication I must add at minimum LDAP authentication... For NIS and RADIUS I must check if it's possible (don't know if it's possible to use PAM for samba).
Release 0.7x:
- Migrate to FreeBSD 7.0 (with ZFS support)
- Testing a new way for configuring/using share:
'Adding a new disk' will automatically initialize it (format under UFS) and mount it (transparent process for the user).
. 'Creating a share'(create a folder on a selected disk), with user/group/quota property on this share
Release 0.8x:
- Adding monitoring features (SNMP, email alerting, etc..) - Adding other features (I18n Web GUI, LCD, disk encryption, etc...)
Release 0.9x:
- Only Bug fixes, no more new features - This step will depend a lot's about the development of the "geom vinum tools". If this tools is not stable at this moment, I will replace it by 'geom mirror' for RAID 1 and by 'geom stripe' for RAID 0.
Release 1.0:
- The D day! - Lot's of documentation: User guide and developers guide.
and...
Date: 2009-09-17 17:23
Sender: votdev
--- cut ---
Anyway, 0.7 seems to be the last version of FreeNAS as it is right at the moment. For the next version the whole system will be recoded (what i'm doing at the moment). There will be no more embedded installs anymore, also the OS will be Debian.
Regards
Volker
By any other definition, this would be a fork. It's not even FreeNAS any more, it will be CoreNAS?
Anyone have more insight into what's REALLY going on with this project?
Isn't the real solution to start a new project for a Linux-based NAS solution and leave FreeNAS development to those who want to use FreeBSD?
Why downgrade?
Aww I'm just messing with you all. Anyone who had a genuine emotional reaction to the above needs to go outside right now and recommune with nature.
You are not inflammatory, you just give more meaning to the position of the first decimal point in the version number than it deserves.
Would the software magically be better if the version was 8.0? 2009.12? 3.141592? 666.123.789? There are many post-1.0 applications that are hopeless, buggy crap, quite a bit of them even commercial, and just as much sub-1.0 software of high stability and overall quality.
In this case, as with many FOSS projects, the sub-1.0 numbers probably mean "there are still features to be added before we consider our work complete". The keywords are "we", "consider" and "complete". "We" != "any other user with a different set of requirements", "consider" != "claim as absolute truth", "complete" != "stable". In other words, a 0.8 version might be perfectly stable, just not feature-complete from the author's point of view, and perfetly sufficient for a subset of potential users with less sophisticated needs.
And why 0.8 and not 2.3.075? My best guess is "because they could and they liked it better."
Case closed, have a good day.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Well, what's stopping people using NexentaStor (non-free) or NexentaOS (free as in beer/speech)? Better yet, Nexenta is OpenSolaris w/ ZFS, etc, but is an Ubuntu LTS 8.04-based distribution. Its always been the best of both worlds. If you have something using ZFS today, you can export the pool, install Nexenta, and reimport, being back up in minutes.
zfs-fuse has horrible performance; I compared Ubuntu 9.10 with zfs-fuse (0.5) and OpenSolaris... Ubuntu could hardly do 15MB/s read/write, while OpenSolaris could easily do 70MB/s.
i feel like the only think freenas had over openfiler was ZFS. i've been running openfiler for 2 years now and it has been rock solid.
without zfs why not go for the more mature linux based NAS?
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4959
"FreeNAS needs some big modification for removing its present limitation (one of the biggest is the non support of easly users add-ons).
We think that a full-rewriting of the FreeNAS base is needed. From this idea, we will take 2 differents paths:
- Volker will create a new project called "'OpenMediaVault" based on a GNU/Linux using all its experience acquired with all its nights and week-ends spent to improve FreeNAS during the last 2 years. He still continue to work on FreeNAS (and try to share its time with this 2 projects).
- And, a great surprise: iXsystems, a company specialized in professional FreeBSD offers to take FreeNAS under their wings as an open source community driven project. This mean that they will involve their professionals FreeBSD developers to FreeNAS! Their manpower will permit to do a full-rewriting of FreeNAS.
