FreeNAS 11.2 new GUI suggestions and discussion thread

[Chris Moore]

That's basically the space issue. As sysadmins of a decent NAS, people are likely to want more info on sight (and will often prioritise "good infomation quickly to hand and visible at a glance" over many other UI features in everyday use), but this isn't giving it, yet anyway.

I don't understand why. Perhaps the developers are using 4k monitors and they need to make the font really big so they can read it but when we look on it with our merely mortal monitors it appears exorbitantly large?

 

[Stilez]

I don't understand why. Perhaps the developers are using 4k monitors and they need to make the font really big so they can read it but when we look on it with our merely mortal monitors it appears exorbitantly large?

I'm tempted to say "whatever; just add a font size option rather than wondering about it" :D

Whatever the answer to that question, we can be sure that no one font size or spacing (even proportionalised to their screen) will work well for all or even most users. Screen sizes, working environments and people's sight vary extremely widely, so no one size will ever be a "good" compromise. Instead, sidestep the whole thing and provide some CSS-tweaking options to meet users' needs. At a minimum add options to

1. Resize/rescale the UI generally;
2. Resize/rescale font sizes specifically (separate from the UI as a whole); and
3. Wide, narrow or minimal spacing separators (so that rows and UI elements are widely spaced, narrow spaced or minimally spaced). Managing it this way keeps the same overall look and feel and avoids multiple templates, it just adds more or less space between UI items as the user prefers.

These are all basically CSS "set and forget" on classes or elements, they don't require multiple UIs or anything to be maintained. So as 3 UI options, these shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

Then everyone can be happy.

 

[Brezlord]

I just installed a test VM of the 11.1RC for a look at the new UI and I can say I like what I see. It would be nice if under the storage menu you had a disks menu and under that you could have a graphical representation of you disks with SMART info for each disk like temp, health etc. Also having a button for the replace and offline function on each disk would be great to. I have attached some pics from the napp-it manual for ideas.

 

[Stilez]

I just installed a test VM of the 11.1RC for a look at the new UI and I can say I like what I see. It would be nice if under the storage menu you had a disks menu and under that you could have a graphical representation of you disks with SMART info for each disk like temp, health etc. Also having a button for the replace and offline function on each disk would be great to. I have attached some pics from the napp-it manual for ideas. View attachment 21331

The existing UI has a "disks" tab. I use it a lot. I didn't notice the new UI doesn't yet. It needs that.

 

[Brezlord]

The existing UI has a "disks" tab. I use it a lot. I didn't notice the new UI doesn't yet. It needs that.

It does but no nice graphical representation of you chassis with temp and status lights for each disk.

 

[danb35]

Being unable to zoom out to see when the problem I'm noticing started is an obstacle to success.

Yeah, this is a big fail.

 

[Jurgen Segaert]

I would get rid of the "spinning button", that forces you to do a one second mouse-over, before the "Add/create" button appears. Cute, but annoying.

I would also move some of the buttons, so that all the functions that directly relate to administering the server are in the navigation bar on the left, and all the other functions are in the toolbar at the top, i.e.

• Move the "Logout", "Reboot", "Shutdown" buttons to the navigation bar on the left, they can be grouped into a new sub-menu.
• Move the "System>Support" and "Guide" functions from the navigation bar on the left to the top, with the language/locale & themes etc...

Thoughts?

 

[Damianos]

Just wanted to chime in for a quick second. While I've been quiet on the forum, I've been keeping an eye on this thread from time to time. What I can tell you right now is that we are aware of the problems you guys have mentioned so far. They are all on our radar and we are working through our to do list as quickly as possible. This includes but is not limited to:

