I wouldn't recommend that anyone actually do this.
Well, this is pretty much expected for the FreeNAS CTO to want to discourage people from using this product. As you already have fully developed in-house products :). But In all seriousness, there is no intent to step on anybody's toes.
People should stick with Warden if that is what they already prefer and are accustomed to. Indeed Warden is a very popular and well established tool (deservedly so) amongst FreeNAS users. So there should be no pressing need to defend it. We are all already aware of how popular it is.
But now how about this new tool, Finch? Well Finch was initially meant only to be for the NAS4Free platform. But during development I had to switch my NAS box over to FreeNAS (the NAS features). Upon finding that the two platforms were so similar it just ended up being no trouble to also make full support for FreeNAS also. Think of it as a bonus. You're welcome.
For one thing, there's no information on how this might permute (or possibly destroy) your freenas installation, and mucking with things in your boot partition is NOT recommended, particularly as it may interfere with future upgrades.
This is a completely new tool, and a little caution can be health thing. The Finch software tries it's best to be completely open about what it does. All of the source code is freely available on GitHub (as is FreeNAS too). This is a brand new project so such concerns are expected to be raised. Trying to be as transparent as possible about this, here is the relevant F.A.Q. entry on the Finch website:
http://dreamcat4.github.io/finch/faq/#toc_15
The hard truth is that Finch is not likely to interfere with future FreeNAS upgrades. Hoever in the event of any such issue, please just report / raise it as a bug on Finch from it's project's website (
http://dreamcat4.github.io/finch/bugs). I am always happy to look at such issues and am always ready to make / provide an appropriate fix.
For another, there's absolutely nothing to suggest that there are any actual advantages to this style of jail management.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of Finch is that users are are completely free to choose from ANY of the publicly available jails management tools. Or indeed anything else that can be found in FreeBSD's official pkg-ng repository.
So it gives (the user), a great deal more options. Including (but not limited to) ez-jail, qjail, and zjails. Which are all equivalent tools that sit outside of the established FreeNAS ecosystem. For best ease-of-use (fewer end-to-end installation steps), Finch preinstalls QJAIL for you automatically. And the Finch documentation refers to QJAIL program. In that sense, Finch is opinionated software (just like FreeNAS). Those are just part of the defaults.*
But if you don't have any need for a jails tool, you are not forced into using any of them either. Finch may also be used to run VirtualBox, bhyve (FreeBSD-10+), or a hypervisor (qemu, xen) instead of jails.
For an example see:
http://dreamcat4.github.io/finch/faq/#toc_25
The PC-BSD warden system, which FreeNAS uses, already does a fine job of jail management
I don't discourage people to use Warden in situations where they are more familiar with Warden and prefer to use that tool. It is a free choice. However open competition should be viewed as a healthy thing. Having alternatives is never bad and helps drive us to improve the quality of our software.
Indeed if you did not have such an obvious vested corporate responsibility to be against this project with a "not invented here" mentality right from the get-go, you might still have one eye open on flip-side of the coin. Which is to realise that there are other uses of this tool aside from jails management. FreeNAS may benefit more in the long run by viewing this tool not as a threat but a potential future ally. iXSystems inc are more than welcome to take, use, re-use, or re-make any and all part(s) of the Finch source code for the benefits of the FreeNAS community. It is released under open license. And I'm happy to answer questions / co-operate with members of the iXSystems development team towards that end.
This project is very new at the moment. It was announced just yesterday. If you don't think this tool is suitable for FreeNAS on the first day of it's release, then why not make it your own? Imitation is the best form of flattery.
If someone wants to manage jails from the CLI, they can already do that with the warden and also not run any risk of having competing jail management systems on the same system.
Nope. There are absolutely no risk of conflicts with Warden. The two systems will run entirely separate from one another. More information at:
http://dreamcat4.github.io/finch/faq/#toc_16
I would say (to someone who wants use to both systems) then by all means. Warden is especially good for FreeNAS plugins such as Plex. I'm not here to trash talk other people's hard work. Yet neither was this topic / thread created to talk about or discuss WARDEN at any great length. There are already many other FreeNAS discussions about that.
* Somewhat ironically, because Finch is not meant solely for FreeNAS platform, WARDEN itself was actually under consideration along with all the other jail management tools. In the end WARDEN wasn't ultimately chosen to be Finch's default jails management program. But it was fairly considered as part of a game of fair competition. QJAIL had a couple of little extra things going for it. There was no huge margin separating the two.
One reason that went against my decision to include Warden was that it wasn't present in the official freebsd ports tree / pkg-ng repository. Never found out why, there seems no obvious reasonsince Warden has an fully open source license.
Another main reason (in part) was what we have obviously been discussing here. FreeNAS already comes with Warden so including warden inside Finch would not benefit nor offer any different alternative options for the FreeNAS segment of the Finch user base. For example those who might need Finch anyway for running other non-jails software such as Virtualbox. Or recompiling their kernel, etc.
Wishing to end these discussions about Warden on a more positive note, you may be pleased to know (although it isn't the default), but with FINCH anyone can now install Warden onto NAS4Free. Just install Finch on NAS4Free. Then install WARDEN onto Finch. Consfused?
As of yesterday, you can now have Warden running on NAS4Free. It's not expected to be any major hit. But at least if anyone is switching over from an existing NAS4Free setup onto FreeNAS, there is now an way for them to trial the WARDEN software alongside it's major competitors and independently come to the conclusion that Warden is... well... all right too!
Again, I kindly remind people that this topic / thread created was not created to talk about or discuss WARDEN at any great length (having just done so myself!). Since there are already many other FreeNAS discussions about that.
Kind Regards,
Dreamcat4
Developer of Finch.