Friday, November 20, 2009

The Future of FreeNAS...

Please read here to get the latest news...

Read through this forum thread to see the actual discussion. In short...

FreeNAS 0.8 will be based on Debian GNU/Linux! Volker (the core developer) started an intermediate project called CoreNAS. FreeNAS 0.8 will be based on that.

Here is a short list of pros by Volker:
- Text and graphical installer that can be customized. This means no hand written install scripts anymore which causes some problems in FreeNAS
- WOL works in Linux
- lmsensor - A WORKING sensor framework which is a really needed feature in FreeNAS to check the CPU/MB temps and fan speeds
- Better Samba performance
- Ability to implement HA features
- System can be updated via 'apt-get' or any other deb package manager
- Better driver support
- Maybe 'ZFS' over FUSE (there is already one commercial product available that uses this feature)
- NFS4
- ...

What does this mean to me? I definetly want to have an OS which supports native ZFS (zfs on fuse is not an option). I don't need an extra small footprint or all of these 'special' features that some users of FreeNAS frequently requested (boinc, printserver...). I really appreciated the wonderful WebGUI of FreeNAS but if it is necessary, I'm not bound to it. As I have quite a lot experience with solaris, I will switch to Opensolaris. It has all I need except the AFP support. So I need to get more experience with Netatalk.
I am also really looking forward for the new features of ZFS like deduplication and crypto. If you are intersted about my experiences, you will find some here...

Nevertheless I would like to say many, many thanks for this wonderful piece of software!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi,
i see there are some issues but they might not be that big, at least not big enough to justify the switch. there are already a couple of installers in bsd world that could be customised. there is a working sensor framework in openbsd and it was already ported to freebsd, though not officially. samba's getting better, though it's still not optimal. i'm not sure what is meant by HA here. updates are easy in all bsds, even in distros like pc-bsd. sure, there are always less drivers than in linux but usually in multimedia domain which shouldn't be an issue here. zfs is stable, performant and production quality. the same goes for nfs4 which is shiny new (rewritten) in freebsd 8.0.
m.

harryd said...

I agree... But I understand Volker when he decided to use Debian as it 'might' be easier to go forward. There are far more linux developer than freebsd. Maybe this will push FreeNAS...

Olivier Cochard-Labbé said...

Wait a little... The future can be different.
We can imagine that FreeNAS will stay based on FreeBSD, and CoreNAS be a new full project (based on Debian).

harryd said...

This would be great! Maybe you can add some more details?

Wonslung said...

Personally, i use vanilla FreeBSD for my nas. It is not that hard to get set up and it is very rewarding. I recently uppgrade from 7.2 to 8.0 and the samba performance in 8.0 is amazing. I can't live without ZFS and FreeBSD 8.0 is a big imporovement over 7.2

While i can see the appeal of a webui, i honestly have no problem using ssh to control my NAS

With FreeBSD it's pretty much set it and forget it anyways.

Olivier Cochard-Labbé said...

More details about on the FreeNAS forum or on the FreeNAS blog