Personally, I come back to actively work in FreeNAS and begin to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8.0 (that is "production ready" for ZFS)."
In this case, as with many FOSS projects, the sub-1.0 numbers probably mean "there are still features to be added before we consider our work complete".
I'd change your definition to "before we consider the initial version of our work complete". This is exactly why I mentioned sub 1.0 version number in a piece of free software. It means there is no marketing department requiring bumping up the version number to impress anybody.
So, as you say, the devs themselves don't think it has the capabilities to be granted the 1.0 number. For whatever reasons they feel.
In other words, a 0.8 version might be perfectly stable, just not feature-complete from the author's point of view, and perfetly sufficient for a subset of potential users with less sophisticated needs.
The key word here is "might". It might, it might not. One also has to consider that even if the system does have all the features you want and seems stable, is it being properly tested and maintained? Has it been around long enough for it to count as some indication that the devs aren't going to just give up on it soon? Is there already a community around it?
All of this goes into choosing a sub-1.0 project for something important. This is what I meant. To depend on an early version of a piece of software is too big of a commitment without the proper analysis of these and many other issues, most of which are not related to the features per se.
And, in any case, it is free software. So anyone can fork the project and continue with it. And it seems there is actually a fork of this project to keep it running over FreeBSD.
None of this changes what I said. If whoever is using it and worried about its future did consider this issues, good for them. If not, well...
-- SouNerd.com
If a vendor isn't willing to go to 1.0 then why should a customer have confidence? 1.0 is a milestone. Certainly it has absolutely no technical meaning, but that does not mean it has no meaning at all.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
FreeNAS is an "easy-to-use" NAS for old hardware, and light on documentation -- read: it has a wiki; generate your own. So it's going to get a lot of first-timers, however technical, and they're going to have questions about the migration. Hence "concerns" in this sense really shouldn't be read as 'emotional outbursts of near panic', but as inquiries.
Anyhow, the traditional /. missing link for this story would be: http://www.learnfreenas.com/blog/
I guess /. is running the story because it's a migration from a BSD to a Linux. But it's a nice minor news items on an interesting project, and is mostly useful by bringing FreeNAS to the attention of /.'ers who are starting to think about setting up a NAS.
Or, they don't care. Changes in major release number often mean incompatible features. I'd have given a lot, for example, for OpenSSL to use a sane numbering system and release "0.97" as "9.7", and "0.98" as "9.8". Or the idiots over at CPAN who release version 1.1, 1.2, 1.21, 2.2105, then 1.3.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for Debian kFreeBSD.
"I don't want to be inflammatory, but having "concerns regarding the future of their existing setups" when using a piece of free software in version 0.7 for something as important as data storage?"
You are kidding, right?
First, the meaning of version numbers is purely dependent on the project. There are plenty of pieces of software that were fine to use in production with version numbers less than 1.0, and there are plenty of pieces of software with larger version numbers (e.g. every other Linux kernel version) that should not be run in production. FreeNAS extremely stable.
Second, even if the version of the FreeNAS that people used was not stable, it is based on a solid OS, filesystem, file services, web server, etc., that are all quite reliable in production, so even if FreeNAS 0.7 had a problem, the problem would be with some UI or scripting, not with the ability to store and serve data, and the data itself would not be at risk. The reality, of course, is that FreeNAS is one of the more mature, reliable NAS projects, so it doesn't matter much that you don't like the number 0.7.
The real problem here isn't that people were stupid to use FreeNAS, but that the FreeNAS developer is making a controversial move of switching the underlying OS to one that doesn't support a previously supported, and very popular, filesystem. And since data storage is the point of a NAS, that change is unpopular with the users of FreeNAS. The same change would have the same impact whether it was numbered 0.7, 1.0 or 3.1. For example, look at the upgrades from XP (AKA Windows 5) to Windows 7, which requires a data backup and restore, and reinstallation of all applications. I suppose you could attempt to argue that XP was too unstable to rely on, and that upgraders were stupid to have relied on such an immature OS, but that isn't what actually happened. Just as with FreeBSD, the developer chose to make a somewhat incompatible upgrade, and the users have to deal with the fallout.
