My first two weeks with Freenas - thoughts and observations !

[asterysk]

I have been using Freenas now for two weeks and thought I would share my initial thoughts and observations which might help other people considering a move to Freenas.

Quick Background: I use a Drobo 5D to store 20TiB of personal data (movies, e-books, PDF's, Office docs) and had a drive fail. In the (very lengthy ) process of rebuilding the array another drive failed and I lost all my data. Luckily I had an offsite backup on Seagate 8TB archive drives. At this point in time I realised my knowledge of NAS's was woefully pathetic and that trusting critical data to a proprietary NAS with sketchy support was not a wise thing to do. After a lot of research I embarked on two paths simultaneously : (1) FREENAS (2) UNRAID. I built two systems from second hand Supermicro based commercial servers (Xeon E54, ECC, Hot swap drives, 32GB RAM, 12 Drive Bays etc)

Observations:
Unraid was by far the easiest to install and configure, I was running a "pre-clear" (writing zeros to each sector) on 12 drives simultaneously within about 2 hours of starting the setup. No glitches, the GUI was intuitive and gave me everything I needed. Haven't had to use the command line yet.
Freenas was a bit trickier, lots of reading and a bit more configuration, it took me about 5 hours to get to the point I could start creating a Share. Definitely not an intuitive GUI. Have had some glitches along the way and have had to delve into the command line quite a bit.

Thoughts:
After a week of using Freenas I realised that I had an immensely powerful and robust NAS because of the Freebsd and ZFS foundation, however, I then came to the realisation that if I am to stay with Freenas I have no choice but to learn FreeBSD and the intricacies of ZFS. I am finding I am spending most of my time working at the Freenas command line. The different terminology between Freenas GUI and FreeBSD/ZFS is making the learning process more difficult that it should be. I have decided that the best way forward is to build a FreeBSD system on ZFS from scratch, learn how it all works at the command line level then make a decision on whether to stay with FreeBSD/ZFS native or use FreeNAS. For me the most frustrating thing about Freenas is that I am constantly asking "How do I do this ..." and the FreeNAS documentation (from a newbie's persepctive) is confusing, fragmented and incomplete. Conversely, I am finding the documentation on FreeBSD/ZFS is consistent and easy to work through. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like for iXsystems to support customers who don't know command line FreeBSD, although it did occur to me that iXsystems probably do have a "How do I do it .. FAQ" as part of their internal support system. I wonder what my experience would have been like if I had simply bought a ready made Freenas system.

Unraid, is such a pleasure to use, the Docker capability is excellent and I don't have to do much more than navigate the GUI, however, in my personal opinion I don't like having only one Parity drive. (I did change my Drobo to use 2 parity disks based on my bad experience). Much as I like using Unraid my gut is telling me to go with FreeBSD/ZFS (and possibly Freenas ) as my main NAS system . I just wish the Freenas documentation was more aligned to Newbie's and had a "How do I do it FAQ" .

So in summary, I think Freenas gives a very good introduction to FreeBSD/ZFS and after I have a working knowledge of FreeBSD/ZFS I will be able to make a decision on whether to stay with FreeBSD/ZFS or come back to Freenas. Once I have this mastered I am confident I will have a very solid NAS which I can trust to handle my data (although I will always have my 8TB archive backup drives !)

PS, I found the Powerpoint "Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC and other newbie mistakes" to be invaluable and have read and re-read it numerous times, its just a pity that it is written from a FreeBSD/ZFS perspective rather than a FreeNAS perspective, this lost me a lot of time trying to work out how to translate the information into what I was seeing on the GUI. (On the flip side, I can definitely credit this slideshow as the guiding light that I better learn FreeBSD/ZFS first !)

Hope this might be of some help to other people considering FreeNAS. I'll post an update once I get a handle on the underlying FreeBSD/ZFS but this will be quite a while from now I expect !

 

[hugovsky]

Hi and welcome.

As someone in the forum says, if you're using the CLI, you're probably doing it wrong. :) What have you done in CLI that couldn't do with the GUI?

Yes, ZFS learning curve is... steep. But when you learn the basics, you shouldn't have major problems. It's just a matter of learning the correct terms for things and understand what they mean. If done right, like you say, it's immensely powerful and robust.

Backups are ALWAYS needed. Even with ZFS. No filesystem can beat that.

