We Want to Hear Your Ideas

[majerus]

A good percentage of these ideas people are posting are not FreeNAS ideas, they are FreeBSD ideas, or core ZFS ideas.

Overall if the ideas will make the product stronger they should be brought up. Along with that ixsystems more then perhaps any one of us individually has the ability to actually propose, write and implement changes to FreeBSD as a whole.

 

[pkernstock]

Having Telegram as an Alert Service

 

[Spearfoot]

Disable all replication tasks with one click. Enable all replication tasks with one click. Or, if not one click, at least all at once.

(We have nine replicated data sets. When we update the replication target or take it offline for maintenance, the primary starts sending 'Critical Alerts' email letting us know the replication is failing, about one a minute, until the target is back online. This is obnoxious. But not as obnoxious as going into nine replication tasks and disabling them then having to remember to enable them.)

Cheers,
Matt

This! I put in a feature request along these lines about 8 months ago:

https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/24944

 

[Stux]

Ability to see SMART stats without needing to open a shell and run smartctl. Maybe another button on the View Disks tab?

Smart automated tests shouldn’t deselect drives just because a drive is moved to a different bay.

Oh, that’s a bug? Okay... don’t do it then ;)

 

[Aurélien]

Allow different network adapters on the same subnet to have static IPs. Every time I try to configure more than one adapter/lagg with a static IP it produces an error "The network 192.168.1.0/24 is already in use by another NIC". To get around this I can assign one static in FreeNAS and the other must be set to DHCP which is assigned its "static" IP by the DHCP server.

The workaround I found is to create one via the webui and the other via the command line!

 

[danb35]

Allow different network adapters on the same subnet to have static IPs.

The GUI prohibits this because it isn't a valid configuration. See https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/multiple-network-interfaces-on-a-single-subnet.20204/

 

[Aurélien]

I would love having a web based file manager. SSH can do the trick but a web file manager would be a Lot faster for me at least

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

And the top of the file manager would be to set ACLs on files and folders from an AD or LDAP.

 

[Aurélien]

Rsync Task : When you manually execute an rsync task via Tasks-> Rsync Task, would it be possible to have a result of the command directly in the interface or in a specific log simply accessible?

 

[acp]

When updating have a reboot button when updating is complete. So there admin can decided when to reboot.


Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Thinking on it a bit and thought of this. Ability to run a shutdown script to automate the process.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[MasterTacoChief]

The GUI prohibits this because it isn't a valid configuration. See https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/multiple-network-interfaces-on-a-single-subnet.20204/

Yay that quotes my former employer. Anyways, even though it's "invalid", there are reasons to possibly want it to be valid. In my case, I have a lagg made of two 10Gb fiber links, and a second lagg of two 1Gb copper links. I don't want to mix 10Gb and 1Gb links, because then sometimes a connection that I want to use a 10Gb connection will end up being assigned the 1Gb connection.
Why have 1Gb and 10Gb anyways you ask? In my case, 1Gb are used for Internet-facing jails that I also want to access via my LAN (email, torrent, S3, etc.) while the 10Gb are used for VMWare NFS shares. While in my case using up 1Gb of a 10Gb link won't kill the performance of my setup, I could see others in a professional environment that want an OOB management port, but maybe they'd just use a different subnet anyways.
Comparing to other retail products, before FreeNAS I was using a NetGear ReadyNAS. It had two 1Gb copper ports which you could either configure in a lagg or assign two unique IPs which could be on the same subnet. Coming from something like this, it isn't necessarily obvious why you can't partition your network connections the same way.
I understand this isn't "the way it's done with FreeBSD", but even so having that feature (maybe with a warning) make it more customer-friendly.

EDIT: Most importantly at the moment for me, I can't get jail networking to work with my 10Gb adapters. I've tried all methods of configuring it, but I can't even ping anything on the LAN from a jail when the bridge is connected to these ports (including when I delete the 1Gb lagg). Creating a separate lagg with the copper ports and making sure the bridge is connected to this lagg works great.

 

[RAurelian]

Bring back Virtual Box in any way or shape would be the easiest and fastest but would work at least as it used to in 9.3. Allow people to choose if they want to use BHYVE or Virtual Box if they cannot coexist.

This would really make FreeNAS great again :) No really, with Virtual Box FreeNAS use cases were almost limitless.. now not so much..

 

[tvsjr]

Bring back Virtual Box in any way or shape would be the easiest and fastest but would work at least as it used to in 9.3. Allow people to choose if they want to use BHYVE or Virtual Box if they cannot coexist.

This would really make FreeNAS great again :) No really, with Virtual Box FreeNAS use cases were almost limitless.. now not so much..