From my perspective, my data, which is all in ZFS, is more valuable than the particular web/admin tools used to serve the data, so it means that FreeNAS 0.8 won't be an option for me. Luckily there are plenty of options, and migration is easy.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I'm not saying its not a lot of work, just that it is possible if the desire is there..
It's not a work problem - ZFS is elegantly simple, 6000 LoC or so in its basic form.
The problem is it's heavily patented and you have no rights to those patents if you don't derive your code from the CDDL'ed code, which you can't do with the GPL (but FreeBSD, MacOSX, and the FUSE module did).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yeah, it's pretty horrible. And I don't really get the point. It's not like FreeBSD is particularly hard to install and configure, and configuring Samba to run on it is identical to configuring Samba to run on Linux. I'm hard pressed to think of a reason why you'd want to run ZFS via FUSE on Linux instead of using the real thing on a similar, well-supported Free Unix.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'd rather have a project whose goal is "well tested and bug free" instead of "reaching milestones." There's always time to add some feature later, but no way to get your lost time back if things break.
Because they've done their testing of the software and found it to be highly reliable?
Because they've been following development, reading release notes, etc., and know what is and isn't stable, forward compatible, and/or feature complete?
Because they're not idiots who base their software decisions on intangible version numbers, rather than any actual knowledge of the product?
0.7 is a milestone. 2.0.5 is a milestone. Any special significance 1.0 has TO YOU is just that, an invention of your own mind, irrelevant to the rest of the world, no more significant than rules such as avoiding odd-numbered Star Trek films, your favorite color, etc.
Yes it does.
One buggy piece of junk may be version 9.7.5, while another highly reliable and usable piece of software may be version 0.0.1.
THERE IS NO PENALTY FOR NAMING YOUR BUGGY SOFTWARE VERSION-1.0, NOR ANY TANGIBLE BENEFIT TO INCREASING THE VERSION NUMBER ON STABLE SOFTWARE. THEREFORE, IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
25MB/s _IS_ "that slow"
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Conjecture! I mean, I don't have figures to back this up either, but I do know there is shirtloads of code in a Linux distro with an intact BSD/Apache/MIT license. I am not aware of wholesale re-licensing just for the sake of it.
But there is no point saying "if BSD code was restricted from GPL licensing it would be the other way around" because; 1) that is not the way things are and; 2) the whole point of BSD is it does not have these restrictions.
Where BSD code HAS been incorporated into GPL it has been done to comply with the BSD license, exactly as intended by the author. If they did not want their code to be used they would have selected a more restrictive license.
I don't get where the resentment comes from, but I would hazard a guess that it is BSD users (or fanboys if you will) rather then BSD developers who insist on these cyclical arguments.
I hope they use an older kernel. The new linux kernels have great speed, and total shit compatibility. I've got four old PCs sitting next to me, and not one of them can detect a DVD drive or read stably off a PATA HDD in Ubuntu 9.10 - yet it works fine in 9.04 (minus the CD drives), and in 8.10/8.04 everything is working great.
It's sad to see an OS cut support for old hardware, like a 2.2ghz Athlon XP w/ 2GB of RAM running off a 120GB PATA HDD. (Still fast enough to browse the internet :P )
I don't work for Sun either, but I agree with many of your points. My homebrew NAS server has been running OpenSolaris since build 49 and ZFS has uncovered issues like a flaky sata cable, and an unstable power supply without losing a single bit of data. In some other systems with similar problems, I found silently corrupted data on drives with ntfs, xfs, and hfs+. I would not go to a non-zfs flle system without some kicking and screaming.
I don't know if OpenSolaris, EON, or NextentaOS is missing any of the features of FreeNAS, but I would think about these as a viable replacement. One advantage is that they will always have the bleeding edge zfs enhancements first, like the new deduplication feature.