 

[cyberjock]

So there's some gotchas here. I'll try to address a few of your comments on why we don't have things that you said would be useful:

The different terminology between Freenas GUI and FreeBSD/ZFS is making the learning process more difficult that it should be.

I agree. Only @jkh really has that kind of control. Several people have put in bug/feature requests to fix these inconsistencies, but ultimately things stay the way they are.

I have decided that the best way forward is to build a FreeBSD system on ZFS from scratch, learn how it all works at the command line level then make a decision on whether to stay with FreeBSD/ZFS native or use FreeNAS.

This is more difficult than it seems.

Did you know you have to align the partitions properly for ZFS based on your ashift value? Do you even know what an ashift value is? I'm not trying to belittle you or anything. I'm trying to show that there's nuances to the way that you need to do things that the average joe will not know about until they have years of ZFS and FreeBSD experience of their own. There's tons and tons of little gotchas with building a file server that, if you get wrong when you start, you can never ever fix later without basically starting all over from scratch. Basically you're really saying you need to be FreeBSD certified and have quite some years of ZFS experience before you expect to do what you want to do. Not trying to deter you, just want you to know what you are in for. This is why FreeNAS is so successful. The iXsystems dev team has already done a lot of the work that you and I may never know or think about properly to maximize performance and/or reliability.

Every time I start doing stuff in FreeBSD I end up finding out that the bottom of the rabbit hole is so much deeper than I'm used to.

For me the most frustrating thing about Freenas is that I am constantly asking "How do I do this ..." and the FreeNAS documentation (from a newbie's persepctive) is confusing, fragmented and incomplete. Conversely, I am finding the documentation on FreeBSD/ZFS is consistent and easy to work through.

This is where things are a bit ugly. Take the simple question "How do I create a CIFS share?". I cannot answer that particular question in ways that 'most' people would want. I can ask about 1000 individual questions like "How do I create a CIFS share I can use on AD?", "How do I create a CIFS share I can use on LDAP?", "How do I create a CIFS share that is read-only for guests but not for user X?", "How do I create a CIFS share that is read-only for guests, but not for group X?" and the list goes on. I could give you 1000 questions that are very nearly like "How do I create a CIFS share?" but aren't exactly like it, and are nuanced. Unfortunately you come to a place like this forum and you'll see all 1000 iterations of those questions. And people regularly get upset because they aren't sure if their specific situation is answered in the forums because they don't even understand the basics. So do we have a FAQ with 1000 questions and answers on how to create a CIFS share for every possible scenario? :P And if so, who is going to be tasked with re-reading all of those questions and the answers with every update? Remember, we're all volunteers here. Nobody is paid to post in the forums.

The reality is that you need to know how to read and apply that knowledge with understanding being the key concept. Too many people don't want to read, don't want to understand and don't want to apply that knowledge. So we're left with a situation where, unless we create a FAQ for every possible scenario, we'll always have someone upset that our FAQ isn't all-encompassing. Heck, I've helped people that the FAQ or manual gave step-by-step instructions that were nearly idiot-proof, and yet they couldn't follow the steps that told them exactly where to click.

We've all been guilty of googling some IT problem, seeing a step-by-step answer to the problem and doing it without an inkling of the potential consequences of what we're doing. We do it, we see the problem we had is fixed, and we go to the next problem. We rarely decide we need to get a full-fledged background in SQL, AD, etc just to know if we've somehow compromised security is some really obscure (but extremely important) way. Unfortunately, doing that for FreeNAS is a really good way to end up losing your data. It might not happen right away, and it might not even happen this month. But you could be setting yourself up for nasty failure later without knowing it.

For the record, we used to have a FAQ that was 20-30 questions and answers. I can't tell you how often the question was answered in the FAQ and people still wouldn't read it because they didn't want to understand the technical terms. "CIFS share? Is that a Windows share?" It was also never up to date because nobody maintained it. ;)

If you want to start a FAQ, you are welcome to. But, be ready for the influx of people telling you that even though you may have poured 100s of hours into the FAQ, it still wasn't complete enough. ;)

I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like for iXsystems to support customers who don't know command line FreeBSD, although it did occur to me that iXsystems probably do have a "How do I do it .. FAQ" as part of their internal support system. I wonder what my experience would have been like if I had simply bought a ready made Freenas system.

iXsystems provides white-glove support. Many of our customers aren't IT professionals and don't care to know how or why things work. They want to call us and have us fix it. That's all they often care about. For those that are IT professionals they are encouraged to attend the FreeNAS training lectures that come free with a TrueNAS purchase. For those that arent IT professionals they simply call and say 'I need a new CIFS share accessible to these users" and someone on the team makes it happen.

