Next Version of TrueNAS CORE

[Arwen]

One note. If TrueNAS Core is going to survive a few more years, upstream work may still be needed.

For example, if a original, upstream package was last updated a month ago, but the FreeBSD 13.3 port of that package was last updated more than a year ago, perhaps an update of the FreeBSD 13.3 port is warranted. I don't expect cutting edge, (which at times is a bloody bleeding edge), version update. On the other hand, a July update of that package that clearly states its stability, (with the new, desired features), might be better for both FreeBSD 13.3 and TrueNAS Core 13.3 than the year old ports FreeBSD 13.3 currently has for that package.

Hope I have said this correctly. My other computers have a similar problem, some packages don't get attention that they deserve. (Gentoo Linux also has a package DB that can have outdated / older packages...)

 

[morganL]

But there are no ABI changes within one freebsd-stable train. These are maintenance releases. Why are you maintaining local modifications at all instead of deploying on a stock FreeBSD release?

Is there a "no bug" guarantee?
(From what I understand, we should get our money back.)

We do make any mods required to run TrueNAS appliances reliably...OpenZFS, iSCSI, drivers, etc, Obviously, the fewer the better, but fixing issues is a priority.

 

[morganL]

One note. If TrueNAS Core is going to survive a few more years, upstream work may still be needed.

For example, if a original, upstream package was last updated a month ago, but the FreeBSD 13.3 port of that package was last updated more than a year ago, perhaps an update of the FreeBSD 13.3 port is warranted. I don't expect cutting edge, (which at times is a bloody bleeding edge), version update. On the other hand, a July update of that package that clearly states its stability, (with the new, desired features), might be better for both FreeBSD 13.3 and TrueNAS Core 13.3 than the year old ports FreeBSD 13.3 currently has for that package.

Hope I have said this correctly. My other computers have a similar problem, some packages don't get attention that they deserve. (Gentoo Linux also has a package DB that can have outdated / older packages...)

Thanks for reminder. Obviously, we'd like help identifying and fixing these types of issues. Sometimes they are seen as TrueNAS bugs.

 

[Kris Moore]

One note. If TrueNAS Core is going to survive a few more years, upstream work may still be needed.

For example, if a original, upstream package was last updated a month ago, but the FreeBSD 13.3 port of that package was last updated more than a year ago, perhaps an update of the FreeBSD 13.3 port is warranted. I don't expect cutting edge, (which at times is a bloody bleeding edge), version update. On the other hand, a July update of that package that clearly states its stability, (with the new, desired features), might be better for both FreeBSD 13.3 and TrueNAS Core 13.3 than the year old ports FreeBSD 13.3 currently has for that package.

Hope I have said this correctly. My other computers have a similar problem, some packages don't get attention that they deserve. (Gentoo Linux also has a package DB that can have outdated / older packages...)

Just so folks understand, we manually update only a very select handful of ports to build CORE from upstream FreeBSD. We do not usually get too far off the beaten path of updating all the ports we pull from them. That is a road to sadness when you diverge too much from upstream packages. Usually ports lag behind in upstream FreeBSD for many reasons. Lack of interest by the original FreeBSD maintainers, compatibility issues, conflicts with dependencies, etc. Its a lot of effort to untangle that web so we avoid it wherever we can. ;)

 

[Kris Moore]

But there are no ABI changes within one freebsd-stable train. These are maintenance releases. Why are you maintaining local modifications at all instead of deploying on a stock FreeBSD release?

The stories I could tell of the ABI "compatibility" and how that isn't strictly 100% true...

 

[Mario Rossi]

I did not understand. So do you recommend switching to Scale if there isn't a valid reason to use CORE?
What could be a valid rationale for using CORE?

I have to do a new home installation. this is my first time using TrueNAS and I will add NextCloud to it. I thought CORE was more stable and lightweight for simple home file sharing.

At this point the doubt whether to use CORE or Scale increases.

