FreeNAS 11.3-BETA1 - Now available!

danb35

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if you have specific things that need fixes please let us know.
The biggest thing I see, other than simple resistance to change, is that the new GUI is much more wasteful of screen space than the old one. Not everyone has a 4k monitor, and not everyone runs their browser windows at full-screen all the time. To be specific, there's way too much padding around entries in Pools, Disks, Snapshots, and Jails. Ditto for user and group accounts. And though you can adjust column widths to help a bit, those changes aren't persistent; next time you return to that page you'll need to adjust again.

I'm not particularly partisan for or against the new GUI (and 11.2's implementation of the "new GUI" is a good bit different from 11.3's), but this has been an issue ever since the new GUI was floated, it's been mentioned by many people, and there really doesn't seem to have been much improvement in this area. At least 11.3 adds scroll bars so it's a bit more obvious that there's more to the list than the user sees.
 

Kris Moore

SVP of Engineering
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not sure this is the right spot, but since it's in the patch notes for 11.3 beta:

Support for collecting daily anonymous usage statistics has been added. Collected non-identifying data includes hardware information such as CPU type, number and size of disks, and configured NIC types as well as an indication of which services, types of shares, and Plugins are configured. The collected data will assist in determining where to best focus engineering and testing efforts. Collection is enabled by default. To opt-out, unset System ➞ General ➞ Usage collection


isn't that in direct violation of the European GDPR act? By default it should be opt out with an option to opt in.

We don't believe so. The service was designed in such a way that no user-identifiable information is retained, even IP's aren't tracked. It provides metrics at a very basic level, like out of 100 systems, 75 enable SMB, 30 enable NFS, average pool size is XXTB, that kind of thing. We may add this to an initial getting started wizard at a later point though to prompt you at first-install.
 

SamM

Dabbler
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May 29, 2017
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39
Does this update help with any of the following outstanding issues?
  1. Problems with the iSCSI Initiators DB corruption in the GUI:
    1. https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-after-deleting-initiators.77441/#post-538498
  2. Problems with 10+Tb drives on LSI controllers, which allegedly work fine in 9.1?
    1. https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-seagate-10tb-enterprise-st10000nm0016.58251/
  3. Being unable to remove mirrored SLOG devices via GUI:
    1. https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-cant-be-removed-from-pool.79966/#post-553796
 

emk2203

Guru
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Nov 11, 2012
Messages
573
When you free up resources because you don't have to maintain two UIs anymore, please fix the date/time format localization for the dashboard as well for 11.3 and not with a target for 12.0. That's too late. When I monitor something and focus on an issue, I don't want to get sidetracked by having to do mental calculations from some US format to proper ISO or local format.

For anyone who is also annoyed by it, please vote for it in the bug tracker. https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-101577
 

Philip Robar

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Jun 10, 2014
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116
Under the update, my Plex is no longer running. I deleted the jail and tried to reinstall Plex. However, if I want to add an extension or a jail I get various error messages. Is there any way to continue using Plex? A decline to 11.2 U6 brought no improvement
Straying off topic: I recommend not using the plugin. Create a jail manually. Use pkg to install and update Plex.

If you want keep "pathologically" up to date with Plex change the repository to "latest":

Create /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf

Add this:
Code:
FreeBSD: {
  url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest"
}

Simple script to automate installation of Plex Media Server: https://forum.freenas-community.org/t/scripted-installation-of-plex-media-server/47
Why bother?
I’ve said for a long time that Plex installation is trivial, requiring only three commands once the jail is created (pkg install plexmediaserver, sysrc plexmediaserver_enable=YES, service plexmediaserver start). While this remains true, it doesn’t account for a few “best practices”:
  • The Plex metadata is stored inside the jail. If the jail needs to be rebuilt for some reason, you’ll lose it.
  • The package repository is by default set to quarterly, meaning that the Plex Media Server package will only be updated that often. Many Plex users have a near-pathological desire to have their installation as up-to-date as possible, so this won’t do.
  • There’s nothing in those three commands that sets up automatic updates to the installed packages.
This script addresses these issues–the Plex metadata is stored outside of the jail, the jail is configured to use the latest repository, and a cron job runs weekly to update the installed packages in the jail.
 
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J0s3f

Cadet
Joined
Nov 12, 2019
Messages
1
I installed 11.3 Beta 1 as update on one of my not critical systems and today, it told me there is an update:

1573595390810.png



This actually looks it wants me to downgrade to 11.2-U6.