PS, I found the Powerpoint "Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC and other newbie mistakes" to be invaluable and have read and re-read it numerous times, its just a pity that it is written from a FreeBSD/ZFS perspective rather than a FreeNAS perspective, this lost me a lot of time trying to work out how to translate the information into what I was seeing on the GUI. (On the flip side, I can definitely credit this slideshow as the guiding light that I better learn FreeBSD/ZFS first !)

Thanks for the kinds words (I wrote the powerpoint presentation). The reason why I'm more focused on the FreeBSD/ZFS side of things is because:

1. The GUI keeps changing, and I'm not interested in regurgitating what is better written in a manual that is kept up-to-date by someone that is maintaining that document for a job. The presentation is my own volunteer time.
2. The manual really covers it all (and it had better since we have someone paid to keep the manual up to date, so why put it in my presentation and risk being out of date? One of the reasons the manual is "in" the FreeNAS build is so that you have a guide that matches your exact build of FreeNAS.
3. I've already gotten complaints about the presentation being too long, and since its purpose wasn't to teach how to use FreeNAS, it doesn't seem like a good fit to put that kind of info in my presentation considering the current complaints. Still others complain that while it is too long, it still doesn't get into enough detail to make them happy.
4. The presentation is intended to cover topics that are "the most common and most serious mistakes for getting a FreeNAS system to work on its own". To me, that means focusing on choosing proper hardware, understanding ZFS basics (which aren't covered particularly well in the manual since we aren't selling "ZFS" by itself) and the more common "silly mistakes" a new user might make that aren't immediately obvious until you've potentially lost data.

 

[cyberjock]

Speaking of which.. read #4 above and then read this post: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ack-having-no-effect.43045/page-2#post-281635

Customer thought they had protection, but because of a missed checkbox, boom... lost data. :(

It really is important for you to be able to learn, understand, and then apply the information. Following some guide just doesn't cover you from mistakes. :/

Also, I hope I didn't make you feel like I was trying to belittle your comments or anything. That wasn't my intent and if you are taking it that way I appologize. I was just trying to explain that the issues are pretty big and there is no easy fix, especially with volunteer hours at work. There are youtube videos that give very basic guides for "how to make a windows file server with FreeNAS" and even those are ultimately lacking because people still want more or different from what the youtube video shows.

 

[asterysk]

Thank you for your comprehensive response which does help put things into perspective. I guess it comes down to personal preferences for several things:

1. Learning style
2. Trust in Software
3. Intuitive nature of Software

Taking them one by one :

1. Learning Style : I like to understand what is happening when I action something even if that understanding is a simplistic metaphor for something more complicated. Freenas does not make this easy, it is somewhat cryptic, uses its own terminology and doesn't explain in the GUI what is happening in a consistent way.

2. Trust in Software : I have had so many issues (the same ones many other people have had judging by researching the Forums) and also had to resort to using command line (using information from Forums ) , this has resulted in a low trust of the installation

3. Intuitive nature : The Freenas GUI is anything but intuitive, the two similar but different menus typifies this.

I mentioned Unraid because I was simultaneously experimenting with it at the same time and conversely it ticks all 3 boxes for me, in many ways it shows what Freenas could be like for new users.

My research shows me that ZFS is probably the best way to reliably store data and therefore it is my firm intention to use Freenas as my back end reliable storage method (with an offsite to back that up). Due to my learning style I feel I need to learn FreeBSD and ZFS to a basic level so that I gain more confidence in the Freenas software, I don't have the time to actually use FreeBSD/ZFS as my storage method, its simply a learning strategy that will work for me.

Whilst I do all this I am now using Unraid (have bought the Pro license) as my first level media storage system, its really is a pleasure to use and so far absolutely no bugs, glitches or issues.

I can see me ending up with this setup :

First level = Unraid using 6TB drives, and using it for VM's and Docker and Plex
Second Level = Freenas Z3 using 2TB , simply as a robust, reliable data storage method
Third level = Seagate 8TB archive drives, stored offsite

Thankyou once again for your excellent powerpoint, I can't recommend enough that all new users should read it, it definitely stopped me making what would have been catastrophic mistakes in my setup