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FreeNAS 9.3 Released
An anonymous reader writes This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases featuring: a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. You can get it here and the list of changes are here. Existing 9.2.x users and 9.3 beta testers are encouraged to upgrade.
My CPU doesn't support x64 guests so I'll remain on 9.2.x, which still works pretty well. The only downside is the minidlna plug-in is a bit old and needs to scan the entire collection when adding new files. Newer versions will either have inotify/kqueue working, if not already.
News of this release seems to address many of the short-comings Ars Technica had when Ars reviewed FreeNAS.
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
I think it needs a different name. When I pronounce "FreeNAS" at a typical discussion speed, it ends up sounding like "freeniss". That, obviously, sounds far too much like "penis". "Penis" is a word that's forbidden in most non-medical workplaces, and even some medical ones these days.
So me and the other IT guys could be sitting in a meeting, talking about integrating "FreeNAS" into our stack. Some young HR intern happens to walk by the meeting room door, and hears what she mistakenly thinks is us saying stuff like, "How much is this penis going to cost?" or "How are we going to stick penis into our stack?" Then she'll get offended, tell her supervisor, and we'll all get accused of being "sexist, racist, misogynist, intolerant bigots" and probably sent off for sensitivity training.
Sorry, we just can't risk it. This might be the best software out there, but if there's the chance that it'll land us in deep shit, then we just can't use it.
There's no reasonable excuse to want wireless networking in a server.
NAS OS is restricted to doing NAS duty plus run arbitrary software via Jails. News at 11.
16GB ECC only costs a little over $100. You can way, way beat that price if you build your own.
I built a 4U rack with 12 hot swap bays, a quad core Haswell, 32 GB of ECC RAM for about that price, all up less drives. That includes an 8 SATA3 PCIe x8 card as well as 10 SATA3 built in to the motherboard.
I run FreeBSD 10 on it with ZFS. Why settle for a repackaged FreeBSD, way out of date, when you can use the real thing? They are both free.
16GB ECC only costs a little over $100. You can way, way beat that price if you build your own.
I built a 4U rack with 12 hot swap bays, a quad core Haswell, 32 GB of ECC RAM for about that price, all up less drives. That includes an 8 SATA3 PCIe x8 card as well as 10 SATA3 built in to the motherboard.
I run FreeBSD 10 on it with ZFS. Why settle for a repackaged FreeBSD, way out of date, when you can use the real thing? They are both free.
The management UI.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
As as FreeBSD admin I would usually agree with you, especially when ZFS is involved as FreeBSD tends to be much more up to date. I have always historically just used the latest FreeBSD when I've wanted a NAS.
However, setting up a well configured NAS with FreeBSD isn't something an end user is going to do very easily. On top of that the FreeNAS devs have put a lot of effort into configuring the various services in the most optimal way. You'll probably find an off the shelf FreeBSD that you have enabled some NAS services on (SMB/NFS/whatever) will probably not perform as well as FreeNAS on the same hardware. And knowing what knobs to tweak and how takes the sort of knowledge only the devs themselves have, gained through a lot of trial and error.
Some of the things FreeNAS does out of the box, like allowing additional services to be installed and run from inside jails, would take a lot of effort to do by hand, even for a seasoned FreeBSD user.
I'm planning on setting up one of these in a month, and I'm considering FreeNAS and NAS4Free. I'm very interested in comments from anyone with experience with both.
I've used both, migrated between them, and support instances of both for different clients.
tl;dr: NAS4Free better adheres to the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". FreeNAS does not - it does more stuff. Depending on your use case, either one of them can be a help or a hindrance.
Both of them essentially solve the same problem, essentially the same way: Get a bunch of hard disks recognized by a computer, and use the ZFS file system and various networking protocols together in order to facilitate data storage. Both of them have the same advantages of ZFS (Data security, "datasets", good performance in software RAID, snapshotting, compression, volume portability) and cons (you'll need plenty of RAM [ECC RAM is strongly recommended], hardware RAID controllers are only useful in JBOD mode, adding disks later on gets weird, etc.). If the ZFS tradeoff is worthwhile for you, then you're in the right place.
Pros, NAS4Free:
--Runs better on lower spec'd hardware.
--Faster startup time and generally snappier web interface.
--Has all the core stuff (SMB, FTP, SSH, NFS, iSCSI), and notably, Transmission.
--"More Open" than FreeNAS with regards to licensing.
Cons, NAS4Free:
--Limited functionality beyond NAS stuff, i.e. no plugins, though there are a handful of tutorials for unofficial methods (I've personally set one up to run BT Sync and Plex, but it took about an hour and LOTS of command line fun).
--Update schedule is erratic.
--I've personally had some annoyances with their Samba implementation; it doesn't always respect "remember password" in mixed environments with mapped drives.
Pros, FreeNAS:
--Extensible functionality with plugins; there are multiple avenues for media streaming and automatic downloading (Transmission, SabNZBd, XDM, etc.). There's also an OwnCloud plugin which is very nice, and an Amazon S3 plugin that allows for real-time replication to The Cloud (tm) if that's worthwhile. Depending on the environment, integration with Active Directory is possible.
--ZFS Replication - you can have your datasets replicate to a secondary NAS somewhere else.
--In-UI updating, automatic or scheduled. This is a new feature in 9.3 admittedly, but it no longer requires updates to be manually uploaded or the NAS to be taken offline for an update to be performed.
Cons, FreeNAS:
--All those extra features come at a cost - you'll need to account for that when buying RAM.
--Plugin updates aren't always immediate when the source program updates; when some programs update internally, it's not always reflected in the FreeNAS UI.
--UI is more daunting at first go. Also, some things are a bit more quirky than they should be.
--iSCSI is a bit more complicated to set up than on N4F.
I personally like the FreeNAS route myself, but that's also based on my extensive use of plugins, because I'm trying to do "one box to rule them all" - FreeNAS fits that bill better. If you either don't care about your NAS doing anything besides speaking FTP and SMB, or you've got an ESXi server running around that does all your other server-like stuff and you just need an iSCSI target, or you're building a FrankenNAS and need to squeeze the most out of your RAM, then N4F is probably more practical for your use case.
ZFS highly recommends ECC memory. You can always go against the recommendation and run the risk of a total failure later.
You know what else will cause a total failure? If the system is so expensive, you can't afford to get many of them, and then you lose all the good copies. I'm really done with the idea of a single infallible box. ECC, dual power supplies, I don't care about any of those things. I want inexpensive enough to duplicate the whole box offsite.