Is this a bug or do I have something configured wrong?
 

blueether

Patron
Joined
Aug 6, 2018
Messages
259
not beta 1 but in the 11.3 nightlies/Truecommand there is no indication that something is wrong with a disk (other than email) until you drill down into the drive list of a pool on TrueCommand, can this sort of reporting be included in 11.3/12 - maybe withe the online tick changing to red?:
1573618135942.png
 

kenmoore

TrueCommand Project Lead
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May 1, 2019
Messages
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not beta 1 but in the 11.3 nightlies/Truecommand there is no indication that something is wrong with a disk (other than email) until you drill down into the drive list of a pool on TrueCommand, can this sort of reporting be included in 11.3/12 - maybe withe the online tick changing to red?:
View attachment 33859
So that failure badge is only supposed to be helpful in identifying which disk(s) are failing the SMART tests. You should have received a system alert for that smart failure as well, which is the "top level" notification that you had a failure and need to check your disks.
 
Joined
Feb 2, 2016
Messages
574
Sorry, I stand corrected on that. We did remove that option for 11.3 FreeNAS, it is enabled still on TrueNAS builds specifically, since this is the first release with the new UI there.

Ugh. Y'all have made huge improvements in the GUI but it still isn't as easy to use as the classic GUI. Any chance you could leave the old GUI, buried for people like me with a huge 'do not use this, no longer supported' disclaimer? For those of us who use FreeNAS as a simple storage device, the classic GUI is still leaps and bounds better than the new version.

Cheers,
Matt
 

TimoJ

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Jul 28, 2018
Messages
39
The new UI shows setting titles with smaller fonts than the selected value. I find it odd and confusing. Why not show the titles at least with bold fonts? Or is it just me...?
 

dasti

Explorer
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Jun 11, 2014
Messages
71
We determine when the EOL of any particular FreeNAS version is. If we wanted to, we could maintain a version based on 11-stable long beyond FreeBSD's stated EOL timelines. Some companies ran FreeBSD 4.x for a decade or more :)

Granted we most likely won't do that, since 11.3 and then 12.0 are just around the corner, but rest assured we will maintain whatever the latest version(s) of FreeNAS are for as long as it makes sense for us and our users to do so.

thank you for this update, I'm going to test that asap !

I concur with danb35's post : the jail function is a core feature of freenas, plugins are good but this liberty is definitively a must, not keeping up with freebsd creates problems.
i.e. right now installing nextcloud-php73 you will get a message when you try to start php-fpm service.
/usr/local/sbin/php-fpm: Undefined symbol "setproctitle_fast@FBSD_1.5"

making freebsd and freenas community work together means less fragmentation it's a key differentiator
 
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
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Ugh. Y'all have made huge improvements in the GUI but it still isn't as easy to use as the classic GUI. Any chance you could leave the old GUI, buried for people like me with a huge 'do not use this, no longer supported' disclaimer? For those of us who use FreeNAS as a simple storage device, the classic GUI is still leaps and bounds better than the new version.

Cheers,
Matt
At the risk of sounding annoying I 100% agree. I can't help but think that iX are missing a trick here. My company would happily pay for iX to continue to support the old UI and I think they could charge some clients a flat fee for access to it. I imagine most home users either don't care or are quite happy with the "better-looking" UI but for us sysadmins running this in production, we are dreading the day the old UI disappears as the new one is years away from even coming close.

Please reconsider your position on this iX as I fear you may look back at this moment with deep regret.
 
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@Johnny Fartpants I'm a home user and I was feeling the same way about the 11.2 GUI however the updates that are in 11.3beta have made me feel better about the new GUI have you gotten a chance to try the beta?
 
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@cobrakiller58 no not fully and I will try over the coming months. My first issue with 11.3 is that it broke its connection with AD. I tried a new install and an upgrade with an already bound 11.2 system but both don't work. Nothing obvious from what I could see but if I'm honest I haven't donated much time to it.

Like I said I hope I'm wrong but I have this feeling that iX are going to potentially lose a lot of long-term users over the next few years unless they continue to support the old UI. Some people want jails and VMs and plugins etc, etc but others just want a reliable NAS with ZFS underneath and for those users, I think iX should offer a paid-for longterm stable platform similar to CentOS for 10 years.
 

danb35

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iX are going to potentially lose a lot of long-term users over the next few years unless they continue to support the old UI.
They've been saying for a long time this isn't going to happen. And what sense would it make for them to continue to support two GUIs?
 

anodos

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@cobrakiller58 no not fully and I will try over the coming months. My first issue with 11.3 is that it broke its connection with AD.