 

[Mario Rossi]

I found this discussion and therefore the answer to my previous question.

What is the future of TrueNAS CORE?

Given the fact that TrueNAS SCALE has been widely adopted by many people, it is starting to look like TrueNAS CORE is on it's way out. I (and others I'm sure) am looking for a simple answer to a simple question? "Thread Title" There have been indirect answers and replies to similar questions in...

www.truenas.com

 

[morganL]

I did not understand. So do you recommend switching to Scale if there isn't a valid reason to use CORE?
What could be a valid rationale for using CORE?

I have to do a new home installation. this is my first time using TrueNAS and I will add NextCloud to it. I thought CORE was more stable and lightweight for simple home file sharing.

At this point the doubt whether to use CORE or Scale increases.

As you've found, for new users with no special reasons to use CORE, we recommend SCALE.

For existing users, TrueNAS provides a choice of 2 paths. Each has its advantages depending on the use-case.

 

[ddaenen1]

Can we save many (new) users from frustration and just eliminate the "plugins" section?

 

[victort]

Can we save many (new) users from frustration and just eliminate the "plugins" section?

It is scheduled for removal in 2025, but I also think faster would be better.

 

[Kris Moore]

Can we save many (new) users from frustration and just eliminate the "plugins" section?

We'll look at that, it does seem to be time to consider it.

 

[Stux]

We'll look at that, it does seem to be time to consider it.

Maybe stick it behind a checkbox in advanced?

“Hide Plugin Section [X]” defaulting to true on new installs?

 

[ddaenen1]

We'll look at that, it does seem to be time to consider it.

Well the facts are that there are many being tempted by them (including myself at the time they were still working properly) but only few don't end up frustrated and move away because of that. It was fun while it lasted. I stayed and went through the learning curve leading to setting up my own jails but the plugins create expectations that nowadays are not fulfilled anymore.

 

[danb35]

Can we save many (new) users from frustration and just eliminate the "plugins" section?

Agree 1000% with this.

 

[Octopuss]

What are the plugins good for anyway? I never looked at that because I use TrueNAS for, you know, a NAS.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

What are the plugins good for anyway? I never looked at that because I use TrueNAS for, you know, a NAS.

Jails are a great way to run applications the integrate tightly with a NAS like e.g. media players or Nextcloud.

 

[Ericloewe]

And/or more flexible file serving options - jailed SFTP servers so you can have nicely-isolated containers for different users, weird things needed to deal with that weirdo setup company Y claims to need for their thing that could have easily been an SFTP server (these are typically odd variants of FTP that don't work well, if you'll pardon the redundancy), etc.
Not strictly file serving, rather block serving, but see also iX's new approach to S3, where it's no longer on the base system. This can be very advantageous if your setup is not trivial.

 

[garm]

I love jails, I chrooted everything back in the day and a big part of my love for iOS is the framework approach. That gets security to a much higher level then dirty operating system and its derivatives ever could... docker is nice because you can spin up in a few minutes what someone else built, but you don't know what's running in it. Sure you can build your own docker containers, but that's way more hassle then deploying from ports or pkg in a jail.

 

[craigdt]

I'm still using Core on my main system even though I'm looking to migrate over to Scale soon, and I agree that getting rid of the plugins is not an issue for me, most of the services I run on Core I built my own jails for, so as long as the jails menu is there still its not a big deal. Jails are still a handy thing to have on a NAS appliance...

 

[Whattteva]

This is one of the main advantages of FreeBSD over Linux, yet ironically it is not leveraged by TrueNAS Core.

But there are no ABI changes within one freebsd-stable train. These are maintenance releases. Why are you maintaining local modifications at all instead of deploying on a stock FreeBSD release?

Yep, this is also the reason why FreeBSD project is still maintaining the 13.x even though they already have 14.0. FreeBSD 14.0 has breaking ABI changes, the most notable one I've noticed being libssl.