FreeNAS and TrueNAS Are Merging (liliputing.com) 94
An anonymous reader shares a report: FreeNAS is a free and open source operating system designed for network-attached storage (NAS) devices. For much of the past decade, the project has been led by the folks at iXsystems, which has also produced an enterprise version of the software called TrueNAS. Now iXsystems has announced that FreeNAS and TrueNAS are merging. Moving forward there will be a single operating system called TrueNAS rather than two different, but closely related operating systems. According to the company, the latest versions of the operating systems (FreeNAS 11.3 and TrueNAS 11.3) already share about 95-percent of the same source code. Starting with TrueNAS 12, there will only be a single OS image. But the company will offer two editions:
TrueNAS CORE: open source edition
TrueNAS Enterprise: commercial version with enterprise management and support.
TrueNAS CORE: open source edition
TrueNAS Enterprise: commercial version with enterprise management and support.
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Went back to bare FreeBSD. (Score:3, Interesting)
Between the UI changes, all the 'plugins' and what not. They seem to be finding a market between Synology and Dell/EMC.
Then there is the dumpster fire that is the FreeNAS forums. [reddit.com] God forbid you not have some divine knowledge from BSD from when you were in elementary school or can't afford ECC for everything.
I do commend them for contributing to opensource but iocage needs rewritten in go or something faster. It shouldn't take 30 seconds to run a command like iocage help
Re:Went back to bare FreeBSD. (Score:4, Interesting)
Then there is the dumpster fire that is the FreeNAS forums. [reddit.com] God forbid you not have some divine knowledge from BSD from when you were in elementary school or can't afford ECC for everything.
Phew - I guess I'm lucky, I've never needed to visit.
I do commend them for contributing to opensource but iocage needs rewritten in go or something faster. It shouldn't take 30 seconds to run a command like iocage help
I installed the root OS install on 2 "striped" usb sticks on separate controllers and I don't see that issue.
FreeNAS is awesome, it's a great way to recycle some old hardware too!!
Striped USB? (Score:2)
User name checks out.
I sincerely hope you meant mirrored, not striped. Using a USB stick as an OS drive is bad enough to make me question their competence, using a striped set of usb sticks, well, I think you get the point.
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"I installed the root OS install on 2 "striped" usb sticks on separate controllers and I don't see that issue. " User name checks out. I sincerely hope you meant mirrored, not striped.
Yeah, I was posting tired. Cheers
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Then there is the dumpster fire that is the FreeNAS forums. [reddit.com]
This is nothing new.
BSD has always been hostile to newbies.
Then they wonder why they lost and Linux won.
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They didn't "lose," they didn't want newbs in their house, and they don't have newbs in their house. Their computers still run fine.
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Only on hardware that no you have to pull out of a dumpster. The installer is not your friend.
...and grammar is not your friend.
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Linux "won" because Ma Bell had them scared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Re:Went back to bare FreeBSD. (Score:5, Insightful)
BSD fans like to tell themselves that, it's a comforting excuse - but the fact is that Linux "won" because of the GPL.
More people want to contribute to and use software with a "once free, always free" ethos than software with a license that encourages corporations to take contributions private - not giving back, and undermining the freedoms of all users.
Contrary to what libertarian nutters believe, humans have an innate sense of fairness (many other animals do too) - selfishly grabbing from the Commons triggers that sense of fairness. Most people prefer a license that doesn't allow that kind of greed.
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Any sources for this claim? If humans had "an innate sense of fairness" then the world would be a utopia.
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There have been numerous studies on this over the years. Start by googling "fairness studies". And, no, having a sense of fairness doesn't automatically result in utopia. Humans can be arseholes and psychopaths too.
some sample reports on fairness studies:
https://blogs.scientificameric... [scientificamerican.com] (Do Kids Have a Fundamental Sense of Fairness?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com] (7 country study on fairness: Kids everywhere can't stand getting less -- but in some places they don't like getting more)
https://www.npr. [npr.org]
"freedom" as Orientalist harem envy (Score:3)
Lindsay Ellis: The Most Whitewashed Character In Literary History [youtu.be] — 31 January 2020
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I can almost hear people arguing "ah, but a true Scotsman never conflates the local security model with other aspects of new code" on the implication that the only marginal cost of being a "true" Scotsman (if you are already a Scotsman) is having the decency and gumption to get out of bed on the right side each and every morning.
