Alternatives to FreeNAS?

D

Deadjasper

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 28, 2001
Messages
2,584
I'm done with FreeNAS. What a steaming pile of horseshit it's turned out to be for me. The latest stupid issue concerns permissions. I have 2 Z2 pools in the same box. Pool A I can read to and write to without issues. Pool B I cannot write to no matter what the setting. Not gonna waste any more time on this garbage.

My question is, are there any sane alternatives out there. I'd like to stick with ZFS but I'm not willing to deal with the issues I've faced with FreeNAS. If there aren't any good alternatives then I'll go with Windows Server. This I don't want to do but will if forced to.

TIA

Well hell, I upgraded to FreeNAS 11 and it seems to have fixed the problem. I stopped upgrading after the FreeNAS 10 fiasco and didn't even know 11 was out. One of my main gripes about 10 was the shitty UI. I see that 11 has retained the old UI so all is good for now.
 
Last edited:
well you can try linux with zfs (the version on linux does not support certain features such as trim - also i suspect you will have to manually copy the files); ubuntu finally added zfs to their installation (16.04). Not sure if this will solve your issues.
 
Glad you found a solution, but in case you wanted to try an alternative to FreeNAS..

NAS4Free (www.nas4free.org) - Also based on FreeBSD, it has native ZFS support and is in many ways very similar to FreeNAS. Not sure of the differences or minutia between them as I've not used it myself. Seems to have some of the same kinds of plugins/features as FreeNAS.

OpenMediaVault (www.openmediavault.org) - Based on Debian Linux, this is another NAS-focused distro. It has a variety of plugins including those for ZFS on Linux if you wish. Note there is a 3.x and a 4.x build - get the 4.x build especially if you want the latest features/plugins.

Rockstor ( www.rockstor.com) - Also based on Linux, this as another storage focused distro that has a lot of options and features. For instance, it is focused by default on BTRFS a "ZFS-like" file system that I've heard is even better in some ways, though is not as mature as ZFS. However, if you look into it and install proper ZFS support as a plug-in you can use it here too. It also has a ton of Docker plugins/"RockOns" for all kinds for not just common NAS-focused apps, but for really any kind of cloud/storage/server setup you might want to configure. I've been told that among Linux based NAS/SAN/Cloud distros this is one of the best and with the most features

These are a few of the more popular ones of which I am aware, and updated with some frequency too. Hope it helps, even if you decide to stick with you updated FreeNAS!
 
Xaeos said:
Glad you found a solution, but in case you wanted to try an alternative to FreeNAS..

NAS4Free (www.nas4free.org) - Also based on FreeBSD, it has native ZFS support and is in many ways very similar to FreeNAS. Not sure of the differences or minutia between them as I've not used it myself. Seems to have some of the same kinds of plugins/features as FreeNAS.

OpenMediaVault (www.openmediavault.org) - Based on Debian Linux, this is another NAS-focused distro. It has a variety of plugins including those for ZFS on Linux if you wish. Note there is a 3.x and a 4.x build - get the 4.x build especially if you want the latest features/plugins.

Rockstor ( www.rockstor.com) - Also based on Linux, this as another storage focused distro that has a lot of options and features. For instance, it is focused by default on BTRFS a "ZFS-like" file system that I've heard is even better in some ways, though is not as mature as ZFS. However, if you look into it and install proper ZFS support as a plug-in you can use it here too. It also has a ton of Docker plugins/"RockOns" for all kinds for not just common NAS-focused apps, but for really any kind of cloud/storage/server setup you might want to configure. I've been told that among Linux based NAS/SAN/Cloud distros this is one of the best and with the most features

These are a few of the more popular ones of which I am aware, and updated with some frequency too. Hope it helps, even if you decide to stick with you updated FreeNAS!
Click to expand...

Thank you sir. This is most helpful.
 
Your issues is why i stopped making my own home storage and bought a QNAP TS431P and it just works :D
 
Deadjasper said:
I'm done with FreeNAS. What a steaming pile of horseshit it's turned out to be for me. The latest stupid issue concerns permissions. I have 2 Z2 pools in the same box. Pool A I can read to and write to without issues. Pool B I cannot write to no matter what the setting. Not gonna waste any more time on this garbage.

My question is, are there any sane alternatives out there. I'd like to stick with ZFS but I'm not willing to deal with the issues I've faced with FreeNAS. If there aren't any good alternatives then I'll go with Windows Server. This I don't want to do but will if forced to.

TIA

Well hell, I upgraded to FreeNAS 11 and it seems to have fixed the problem. I stopped upgrading after the FreeNAS 10 fiasco and didn't even know 11 was out. One of my main gripes about 10 was the shitty UI. I see that 11 has retained the old UI so all is good for now.
Click to expand...

The pools themselves shouldn't have permissions, nor the vdevs. Not sure if you are still interested in working on this, but if so, post here. What filesystems/datasets did you create on top?

I ran straight freebsd for a while instead of freenas, but accomplishing the same thing is a bit harder. Switched to freenas for ease of use a week or two ago, and so far so good.
 