• Dealing with the spinning dial on the title bar of the tables. These are material components in angular that use the spinner by default. This will be changed.
• Accommodating different data densities. FreeNAS has a diverse install base. There are home users with 4 disk setups and there are also sysadmins with huge arrays. We plan on offering the ability to toggle a card view and a table view for the different use cases. We also will make heavy use of regex filters and a tagging system to help users focus on what's important to them. Check out the 'Virtualization' page in the nightlies to see how this is progressing. Please remember, cards take up a lot of space and are not meant for dense installations. Table view should be used if you have a lot of data to display.
• Responsive layouts. The rest of the team and I have been used to bootstrap's grid system for responsive layouts up until now. We have switched to a toolkit that uses the angular flex-layout module. This has yet to be implemented on the entire UI but is a high priority, so it will be coming soon.
• Charts. We're using C3.js because it is a nice wrapper around D3.js, which is an exceptionally robust charting toolkit. I am personally taking on this part of the project starting in the next couple of weeks. I have many refinements on my to do list.
• Themes. The themes we have in place so far were done quickly and mainly just change the color palette. We will have more elaborate themes in the future after we get more of the functional things sorted out.
• Font Scaling: We're not all on 4k monitors. A couple of us have macbooks, Kris uses a 4k in the office and I'm pretty sure the rest of us are 1080p and lower. We're going to investigate this. Once we find the cause of the scaling issue, we'll decide on a solution.

Our plan is to first get the UI to a relative feature parity with the old UI. The upcoming 11.1 strives to get us as close to that objective as possible. For 11.2, we will be working hard to get the UI to a state where it will be default worthy. Most of the refinement and fine tuning will happen for the 11.2 release. Anything before 11.2 is a technology preview so please keep that in mind.

I want to thank you guys for taking the time to give some constructive feedback. It was comforting to read through it and find that the team has also noticed a lot these same issues. It let's us know we're on the right track. This is a huge undertaking and we're working hard to make it as great as we can, since we on the UI team are also FreeNAS users. Thanks for being patient while we work towards our goals. Speaking of which, I need to get back to it. The 11.1 release is coming up soon.

 

[Chris Moore]

I want to thank you guys for taking the time to give some constructive feedback. It was comforting to read through it and find that the team has also noticed a lot these same issues. It let's us know we're on the right track. This is a huge undertaking and we're working hard to make it as great as we can, since we on the UI team are also FreeNAS users. Thanks for being patient while we work towards our goals. Speaking of which, I need to get back to it. The 11.1 release is coming up soon.

It is really nice to see this response. Thanks!

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

I, too, miss the 'View Disks' display, @Stilez. It is a quick way to see serial numbers.

I also miss the detailed information on the 'View Volumes' tab. No compression information at all? No way to access the 'Volume Status' information that shows last scrub information? Why is replication not available from the Volume page? Why can't I see which disks are included in a Volume from the Volume page?

Do we really need four clicks to Logout? Reboot or Shutdown, sure. But more than two clicks to logout seems excessive.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[appoli]

Throwing my 2 cents in:

Stuff others noted, but would like to second:
-Historical data retention
-use of space/config (but i understand that the objective is to get it working first so understandable...)
-Disk details/view. Would like to be able to get info about the actual hardware
-logs
-mouse overs with info/sample data

Don’t think anyone has noted these ones:
-Task outcome: I can schedule tasks, but I wish I could see the result of them as well in the same place (eg last smart test performed on X date, taking Y time, etc).
For init scripts I would like to be able to see if the script is still running (my fan spin script doesn’t show up as a running process, have to login via ipmi KVM to see the log output displayed every few min)
-Mobile view: probably not a high priority at all, but I use my phone regularly to make minor tweaks/see the status of the system. The new UI is the least mobile friendly yet. The new UI is almost useless on it (hard to be specific: stuff isn’t displayed, charts don’t form, things that should be on the screen aren’t, but the system believes they are, etc). The space use also plays a role here
-I like the VM stats option, if something like that were possible for jails that would be cool (but then again I don’t plan on using jails for much longer)
-Multiple/persistent shells: either or, or both, would be nice. I know I should SSH in, but sometimes what I’m doing is really simple and I’d rather just do it via the GUI, but it may require a second screen or console for a jail, etc
Also, the current console is unusable on a phone (can’t engage with the window object)
-Some customization would be nice. EG if we would like a view with only a few bits of information available, but shown in a condescend format that would be awesome. Going a step further, being able to arrange the main menu items as different window objects would be cool as well (I’m probably dreaming though haha).

