We Want to Hear Your Ideas

[kdragon75]

An idea: As mentioned in my last post, resource management for jails fully implemented into the UI.

 

[majerus]

@Bgadd Of the ideas posted what does the iX team think is most likely to be implemented, most ambitious and overall the general response to the requests? Along with that is there anything obvious that we missed that is coming down the horizon , or is requested by enterprise customers that could significantly help FreeNAS? Thanks!

 

[Hazimil]

When new releases are released, can we ensure the change/release log is up-to-date with all changes. What I mean by this, is that when v11.1 was released it went through 4 iterations (BETA, RC1, RC2, RC3) before being released as LIVE. However the change log only showed what was fixed between RC4 and LIVE, meaning people who had not played with the BETA and RCs had to manually search for the change logs in each of those releases to see the true picture of what was changed between 11.0U4 and 11.1.

Can we tidy this up?

 

[Ericloewe]

What I mean by this, is that when v11.1 was released it went through 4 iterations (BETA, RC1, RC2, RC3) before being released as LIVE.

That has already been fixed, IIRC. It was certainly already brought up in the bug tracker.

 

[Nick2253]

I'm wondering if we can come up with a better idea for giving you ideas?

Redmine is great as a bug tracker, but for new features, it's difficult to search (you can't, to the best of my knowledge, limit search to just "Features"). It also takes people out of the forum, leading to a dis-jointed solution. However, a single thread is ever harder to search, and it's difficult to provide feedback/discussion on ideas in this format. Could we create an "Ideas/Suggestions" subforum?

Or, even better, a Resource-section-like "Ideas/Suggestions"? That way it would be easy to sort and categorize ideas, and we could link them to the Redmine issue to prevent duplication.

Just some thoughts.

 

[majerus]

I would like to see copy and paste out of the web interface Shell. Just tried this in the latest nightlies new and old Ui doesnt work.

 

[Ericloewe]

(you can't, to the best of my knowledge, limit search to just "Features")

Sure you can. https://redmine.ixsystems.com/projects/freenas/issues?set_filter=1&tracker_id=2

 

[Ericloewe]

I would like to see copy and paste out of the web interface Shell. Just tried this in the latest nightlies new and old Ui doesnt work.

It should be working. File a bug report, please.

 

[Nick2253]

Sure you can. https://redmine.ixsystems.com/projects/freenas/issues?set_filter=1&tracker_id=2

Whaddaya know!

I was looking in the filter dropdown, which is why I missed it.

EDIT: I take that back. What I'm talking about is searching for a specific term or phrase using the bar in the top right. I don't see a way to restrict this to only features: https://redmine.ixsystems.com/projects/freenas/search?utf8=✓&scope=&issues=1&q=test123

 

[Ericloewe]

Well, you can't have the computer search for you, but you can sort them alphabetically by Subject by clicking the header in the appropriate column. From my experience using the search function, a manual search might actually be faster.

 

[Nick2253]

Well, you can't have the computer search for you, but you can sort them alphabetically by Subject by clicking the header in the appropriate column. From my experience using the search function, a manual search might actually be faster.

That was part of my point that searching is difficult. What if I call (for example) a feature request "Update NTP for SNTP" vs "SNTP Support Needed" vs "NTP missing SNTP"? A search for SNTP would find all of them, but sorting would only really spit out the middle one.

 

[Bgadd]

@Bgadd Of the ideas posted what does the iX team think is most likely to be implemented, most ambitious and overall the general response to the requests? Along with that is there anything obvious that we missed that is coming down the horizon , or is requested by enterprise customers that could significantly help FreeNAS? Thanks!

We are still working on reviewing all the ideas submitted here, but I will let everyone know when we have had a chance to review them. When we do, I will come back to the forum and update our "top 10" and allow for further discussion. Thanks again!

-Ben

 

[majerus]

Would be nice to ixsystems FreeNAS and TrueNAS listed as partners for b2 and various other cloud providers.

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html

 

[jagter_freenas]

Old versus New UI

I tried the new Beta UI for a week, but went back to the old UI.

I understand you have to change the architecture of the UI to ensure long-term maintainability, but the actual UI design is a big step backwards.

I think the whole design philosophy of the new UI is wrong.

It looks like a consumer-orientated web site, not a professional UI to manage a production server.

Specifically:
- It is slow
- Too many clicks to find something
- Too much wasted white space
- Fonts too big, just wasting space
- It does not fit on average laptop screen, you have to scroll. If you have to start scrolling your menu, you should know you got it wrong.

A very big problem:
- Not enough "information density" in a screen, you have to view multiple screens to get info on a topic

The old UI is concise and simple to use, with easy and quick access to anything.

Please re-consider the UI design.

 

[Borja Marcos]

I would consider some logging post processing to ease some important tasks.

Main priority with all the rage about ransomware: making it easy to pinpoint troublesome users in an incident.

For example: last year a customer had a ransomware incident. Fortunately they were using FreeNAS with hourly snapshots for the typical department shared folders. If I remember well I found the affected user by searching the system log. I searched for the Samba pid with the highest number of file creation events and I had to do a couple more searches to find out which user was affected.

So, it would be great to have some attribution mechanism so that events in the system logs could be related to identifying information such as authenticated user, IP address or even MAC addresses.

I'm not sure wether to suggest a top-down approach (which log hunting tasks get the most requests, finding out through a user survey) or a bottom up approach like identifying the "final" events registered on the system log (example: a file creation or deletion) and making sure that all of these events are properly identified with authenticated account and IP address.

Such kind of audit mechanism can be useful not only for ransomware incidents, but imagine other scenarios like the typical employee copying lots of files before leaving the company, etc.

With a somewhat stable auditing available it would be great to add an alert mechanism. Maybe something as simple as a threshold based alert.

 

[Christian D.]

Old versus New UI

I tried the new Beta UI for a week, but went back to the old UI.

Thus is the life of single-page-apps. I wouldn't trust a designer to program one, and I wouldn't trust a programmer that wanted to wade into that stack in the first place.

 

[Fran Aquino]

Bhyve RDP graphical console, just as in VirtualBox.

 

[Fran Aquino]

Embrace the cloud. One can get a cheap Synology or QNAP box and effortlessly manage it from anywhere, access files from anywhere and sync folders from anywhere. I know this would incur in infrastructure costs for iXsystems, but I would happily pay for this.

 

[Eniqmatic]

Native integration with Elasticsearch/Logstash for me would be excellent so that I can keep an eye on things from a central location and see how things are running, plot graphs etc. I know I can do it via the syslog option (which I do) but there isn't enough detail in there. I know there is also the native Graphite option which I can use with the logstash plugin, but it doesn't quite seem to work properly.

 

[majerus]

Add ability to have cloud mounted storage, presented as a mount. Coupled with the ability to limit transfer speed, max download limits per day.