See, I'd go the other way. If you want to make FreeNAS great again, remove the VM/jails/plugins/etc. altogether. If I want a superb VM environment, I'll build an ESXi box. I want my FreeNAS to be a really killer NAS, that's all.

And yes, I know, this won't be a popular opinion :)

 

[RAurelian]

See, I'd go the other way. If you want to make FreeNAS great again, remove the VM/jails/plugins/etc. altogether. If I want a superb VM environment, I'll build an ESXi box. I want my FreeNAS to be a really killer NAS, that's all.

And yes, I know, this won't be a popular opinion :)

I understand your point, but in my opinion, FreeNAS is already more than great on the NAS part. I`m using almost all (do not use it as a Domain Controller) of its NAS features (and those that basically make it a SAN, like iSCSI) and have no complaints except for very small qualms - but I`ve had issues (even bigger ones) with other systems too, including well known commercial ones.

I have several servers in different configurations and they all work great. I have very large pools, small pools, with slow 5400 rpm disks, with 7200 rpm ones, with 10000 rpm ones, SSD ones - they all work better than expected (especially the slow ones).

What really sets FreeNAS apart is its versatility and with version 9 it really went to a whole new level, especially when they added virtualbox in the mix. I was already using the jail system for various services, including OwnCloud, Plex, and others based LAMP stacks into the jails. But FreeBSD was holding me back in terms of what services I want to put on the FreeNAS server and virtualbox was a radical shift. I know, I`ve heard it before - put applications on ESXI and storage on FreeNAS - but guess what: for example I already have a network that has 2 ESXI servers that is holding many services, including the ones that used to be on the FreeNAS server while on v9.3.. Please leave it to the user to decide where to put their services - although I have them all now on ESXI, there are a few that I`d rather have on FreeNAS directly, especially because they deal with storage mostly.
And I will name just one service that hit me hard: I had a Windows VM in virtualbox with BlueIris that was recording from many surveillance cameras at once and storing everything directly on FreeNAS. This configuration was very efficient and scalable - started with 2 cameras and added a dozen more over the time, as well as storage - as funds became available. The FreeNAS server has a 10G NIC for most of the storage services and 2x 1G ones for the services inside the virtualbox VMs.
Now this VM sits on an ESXI server which sends the video recording to storage shared from the FreeNAS server. Previously the surveillance system was all isolated to a large PoE switch + an uplink to FreeNAS, but now I have to access that network from the ESXI server for the recording VM and send the data over to FreeNAS on another network, doing useless constant traffic that could have been avoided if the VM had stayed on FreeNAS.

Again, FreeNAS is great for NAS, but that is not what FreeNAS is about and if at any time FreeNAS would go back to just serving data, then I would have to find another alternative.

 

[bigphil]

See, I'd go the other way. If you want to make FreeNAS great again, remove the VM/jails/plugins/etc. altogether. If I want a superb VM environment, I'll build an ESXi box. I want my FreeNAS to be a really killer NAS, that's all.

And yes, I know, this won't be a popular opinion :)

While I couldn't agree more, I also understand why they have it. FreeNAS' main audience is the DIY crowd and home users. Without these features they would lose a certain user base and that user base is important. With so many people on FreeNAS, a lot of bugs are found and ideas are shared. I'm sure these things have an impact on TrueNAS as well and only adds to the stability of that platform with so much user input coming in. There's always going to be two crowds on here...those of us like you and I that want FreeNAS to be more like TrueNAS and those of us that what all of the Features that a DIY system like FreeNAS should have.

 

[Nick2253]

While I couldn't agree more, I also understand why they have it. FreeNAS' main audience is the DIY crowd and home users. Without these features they would lose a certain user base and that user base is important. With so many users on FreeNAS, a lot of bugs are found and ideas are shared. I'm sure these things have an impact on TrueNAS as well and only adds to the stability of that platform with so much user input coming in. There's always going to be two crowds on here...those of us like you and I that want FreeNAS to be more like TrueNAS and those of us that what all of the Features that a DIY system like FreeNAS should have.

Absolutely correct. First and foremost, FreeNAS is the proving ground for TrueNAS. Which means that it's critical that FreeNAS get as many users as possible. In that way, dev time spent on non-enterprise features actually pays huge dividends, because it boosts FreeNAS's profile, and gets more people on board. And more than just testing the software, FreeNAS is the billboard for iXsystems to market pre-configured FreeNAS hardware and TrueNAS. And without those, no developers are getting paid.

Personally, I agree with the NAS-first approach that @tvsjr is getting at (I also don't use plugins/VMs). However, as much as I want all the dev time going to better NAS/ZFS feature integration, I want to see more people using FreeNAS, because that will ultimately keep the project going.

