Update on Nightlies - 3/4/2017

[Kris Moore]

Wanted to give everybody a brief status update on some of the new things starting to land in the 9.10 nightlies. First though, 9.10.2-U2 is expected to ship sometime on or around Monday March 6th. This should be the last -UX update for the 9.10.2 series as we prepare for 9.10.3. On the 9.10.3 front some exciting new features have started to land in the past few days.

First up is a new "S3" service, using Minio as its backend provider. This allows you to host your own S3-compatible "buckets" and manage / access files via a variety of clients. I'm using S3Anywhere on my Android, and it works nicely. But, of course rclone and friends work just as well for larger sync operations. Once the service is enabled it also provides a nice WebUI so you can manage files/buckets via your favorite browser if needed.

Next is a new Angular-based Web Interface. WilliamG (One of our developers here) created a very cool UI using Angular, which not only looks great, but works very well on small-screens (Smartphones/tablets). Before you freak, don't worry, the existing UI hasn't gone anywhere and this new UI is by no means "feature complete" (Very much still a WiP). But if you want to experiment with its functionality and provide feedback, you'll be able to do so on the latest nightly tonight. To access it, browse to http://<MyFreeNASHost>/ui/

Thanks for your continued use of FreeNAS and looking forward to discussing these features with you in more detail soon!

 

[Jailer]

Nice! Keep up the good work.

 

[Jailer]

Is it wrong if I like the unfinished Angular UI better than the new FN10 UI?

 

[m0nkey_]

I updated my nightly VM to take a look. The UI does look nice, however just a couple of comments.

Is there a reason for a new UI in 9.x? The current 9.x UI is tried, tested and works. There's nothing really wrong with it and works in all major browsers. I just feel this is being done for the sake of doing it. I for one would prefer attention was focused elsewhere. Sure, bring us new features (I'm liking the look of the new VM tab in the nightly), enhancements, stability updates, but keep any major UI changes in the upcoming FN10 release.

 

[Jailer]

I'm guessing this is in response to the complaints about the duplication of objects in the current FN 9 UI. The Angular UI removes the top row of selections and places everything along the left side similar to FN 10 UI. But this is only a guess.

If you follow PC-BSD/TrueOS you'll know that @Kris Moore and the team experiment a lot and play around with cutting edge stuff a lot so this actually fits right in with what they do.

 

[Kris Moore]

I updated my nightly VM to take a look. The UI does look nice, however just a couple of comments.

Is there a reason for a new UI in 9.x? The current 9.x UI is tried, tested and works. There's nothing really wrong with it and works in all major browsers. I just feel this is being done for the sake of doing it. I for one would prefer attention was focused elsewhere. Sure, bring us new features (I'm liking the look of the new VM tab in the nightly), enhancements, stability updates, but keep any major UI changes in the upcoming FN10 release.

It's being done for a several reasons.

#1 - Entirely API driven. This UI only uses the WebSocket and Rest apis, which is a heck of a lot cleaner than the old django driven one. Since we do a Ton of QA via those Apis, it makes sense to try and run the UI with them as well.

#2 - Better compatibility long term. The angular project has a good track record of browser compatibility, including mobile devices.

#3 - Easier to maintain - Have you looked at the Django / dojo code?

#4 - It's open source! Since FreeNAS is open source, contributors are welcome to hack on or add features as their heart desires ;)

In this case, the new UI can happily co-exist with the old, so there's really no downside to having it available as an alternative.

 

[JustinClift]

With the Angular approach, any thoughts about experimenting with D3 too?

Just asking because they can be combined for good data visualisation things.

Not sure if/where there's real use for that in the FreeNAS UI. Performance characteristics over time maybe? :D