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You're delusional.
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Back in the 90s, Debian's fan club used to be quite condescending to new users. They had this expectation that everyone should fall out of the womb fully knowledgeable.
Re:Went back to bare FreeBSD. (Score:4, Informative)
> Then they wonder why they lost and Linux won.
They also decided that block devices are unnecessary and dangerous because pRoGrAmMeRs cAnT hANdLe cAcHiNg and broke dd by making everything a character device. This is a disaster for a unix storage admin.
And GELI is buggy. No, it's not my RAM on every machine. Jesus, Linux doesn't suddenly make bad RAM start working. Yes, race conditions can be hard to find.
To be fair, they had the best ZFS stack years ago - but change is a constant.
I suspect the BSD strategy leaders will be delighted to see all the storage n00bs leave so they can get back to pure UNIX thoughts.
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I do commend them for contributing to opensource but iocage needs rewritten in go or something faster. It shouldn't take 30 seconds to run a command like iocage help
Hmm.. Open GUI. Run shell. Run iocage -help. Appears in under a second.
iocage stop plex takes about four seconds.
Dell T630, 16GB RAM (yeah it's ECC) E5-2603v4 6-core, running off of vflash.
So, yeah, seems to run fine here. Never even knew there were forums on Reddit.
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> or can't afford ECC for everything.
This is mostly an excuse used by lazy or arrogant people for not looking at bugs.
"Oh, you have daily blockpointer = 0 corruption bugs and no ECC? Buy some real hardware, kid, GELI is bug-free".
Meanwhile that same machine is entirely corruption-free on ZoL with native encryption.
Yeah, I had to rewrite iSCSI and NFS server configuration in puppet to replace the FreeNAS GUI for admins, but lemme tell you, a perl 1-liner to reconfigure iSCSI topology can save you half an
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Turn in your Geek Card if you haven't watched evey episode of Good Eats. Food Science makes your life better.
Oh, what's that, you only eat Soylent so you have more time for shitposting on Reddit? That'll come in real handy the next time you have a date over for dinner. Congratulations on winning your troll points!
So... it's just branding name changes. (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, if they already share 95% of their code now, and IXSystems is going to continue to release them as two different products, all they are really doing if changing the name of FreeNAS to "TrueNAS Core" and adding the word "Enterprise" to the name of the other.
Re: So... it's just branding name changes. (Score:3)
This way, when they decide it is not free anymore, the name won't be a contradiction.
Fork (Score:2)
Fork and continue. As always.
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What is NAS4Free, chopped chicken liver?
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It's Samba with a GUI. FreeNAS is Samba on a hardware platform. Both of them could also run as full domain controllers, if they'd *keep it up to date!!!!*.
Re: So... it's just branding name changes. (Score:2)
How is it two different editions and a single image? Is it open source or not in light of that?
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Probably proprietary software providing additional/better functionality. Much like the difference between Red Hat and CentOS. Nothing about OSS requires that it not be bundled with proprietary software.
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It's a pretty significant name change. They've discovered something that I only just now realized: nobody's ever heard of TrueNAS. I've heard lots about FreeNAS, but never used it. I wasn't even aware there was a paid version - and I'm willing to bet that a lot of long-time users don't know either.
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It's a pretty significant name change. They've discovered something that I only just now realized: nobody's ever heard of TrueNAS. I've heard lots about FreeNAS, but never used it. I wasn't even aware there was a paid version - and I'm willing to bet that a lot of long-time users don't know either.
