We Want to Hear Your Ideas

[olivier]

FreeNAS needs a Distributed filesystem like GlusterFS or Ceph (too soon for pNFS?): The simple traditional master/backup design became too old and limited.

 

[Redcoat]

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

While I would say that's presently available courtesy of @gpsguy, use that .pdf version as the in-app and online version such that we can have a search function that can actually find things that are quite demonstrably present!

Fix the links from the forum search function such that one does not have to edit the url to see the item identification in the search.

 

[aarcane]

Definitely need Ceph official support. GUI management through and through.

 

[majerus]

While I would say that's presently available courtesy of @gpsguy, use that .pdf version as the in-app and online version such that we can have a search function that can actually find things that are quite demonstrably present!

Fix the links from the forum search function such that one does not have to edit the url to see the item identification in the search.

I guess official links would be nice in that regard.

 

[aarcane]

The other big thing keeping me from switching full-force to FreeNAS is Fibre Channel support. Linux support for it *sucks*, but it is still usable. There's nothing in the manual except a vague reference that Fibre Channel exists, but I know FreeNAS has support under the hood. It needs to be in the GUI and first class right along side iSCSI. A lot of businesses still use Fibre Channel in their backends, and having it supported as a first-class citizen in a major storage solution would help it be more used in the home as well.

 

[Ericloewe]

Heads-up: I'm separating out suggestions into multiple posts. Don't be alarmed.

 

[Ericloewe]

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

Communication definitely needs to improve. I have a general idea of what's going on, but I read the bug tracker, which officially makes me weird. Non-weird people should be allowed to know what's going on.

 

[Halio1984]

FreeNAS needs to extend the ZFS file system to being a multi-master globally distributed file system...

 

[tvsjr]

Improve iSCSI configuration. iSCSI is enough of a black art as is... having to jump around between half a dozen different screens seems sub-optimal.

 

[MasterTacoChief]

Ability to select which hardware/OS metrics to plot, including items currently not available. I remember a video for Corral where there were a bunch of attributes behind the scenes that could possibly be available for plotting/logging. For example right now I have to run a separate cron job for rrd to plot drive temps, and view the resulting plot outside the FreeNAS GUI.

 

[MasterTacoChief]

Ability to see SMART stats without needing to open a shell and run smartctl. Maybe another button on the View Disks tab?

 

[MasterTacoChief]

More options for notification system. For example, options to get immediate notifications when swap usage above some %, system above temperature threshold, CPU load above threshold, network connectivity on a link goes down or network usage above some threshold, disks go offline or online, etc. Similar to how a BMC works on fancy hardware, like Dell's iDRAC. Some of these could have saved me a lot of trouble if I knew when they were happening.

 

[MasterTacoChief]

Improved snapshot browser that allows you to view the contents of a snapshot, locate a file or folder inside the snapshot for replication or recovery.

 

[MasterTacoChief]

Improve replication transfer speed. When I created a new replication server it took around 4 days for it to finish because it wouldn't transfer faster than ~120Mb/s, on a dual 10Gb/s link.

 

[MasterTacoChief]

Ability to change lagg type without having to destroy and recreate the lagg from scratch. Ability to add already active adapters to a lagg.

 

[MasterTacoChief]

Allow different network adapters on the same subnet to have static IPs. Every time I try to configure more than one adapter/lagg with a static IP it produces an error "The network 192.168.1.0/24 is already in use by another NIC". To get around this I can assign one static in FreeNAS and the other must be set to DHCP which is assigned its "static" IP by the DHCP server.

 

[MasterTacoChief]

Integrate Let's Encrypt as an option in SSL cert generation, to be able to create certificates for services like S3 (Minio).

 

[DrKK]

A good percentage of these ideas people are posting are not FreeNAS ideas, they are FreeBSD ideas, or core ZFS ideas.

 

[danb35]

I would like to have confidence in going to mainline releases as they come out.

Really, this. Corral (aka The Release That Must Not Be Named) was a fiasco, of course--and though I think you did the right thing in killing it, it still boggles my mind that you ever let such a half-baked product see the light of day. Rebuilding trust after that takes time. The release of 11.1 with its memory hole doesn't help that process.

 

[SoftvalMedia]

Integrate Let's Encrypt as an option in SSL cert generation, to be able to create certificates for services like S3 (Minio).

That's a good one