There were significant changes to directory services in 11.3. Can you PM me with more information about your AD configuration and the issues you experienced? The 11.2->11.3 upgrade path is something we want to get right, but AD environments can vary wildly and so there are bound to be edge cases. This is one of the areas that beta testing and user feedback / bug reports is extremely valuable.
 
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And what sense would it make for them to continue to support two GUIs?
Financial as they could charge for it. The needs of home users and the needs of the enterprise are very different. Organisations are willing to pay for consistency and reliability. The proof will be in the pudding and that's obviously iX's choice but the general feeling I've been getting from the forum over the last year or so is that a good chunk of people running FreeNAS in a serious setup are not liking the direction of travel.
 
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Stilez

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Apr 8, 2016
Messages
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The blog post was (for me) really good. Clearly a huge amount of work has been done, and also the emphasis on enhanced QA before release is really good to learn aboit. Knowing this, I don't mind that 11.3 took so long. Awesome work, crew!!

My 3 areas of focus are on ZFS , Samba, and the new UI.

ZFS

Targeting Beta Q2 if at all possible. This will be faster release since we don't have to do quite so much UI work to get it out the door.
spacemap_v2 was added in FreeBSD 11.3. At one point this made an upgrade to 12.0 impossible because 12.0 did not support that feature flag, but according to the openzfs matrix it now does - not sure what to believe there.
A lot comes back to ZFS. I'm keenly waiting on 11.3 and 12, because of spacemap v2, and because of device allocation arriving from ZoL. Both really useful for my current pool. So these are both very promising news, but I'd really appreciate a bit more detail (and maybe a ZoF/FreeNAS ZFS blog post update at length too!).

- Does this mean that ZoL-based ZoF will arrive in FreeNAS some time around Q2-Q3 2020? And also full support for metadata device allocation? Please say "yes", and that it's not being held back to 12.1 :) Or at least that device allocation will happen :)

- The answer to Yorick's question wasn't quite clear to me. What if any compatibility (or other) issues for future FreeNAS 11.3+ or mainstream BSD 12+ are currently known to exist (or not yet adequately ruled out by QA) if I were to update my pool to spacemaps v2 on the Beta, or indeed 11.3 final? Are there any other feature flags to be wary of adopting.

Samba

A huge amount has changed or developed in Samba, including its handling of recycle bin, time history, and much else.

Unfortunately the Samba docs that are pointed to, aren't really geared for FreeNAS users generally, and details for these options (e.g. to get snapshots for nested datasets, or to reconfigure now that snaps and file history are decoupled) just aren't that great.

Can some extra focus be put on either pushing clarifying changes to the linked Samba docs, or making very sure the 11.3 user guide is really good on this area? Thanks!

New UI

Having started with the legacy UI, the New UI has kept moving and now looks pretty good. I'll look at it in a bit.

It does seem that a number of the issues where people prefer the legacy UI, aren't so such about appearance, but about what is shown on a screen, and specifically, details and whitespace.

Whitespace however is almost totally controlled by CSS alone. Would it be possible to offer CS variants giving config choices such as "compact" vs "normal" vs. "tight" layout, or 1 vs. 2 vs. 3 columns (where applicable), and base font size control? In principle, that would let users who prefer a tight, dense, compact, informative layout, and users who like an uncluttered, emptier, spacious layout, to both be satisfied, pretty much simply by offering a slightly modified CSS geared to these different approaches, rather than any actual reworking within the UI.

I'd really like that as an option, and I suspect I'm not the only one. With the final demise of legacy, maybe this would be a good and not-difficult thing to offer users who like it dense and informative, or with small displays?
 
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anodos

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Samba
A huge amount has changed or developed in Samba, including its handling of recycle bin, time history, and much else.

Unfortunately the Samba docs that are pointed to, aren't really geared for FreeNAS users generally, and details for these options (e.g. to get snapshots for nested datasets, or to reconfigure now that snaps and file history are decoupled) just aren't that great.

Can some extra focus be put on either pushing clarifying changes to the linked Samba docs, or making very sure the 11.3 user guide is really good on this area? Thanks!
As far as snapshots go with samba, nested datasets should just work. If you have specific issues with it, PM me and we can discuss what issues you're having and I can make code fixes as needed or prompt the docs team to update what we have. Shadow copies are simpler in 11.3. You should be able to just check the "shadow copies" box and have it work. BETA2 already has some significant fixes and improvements queued up for shadow_copy_zfs so things should be better with the next release.

I don't believe there are any changes WRT the recycle bin, but once again if you've observed an issue, feel free to PM me and we'll work to get it resolved.
 
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