Yes, that's probably a big part of it, too. They recently moved all the forums together into a consolidated "IXSystems" board, where before the FreeNAS forums were separate from the other products.
Folks gotta live. (Score:1)
I'm not put off by this as I can use it at home.
I can understand that others have issues.
In my use case my GF installs anything and everything.
Deep probing malware etc.
I've worked in IT for large companies etc, it's nothing like trying to get her not to endanger anything connected.
That said I'll have to peruse a bit.
Big FreeNAS fan here! (Score:3)
I've tinkered with FreeNAS on various server PCs for years now. Started out using it as a solution for a few simple things like a Time Machine backup target for my Mac desktop and a few SMB file shares. Soon realized it was a great solution for hosting a Plex media server in a jail, and today I have a re-purposed HP Proliant server w/12 SATA drives hosting a copy of NextCloud along with Plex and HomeBridge (lets me integrate a number of smart home products with Apple Homekit), and I set up a second Dell PowerEdge server with an external drive tower attached via a SAS controller card as a second FreeNAS that nightly backups automatically replicate onto.
I've also spun one up where I work to run a Linux VM with our CrashPlan backup software on it and to share drives out via iSCSI to other servers.
I don't care what they do with the branding, as long as they keep a free product and keep updating and patching it. I can see how this would be attractive in a commercial version for really large Enterprise scenarios. But a big part of the "draw" for me is the fact you can set one of these up without paying someone like Microsoft for a license first, and you essentially get a hypervisor for virtual machines PLUS a really robust filesystem everything gets saved on. If anything? I think there are a LOT of small or medium sized businesses who could benefit from a FreeNAS server in place of more expensive alternatives they're using now, for at least some of their needs. But once you start paying? It's less compelling for these smaller deployments, because often, you're only making use of a couple of its capabilities anyway. (You may not even care about iocage jails or virtual machines, or even the NFS, SMB or Apple file sharing, if you simply need it to set up a raid array to carve out iSCSI slices of for other systems.)
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>where I work to run a Linux VM with our CrashPlan backup software on it
Yeah.. But Crashplan did similar.
I used Crashplan ( the free, peer-to-my-own-machines-peer version) and quite happily sailed along with that for ages.
And they had an 'Enterprise version' which some folks paid for - got them support and, I suppose, some extra dongles.
Crashplan Free died some years back. I'm guessing you stumped up for the commercial version. A cynic might see this as the writing on the wall...
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I used Crashplan for backup since it was the only backup I could get to run on Linux that was affordable when I have 6 tb of data. Only problem was that it became way too slow when with a data set that large.
Now they just need to get Lil NAS X on board (Score:5, Funny)
NAS4Free / XigmaNAS (Score:2)
I'm still happy with the NAS4Free fork (Now renamed XigmaNAS, thanks lawyers!). I haven't looked at the differences lately, but at the time I installed, they were essentially the same except that I chose the one with a more open license and a more friendly community. The FreeNAS community would belittle anyone who wasn't running ECC RAM or true server-class hardware, which was very offputting.
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I've used both.
Xigma is pretty good at the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy - it is a storage appliance. Yes, it handles a number of different protocols, and it has a few extras available to it (Transmission comes to mind), but it sticks to its primary task of allowing users to centralize their data storage. I like the fact that its virtualization platform is Virtualbox; in cases where users have VBox VMs already, it's nice to be able to just move them over. Also, its kept its UI pretty consistent o
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I ran into BSD issues with my ethernet, so I ended up installing Linux and running my NAS in a KVM virtual machine, which it did perfectly fine without any changes. Now I handle any non-storage features that I need from the Linux side. I don't have anything where performance makes any difference; it should be able to exceed my requirements by an order of magnitude.
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They Will Likely Inhibit the "Free" Version (Score:2)
meta-simplicity love story (Score:2)
Even thought I have FreeNAS and TrueNAS in my personal lab (and even the now loosely affiliated Project Trident desktop), I stopped following the iXsystems saga for about six months.