Last edited:
The problem was solved by upgrading to FreeNAS 11. I could not write to the pool in question from either Windows or Linux.

Not sure at this point if I'm going to switch. May just see how it goes from here on.

Something I neglected to mention is that I had another secondary pool composed of 1TB drives that developed the same exact problem. I was initially able to write to it but then an upgrade, I think, broke it. I upgraded the pool to larger drives by first destroying the pool then removing the 1TB drives replacing them with 4TB drives. Then I created a new pool. All went according to plan, I never received an error message or any hint that something was amiss. Just could not write to the new pool either. After upgrading to 11, suddenly I could write to the pool and I made no changes to the config so it had to be something with 9.xx. Anyways, the problem is solved for now.
 
Your permissions problem is almost certainly due to your misunderstanding of the underlying OS and how permissions and possibly SMB works. Which is fine; you shouldn't need to learn to be an expert FreeBSD administrator just to run a NAS. I'm saying that to point out that moving to another relatively open BSD or Linux system won't necessarily solve any issues you have.
 
Well, as I stated before, all sharing and permission setting were the same for both pools in the box. I went over them time and again feeling sure there was something I missed but found nothing. Also, how do you explain the fact that upgrading alone fixed the problem? Thanks.
 
I can't answer that without more information. Were you trying to write to Pool B via a share, or from the CLI, or a jail, or what?
 
Windows share? When you say the permissions were the same, were you looking at the permissions in the FreeNAS GUI share, the pool, Windows, etc?
 
I mean where were you managing permissions. GUI? Linux command line? Linux GUI? Windows File Explorer?
 
Mazzspeed said:
FreeNAS is via webGUI I believe...
Click to expand...

I'm a FreeNAS user. I know. I see a lot of people failing to manage permissions effectively in FreeNAS because they're not using Windows to manage file permissions on their shares. You have to get permissions right on the server files, the share, and in Windows.
 
kumquat said:
I'm a FreeNAS user. I know. I see a lot of people failing to manage permissions effectively in FreeNAS because they're not using Windows to manage file permissions on their shares. You have to get permissions right on the server files, the share, and in Windows.
Click to expand...

This exactly++
 
kumquat said:
I'm a FreeNAS user. I know. I see a lot of people failing to manage permissions effectively in FreeNAS because they're not using Windows to manage file permissions on their shares. You have to get permissions right on the server files, the share, and in Windows.
Click to expand...

Out of curiosity -- what do you do to manage permissions properly? I just set up a Supermicro box that's partially a file server (not FreeNAS, just Proxmox using its native ZFS on Linux). I think I got all the permissions stuff working reasonably well but may change it up if I hear something better. I log into the share with just one machine right now that runs both Windows and Linux -- I set the windows user to own files and give it read/write access and the Linux user to read only (via group read only access). I'm not sure if I should be mirroring my Windows credentials with the Windows user on the server itself (and same for Linux) or if I should have separate login credentials with more secure passwords for each (which is what I do now).
 
FreeNAS 11 manages permissions for windows shares now by default, and you have to work quite a bit to break or change it.
Which is good, because apparently people break it all the time. Windows and Unix permissions do not play well together.
 
This is always a moving target given the rapid development but last time I checked into BTRFS raid was not nearly as stable as ZFS (or mdadm). Specifically people have reported lost data and volumes when fault issues occur. One nice feature of BTRFS (over zfs) is you can add a disk to a raid to grow it (ZFS you cannot grow a raid other than replacing all disks with a large model). I'd definitly switch to BTRFS once it becomes more stable under 'stress' conditions (for normal usage as a regular filesystem it is fairly stable).


Xaeos said:
Glad you found a solution, but in case you wanted to try an alternative to FreeNAS..

NAS4Free (www.nas4free.org) - Also based on FreeBSD, it has native ZFS support and is in many ways very similar to FreeNAS. Not sure of the differences or minutia between them as I've not used it myself. Seems to have some of the same kinds of plugins/features as FreeNAS.

OpenMediaVault (www.openmediavault.org) - Based on Debian Linux, this is another NAS-focused distro. It has a variety of plugins including those for ZFS on Linux if you wish. Note there is a 3.x and a 4.x build - get the 4.x build especially if you want the latest features/plugins.

Rockstor ( www.rockstor.com) - Also based on Linux, this as another storage focused distro that has a lot of options and features. For instance, it is focused by default on BTRFS a "ZFS-like" file system that I've heard is even better in some ways, though is not as mature as ZFS. However, if you look into it and install proper ZFS support as a plug-in you can use it here too. It also has a ton of Docker plugins/"RockOns" for all kinds for not just common NAS-focused apps, but for really any kind of cloud/storage/server setup you might want to configure. I've been told that among Linux based NAS/SAN/Cloud distros this is one of the best and with the most features

These are a few of the more popular ones of which I am aware, and updated with some frequency too. Hope it helps, even if you decide to stick with you updated FreeNAS!
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top