Thanks!

 

[Donny Davis]

Seems like a lot of work has went into this new ui. Maybe using an upstream that is designed for this would be faster and easier.

http://www.patternfly.org/

 

[diskdiddler]

I'm not one for installing a beta when it comes to my NAS... However I can't stand bad user interface and really want to contribute.. is this in a state I could check out?

 

[Ericloewe]

Yes, what's there should be working.

 

[Damianos]

Seems like a lot of work has went into this new ui. Maybe using an upstream that is designed for this would be faster and easier.

http://www.patternfly.org/

Unfortunately there's not really an ideal solution. Rebuilding a UI of this magnitude is going to take a lot of time no matter what you do. Obviously starting from scratch is not an option we could go with due to the time constraints. Instead the UI team has went with an Angular 4 admin template called Egret to give us a head start. It makes use of angular material design components and some other npm packages. However, even with something like Egret, you're going to want to change a bunch of things, so that's what we're doing.

As I mentioned in my previous post, check out the nightlies for the latest ui developments. In particular, keep an eye on the "Virtualizations" page. We're going to get things dialed in there, and then adopt that to the rest of the UI where appropriate. FYI, for power users, the table view is currently being worked on. We have some nice features we'll be putting into place in the next little while.

 

[Chris Moore]

I'm not one for installing a beta when it comes to my Nas... However I can't stand bad user interface and really want to contribute.. is this in a state I could check out?

I installed it in a virtual machine so I could look at it. I don't like the idea of putting it on my regular system until it is really ready.

 

[Chris Moore]

Unfortunately there's not really an ideal solution.

I like blue, but it feels like too much blue. Can that be relegated to a highlight color and have the majority of the background be grey or white, kind of like the forum colors?

 

[Damianos]

I like blue, but it feels like too much blue. Can that be relegated to a highlight color and have the majority of the background be grey or white, kind of like the forum colors?

We're filing the color scheme stuff under fit and finish. It will be looked at after all the functionality and layout tasks are done. When we do get around to that phase, we have some ideas that I think people will like, especially if you're a sysadmin/heavy terminal user. But yeah, don't sweat the colors right now, what you see is not what will ship when the new UI becomes default in 11.2.

 

[Damianos]

So since I'm working on the virtual machines (bhyve) section right now, let me ask you guys this. What sort of batch operations would you guys want to do with your VMs other than start/stop? Throw some ideas at me and I'll see what I can do.

 

[Chris Moore]

So since I'm working on the virtual machines (bhyve) section right now, let me ask you guys this. What sort of batch operations would you guys want to do with your VMs other than start/stop? Throw some ideas at me and I'll see what I can do.

A console that listed the VMs and their state (up, down) and gave options for editing their condition or creating them to begin with. It would be very nice if the whole process could be done through the GUI and with the ability to snapshot the VM and spawn a new VM from the snapshot. Mount and UN-mount an ISO. Spawn a viewer into another window so the hardware configuration can be seen in one window while the UI of the VM can be seen in another. Multiple UI windows should be possible so that each of the many potential VMs can be seen at the same time. All the virtual hardware should be configurable through the web GUI such as the number of CPU cores, amount of RAM, virtual drives (or multiple drives) number and type of virtual network interfaces, how the virtual network interfaces connect to the world, virtual switch (or multiple virtual switches), an ability to export the virtual machine so it can be moved to another server and an ability to import the virtual machine that was brought from another server.
I am sure most of this functionality is available from the command line, but you asked for suggestions to encorporate in the GUI.
I can't think of anything else right now but you might want to tinker with some of the products like Hyper-V and VirtualBox to see what features they have and think if there is a way to do something similar for managing virtual machines in FreeNAS.

Out of scope (maybe) but something to think about is a way to join multiple FreeNAS system so they can be managed / monitored from a single web GUI. If I recall, there was some work on that in Corral but I think that may have died with Corral.