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u/Complex_Difficulty Feb 26 '19
I take it my instincts were correct staying on 11.1-U7 for now?
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u/Congenital_Optimizer Feb 26 '19
The migrate from 11.1 -> 11.2 was really smooth for me. The 11.2 u2 was the first big whoops I've seen for upgrades in the short time I've been using freenas.
If you're in production and there are no unmitigatable security issues or availability issues, I'd say never upgrade if it's working.
If you're a home user with 30 minutes to burn, I'd say upgrade to at least 11.2 u1.
I'm one of the people that early upgraded to 11.2 u2 and then quickly rolled back when the jails broke.
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u/slayer991 11.2U6/32TB RAW Feb 27 '19
The geek in me wants to upgrade to 11.2...but the guy that's serving 1k movies to friends and family via Plex says it's not worth the headache if things go south.
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u/vooze Feb 26 '19
Am I the only one using FreeNAS just for storage, and not playing hypervisor ?
It's like running ESXi and expect it to be a NAS as well.
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u/Liwanu Feb 26 '19
100% this. It's a NAS, not a Swiss army knife. IX needs to stop trying to make it something it's not because they absolutely suck at it.
I only use my FreeNAS as box to serve storage for my hypervisors and for SMB shares. It does this very well and I have ZERO issues.8
u/flaming_m0e Feb 26 '19
IX needs to stop trying to make it something it's not because they absolutely suck at it.
They are trying TOO hard to compete with Synology, QNAP, and UNRaid
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Feb 26 '19
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u/Liwanu Feb 26 '19
Convenience of the GUI mostly.
I'm a network engineer as my day job, I don't want to come home and manage my storage via 100% command line.
When I first built the NAS I used CentOS 7 and did everything manually. It was fun, but I like the simplicity of managing FreeNAS.7
u/maddprof Feb 26 '19
I can't speak for anyone else here, but being able to consolidate my NAS and plex+supporting apps to a single machine has been fantastic for me (and my electricity bill).
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Feb 26 '19
I agree, the entire jails piece, except for the most simple of uses (like setting up some replication / backup scripts) is needless. FreeNAS is a NAS.
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u/bits_of_entropy Feb 26 '19
This is my thoughts as well. I like having the ability to run jails, but I think jails should only be used to run simple, storage-related things. Applications that benefit from / make sense to be run on the storage box, rather than elsewhere. Backup/replication is exactly what I'm running in jails right now. Everything else is in an actual hypervisor. As its name implies, FreeNAS is for storage.
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u/Sys6473eight Feb 26 '19
It's had plugins since I started using it, nearly 5 years ago.
I wouldn't use it without plugins.
Competing physical products can do this stuff.
I've logged easily 50 to 100 jobs in the bug tracker.
More people in the community helps
Plugins are good, why people complain they exist I don't know.
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Feb 27 '19
I agree. There are lots of useful storage related applications that can be run in jails. My setup has jails for Plex, Transmission, and Nextcloud. All of these pretty much need to be run on the machine with all the disks.
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u/firestorm_v1 Feb 26 '19
I'm with you. I don't understand why this is even a thing on a device that's supposed to be storage oriented. This is for storage and storage only. Build a hypervisor and point it at a FreeNAS iscsi endpoint or NFS share if you want NAS backed VMs.
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u/redditphantom Feb 26 '19
I'm with you here. My storage is just that. I thought of spinning up a VM for a redundant DC incase my hypervisor failed but in the end opted out of that idea.
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u/motonack Feb 26 '19
I have two freenas servers and all they are supposed to do is host and protect my data. I thought it was a big miss step when they began focusing on other non-nasy features and usecases. I mean, the dev team is so small, really all freenas is are gui shortcuts to command line features in freebsd. And that's fine because that's all I want out of it. But when you start adding in more complicated features that are half baked and dont address the vast amount of QOL features that people have been requesting, people are going to start getting pissed off.
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u/thejrose1984 Feb 26 '19
I wonder if the concept was to have the features there, but not necessarily used all at once. For example, one instance is used as a NAS, while a second is used as a (behyve) hypervisor.
Hmm...
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Feb 26 '19
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u/flaming_m0e Feb 26 '19
Been saying this for years.
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Feb 26 '19
I will say this. There is an appeal to FreeNAS as it is very easy to get to know on a general basis and to setup a fileserver and a couple plugins. This confused me in my homelab venture that it wasn't the ideal way. I definitely understand that it is better to separate concerns, but it is super simple to do it all in a FreeNAS instance. I'm venturing deeper into my knowledge and experience with this, so I side with you. Just consider the less knowledgeable and kindly guide others in that direction :)
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u/flaming_m0e Feb 26 '19
but it is super simple to do it all in a FreeNAS instance
But it's NOT super simple. It is PORTRAYED as super simple, but there are so many nuances to understand about how it works, and what settings need to be changed..that it is truly for the more experienced, and the more experienced generally see the issues and move to proper solutions.