On that note, I would love to see more official FreeNAS mini-type systems. I don't want the FreeNAS line to interfere with TrueNAS, obviously, but something to bridge the gap between FreeNAS mini XL and the FreeNAS Certified Servers would be nice. Perhaps a FreeNAS mini with an i3 or a Xeon E3 or something like that: more power than an Atom, but still obviously targeted at the SMB/prosumer market. Perhaps with something like "VM Ready" marketing.

And while I'm on this front, I'm not a huge fan of the form factor of the FreeNAS Minis, and personally much prefer horizontal cases (they fit much better stacked in or on a rack). Perhaps, we could see some FreeNAS Minis based around a case like the U-NAS NSC-800 or NSC-600.

 

[jarred.barber]

I'm using FreeNAS in a small tech business environment (with a 48TB FreeNAS Mini XL), so I am coming from a perspective that is between the home power user and a large enterprise IT department user. Here are my suggestions:

1. Better integration of CLI and the web interface. The web interface is great overall, but it is annoying being *required* to use it. For example, I would like to be able to manage users and groups with standard FreeBSD commands and allow users with ssh access to change their own passwords, but this is not doable unless I go to a LDAP or NIS solution.
2. Plugins that aren't geared towards plex/home theater applications. It would be great for a small office use case to be able to install standard services such as LDAP server, or a DNS server, or internal email, internal http server, etc. with minimal configuration required. Obviously, at some point you don't want to host all of that on a NAS, but if you are a small company (or even a home power user) it could be a good way to get up and running without requiring a substantial amount of dedicated IT resources.
3. This has been said before, but a web-based file management system (possibly running in a jail) like Dropbox provides would be great for sharing links to files while being agnostic towards whether a user is accessing the system via NFS, AFS, samba, etc. I have set up a read-only version of this manually by running nginx in a jail, but an approach with a better-designed UI would be awesome.

 

[majerus]

I'm using FreeNAS in a small tech business environment (with a 48TB FreeNAS Mini XL), so I am coming from a perspective that is between the home power user and a large enterprise IT department user. Here are my suggestions:

1. Plugins that aren't geared towards plex/home theater applications. It would be great for a small office use case to be able to install standard services such as LDAP server, or a DNS server, or internal email, internal http server, etc. with minimal configuration required. Obviously, at some point you don't want to host all of that on a NAS, but if you are a small company (or even a home power user) it could be a good way to get up and running without requiring a substantial amount of dedicated IT resources

Does docker enable this? There are dockers for lots of things and relatively easy to build.

 

[Nick2253]

Does docker enable this? There are dockers for lots of things and relatively easy to build.

One of the issues with docker is that there is quite a bit more overhead than a jail running those services (since it requires a full VM). If you are running lots of containers, the overhead is minimized per container, but if you only have a few, especially if they are pretty low load in the first place, it's much better to have them in a jail.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Easyish method for submitting FreeNAS hardware config and server statistics to searchable database. Non-identifiable, of course. Voluntary (but possibly the default), of course.

So many of the questions on this forum are 'will X work with FreeNAS' or 'we see X level of performance with Y hardware'. There is even a 200-message thread where people are posting their ARC stats.

I'm picturing this as a checkbox somewhere in the General or Advanced System tab that says 'contribute anonymous hardware specs and performance stats to FreeNAS'. Check that box and FreeNAS will send data to the mothership monthly/quarterly. I'm sure there is a way to keep the FreeNAS server unique while also providing a level of anonymity.

Then, somewhere, possibly linked from these forums, there would be a way to say 'show me the top ten most popular' motherboards/10G NICs/drives. This would somewhat help to validate new configurations and direct FreeNAS (and FreeNAS-supported BSD) development resources towards widely deployed hardware. Being able to search the ARC stats by dataset size and RAM might also be interesting.

I haven't give too much thought to what statistics would be worth collecting. But the hardware collection seems like something that would be easy and helpful.

Cheers,
Matt

(If I were the sale/marketing manager at iXsystems, I'd absolutely include a button in FreeNAS that says "compare my server's performance to our benchmark systems", then something (or maybe nothing) would happen in the background for a few minutes followed by a message along the lines of "your system is running in the bottom 70th percentile of servers in your class for ARC/network/disk performance; iXsystems will evaluate your configuration and recommend provide detailed performance tuning recommendations for $nnn; click this link to learn more about our evaluation and support services or sign up for a $99 Gold Access Subscription to our tuning knowledge base.)

 

[bigphil]

Along the same lines that @MatthewSteinhoff said...in GUI disk benchmarking could be nice too. Lots of times users want to do this but have the parameters wrong or something else not set correctly.