We Want to Hear Your Ideas

[Bgadd]

Hey Community!

My name is Ben Gadd, and I’m the Engineering Program Manager over here at iX. I wanted to reach out and announce that we want to hear about your ideas that you think can make FreeNAS even better. Go ahead and post an opinion below. Try to limit posts to one idea per post so that we can see what people are voting for.

If you don’t have any ideas, you can still read through the other ideas and give them a thumbs up with the thanks button if you like the idea. The primary goal out of this program is to get as much feedback from the community on new concepts ahead of time, then take that information to the development team here at iX and talk about incorporating some of them into FreeNAS.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Ben Gadd
iXsystems
Program Manager, Engineering

 

[Anon93873]

Incorporate resumable ZFS send as soon as possible, making FreeNAS more tolerant of sub-optimal connections between backup servers across the Internet.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Bring back the 9.x style charts which allow for the easy viewing of historical data. The new charts are virtually worthless for troubleshooting and trend analysis.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Make logging out take fewer steps.

Version 11: click gear, click 'Logout', click check box to acknowledge logout, click 'OK'.

Version 9.x: click 'Logout' and you're gone.

I get why rebooting or shutting down should take several steps. But logging out? One click seems reasonable.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Bgadd]

Thanks everyone for the ideas so far...I will be checking the ideas throughout the week. Thanks again and I look forward to hearing more of your ideas!

-Ben

 

[timsf]

It would be great if the direction of replication between two FreeNAS instances could be easily changed.

My storage setup at home is to use a physical FreeNAS box to NFS-share the dataset containing my $HOME directory to all computers on my home lan. That box does other things too, but those aren't relevant to this suggestion.

I also replicate my $HOME dataset from the NAS box to a FreeNAS VM on my laptop, since having more copies of the data makes me sleep better.

When I'm about to go on a business trip, I disable that replication, and tweak the auto_home settings on my laptop so that my user account accesses that NFS share from the VM instead of my physical NAS box (which is still happily working away at home) and I have access to all of my data on the road.

When I return from the business trip, I then need to replicate the dataset from the VM back over to the NAS box. I also need to toggle the attributes of the dataset on each FreeNAS instance, having to manually 'zfs set readonly=on' on the laptop VM and set readonly=off on the NAS box, then reenable/disable the replication 'enabled' property on each FreeNAS instance.

It would be great if there was a way to more quickly reverse the direction of the replication - one could imagine needing to do similar when performing disaster recovery/failover operations between two datacenters.

Being able to bundle several datasets together in a given "replication set" would further ease this operation so that many datasets could take part in a given replication operation. Perhaps separating the concept of scheduled snapshots from scheduled replication might make this easier to implement (though obviously still using snapshots under the hood)


Keep up the excellent work on FreeNAS - even without the suggestion above, I'm still a big fan

 

[tfran1990]

I would like to see some popular voice communication plugins ex.ventrillo mumble,discord,teamspeak right now you have to create a vm of a windows machine and host from there. would be nice to just start the plugin and have people connect.

 

[m0nkey_]

I would like to see plugins deprecated. While it's nice having a library of plugins, most of which are often out of date or not maintained.

 

[m0nkey_]

Quicker security updates. It often takes 1-2 months before a security update is available.

 

[Nick2253]

I would like to see plugins deprecated. While it's nice having a library of plugins, most of which are often out of date or not maintained.

Agree with this. The entire plugin infrastructure was overly complicated, which meant only a few people knew how to create or maintain them, and therefore they were outdated. I'm not against the idea of plugins in general, but the existing solution was poor.

If we do want something like plugins, perhaps states (something like a masterless Salt setup) would be good: we create a config "state" file, which is applied to the jail creating the "plugin". Such a state configs could be easily hosted in a "FreeNAS Plugins" github. It would also make updates really easy.

Quicker security updates. It often takes 1-2 months before a security update is available.

How can I thank this 100x?

 

[bigphil]

A VSS hardware provider for Windows would be awesome! Tying into the Windows VSS framework in this fashion would allow a VSS requester (backup software for instance) to create snapshots and clones at the application level.

 

[DrKK]

I'll tell you what I would like.

I would like to have confidence in going to mainline releases as they come out. I think that's enough said. (Note my hardware list below indicates that DrKK, one of the most active people in this community, is on "FreeNAS 9 latest".)

 

[majerus]

Publish a user guide version that is PDF for each release.

 

[majerus]

I would like to see a virtual interface that can be composed of a 1Gb and then a 10Gb interfaces. When the 10Gb interface is up use it , if its down use the 1Gb.

 

[majerus]

VAAI for NFS Vmware & VVOL

 

[majerus]

I think it would be interesting to have a semi regular youtube stream regarding state of FreeNAS with developers, iX staff etc

 

[majerus]

Deduplication ( This as I understand is a much larger problem then it sounds on the surface since it requires ZFS implementation

 

[majerus]

Paid support model would be interesting, like pay per ticket / question system

 

[majerus]

More welcoming forums, this seems to be happening IMO (I bring this up because as much as I talk about FreeNAS at work the number one complaint from people is that the forums are hostile no matter how little/much someone has looked into FreeNAS )

 

[tfran1990]

The entire plugin infrastructure was overly complicated,existing solution was poor.

^^^^^^^This is true.

we need a solution so that we can enable/run a basic task.
like a "you choose" solution where you can run an installer for a program inside freenas and the gui for that software opens up and is delt with as a single application.

just an idea.