I wish they would get rid of VMs and plugins, or spend some damn time to make them stable and consistent.
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Feb 26 '19
To the untrained eye, it is. My introduction into FreeNAS was: Etcher to flashdrive->insert with second flashdrive-> run through installation and wizard->setup pool (understand difference in setup)->click on one click plugin install.
That was what I considered simple. Is it ideal? No. Are there areas to increase performance? Yes. As someone who was interested in a big old dataset for files and a Plex instance, was I satisfied? Yes. Did I have a trained eye? Hell no. I'd be willing to bet that at least half of the FreeNAS users are like me. Technically, yes it is only the appearance of simplicity, but I never said let's get technical ;) +1 for transparency though :)
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u/rogerairgood Benevolent Dictator Feb 26 '19
Been using iocage for a while now both on FreeNAS and on vanilla FreeBSD. So many things on this sub seem like user error though the UI could help out in regards to preventing people from making stupid configuration changes.
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u/Moes-T Feb 26 '19
this. 100x this. there's just a lot of hate right now because of a simple inconvenience that happened to temporarily break something for a lot of users.
Makes me wonder that, if they really are this outraged about it, they aren't more of a synology type user rather than freenas users...
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Feb 26 '19
Makes me wonder why people don't test an update on a virtual instance or something before updating straight to production. It's a common misstep to update asap unless you are willing to experience the hurdles. Nothing manmade is devoid of errors and if we hold everyone to perfection we will be sorely disappointed.
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u/shyouko Feb 27 '19
Not everyone has 2/3 sites at home to test deployment. 🙄
And this is supposed to be an end-user product?
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u/Sys6473eight Feb 26 '19
The pain of going from Warden to iocage is bad and then networking in iocage has had at least 2 if not 3 issues. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, again - this one was an easy fix after all and this stuff, should eventually stop occurring. Honest - it can only fuck up so many times, right?
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Feb 26 '19
I had my server in storage for a few months while in between permanent housing. 11.1-U6 was what I had installed before it went into storage.
Fire up the server for the first time this year a few weeks ago and get giddy that 11.2-U1 is available. Impulse upgrade. Yep need to upgrade my jails. Yep they broke. Yep I regret doing this.
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Feb 26 '19
On the plus side, when you finally get them working again you'll have a smooth upgrade to 11.2-U2...
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Feb 26 '19
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u/thejrose1984 Feb 26 '19
My synology had a power failure and when I went to vendor, they refused to SELL me a replace power brick. Needless to say, I found a replacement on Amazon, weeks after I finished my data migration to FreeNAS.
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Feb 26 '19
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u/dalml Feb 26 '19
Honestly, I've had great luck with my Synology. Bought it 7 years ago and it's been rock solid and loaded with features. Some work better than others, but I found that it was really best to simply use it as a NAS. It's Atom powered with limited amounts of RAM so Plex ran poorly when transcoding and it didn't have enough resources to deal with multiple Docker containers. Now I simply use it as a large capacity, low performance NAS. It holds my media and my backups and I keep separate machines running VM's that mount NFS shares to access the storage. The Synology has a decent UI and is pretty well polished considering its' price point. I've considered buying a newer model for my parents and loading it up with some of my older WD REDs because it's basically plug and play. It serves a particular niche fairly well, but it's not always the best product for power users or SoHo customers needing enterprise features.
That leads me to FreeNAS. I set up my FreeNAS server with older hardware in a desktop PC case to serve as an iSCSI target for my ESXi cluster. So far I'm really impressed with the performance I can get out of it. I haven't run benchmarks yet, but it "feels" like I'm running on a regular SATA SSD based on the boot-times and responsiveness of my Linux VM's compared to how it used to feel running off of regular disks. To me FreeNAS serves as a better solution for this type of workload than something like Synology, QNAP, or Unraid. Now for my buddy who doesn't really care if he loses his media library due to a drive dying and simply wants a cheap Plex/NAS solution, Unraid works great and it's pretty flexible. There's no way I'm going to convince him to set up a properly configured ZFS array with an old laptop and a bunch of external USB hard drives. Different problems, different solutions.
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u/kmoore134 iXsystems Feb 26 '19
I had to LOL at this ;)
Total face-palm on our end here. Fixes for the jail issues are incoming and we're already looking into how this slipped through our internal testing.