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FreeNAS

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Re: FreeNAS

#11

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

sircastor wrote: post #3

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

I did the exact same thing. A year on FreeNAS which did “work” but required so much fiddling that I bought a Synology and have never looked back.

Re: FreeNAS

#12

Post by dijit »

sircastor wrote: post #3

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

Wait, ZFS requires maintenance?

I’ve been running freenas for years and have deployed/ran ZFS solutions as part of my job for a decade- this is the first I’m learning about that, it’s usually set and forget.

Am I just a bad admin?

Re: FreeNAS

#13

Post by anon9001 »

I looked at running FreeNAS, but it didn't make any sense to me. I can put as many hard drives as I want in a cheap PC with a ryzen cpu and run samba. It takes maybe 5 minutes to set up, and then you also have a distro of your choosing to use as a server.

FreeNAS probably makes sense if you're an industry IT person and you want to make sure anyone in the future can figure out how to admin the thing. That's probably got a lot more value than I'm willing to admit, and I'm sure that's why it's popular, but I see a lot of posts about people trying to set up FreeNAS at home and it seems silly.

Re: FreeNAS

#14

Post by moviuro »

sircastor wrote: post #3

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

> ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding.

According to FreeBSD's handbook[0], you only need to scrub the drives once a month, and check `zpool status` regularly.

[0] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zpool.html

My crontab:

  # scrub
  0       1       1,15    *       *       zpool scrub zroot
  0       8       5,20    *       *       send_admin_email "zpool status" "$(zpool status)"

Re: FreeNAS

#15

Post by jcims »

gempir wrote: post #8
sircastor wrote: post #3

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

I'm very happy with Synology aswell. If you still want to use your own hardware there is stuff like this https://xpenology.org/ I have rarely seen such a feature rich software. And all of it works pretty solid aswell.

I don't think any product has consistently paralyzed my brain as the Synology. Every time i think about buying one i get stuck in a loop on which device to pick and eventually just give up.

Re: FreeNAS

#16

Post by chousuke »

dev-il wrote: post #2

quotes From the "Hardware Requirements" page on that linked FreeNAS site: • "64-bit hardware is required for current FreeNAS releases. Intel processors are strongly recommended." • "8 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum requirement. 1 GB per terabyte of storage is a standard starting point for calculating additional RAM needs, although actual needs vary. ECC RAM is strongly recommended." The example configuration for a…

I ran a ZFS file server and VM host for years with 6GB of RAM. It'll work fine, just don't use dedup.

Re: FreeNAS

#17

Post by dijit »

moviuro wrote: post #14
sircastor wrote: post #3

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

> ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. According to FreeBSD's handbook[0], you only need to scrub the drives once a month, and check `zpool status` regularly. [0] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zpool.html My crontab: # scrub 0 1 1,15 * * zpool scrub zroot 0 8 5,20 * * send_admin_email "zpool status" "$(zpool status)"

FreeNAS does this as a scheduled job though.

Re: FreeNAS

#18

Post by pmiller2 »

anon9001 wrote: post #13

I looked at running FreeNAS, but it didn't make any sense to me. I can put as many hard drives as I want in a cheap PC with a ryzen cpu and run samba. It takes maybe 5 minutes to set up, and then you also have a distro of your choosing to use as a server. FreeNAS probably makes sense if you're an industry IT person and you want to make sure anyone in the future can figure out how to admin the thing. That's probably g…

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. JBOD is a totally valid strategy for a home disk array. Add in k parity drives and you can even recover from k total drive failures. RAID is not the end all be all of multi-disk storage.

Re: FreeNAS

#19

Post by Godel_unicode »

dijit wrote: post #12
sircastor wrote: post #3

I ran FreeNAS for a while. After spending a fair bit time learning about it and asking questions, it was explained to me that ZFS required a lot of regular maintenance, care and feeding. It was about this time that I decided to move over to a more consumer solution and bought a Synology. I liked the ideal of open source, self managed systems, but I got tired of being my own network admin, and IT.

Wait, ZFS requires maintenance? I’ve been running freenas for years and have deployed/ran ZFS solutions as part of my job for a decade- this is the first I’m learning about that, it’s usually set and forget. Am I just a bad admin?

Somewhat depends. Scrubbing is about detecting bit rot. You need to make sure that all of your data is periodically accessed so that zfs can check for errors. You can accomplish this either by having a workload which touches all of your data on a regular basis or by scrubbing. Depends on your setup.

Re: FreeNAS

#20

Post by cpach »

hestefisk wrote: post #6

Why is this a news story?

It’s not news per se. I upvoted since I’m interested in the discussion of various alternatives for storage (both for personal and business use).

It’s also interesting because of the current kerfuffle regarding the future of ZFS. For people who want to read up on that, this thread is quite interesting: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-moving-to-zfs-on-...

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