Why I don't like this forum

[Davvo]

When it comes to building your first NAS system, it's normal for newcomers to face challenges, especially with hardware selection. The TrueNAS forum should be a valuable resource for these users, providing essential guidance and support.

In my opinion, it is.

One issue is that new users often struggle to find the "recommended hardware list" on the forum. This leads to repetitive questions from newbies seeking advice on their first NAS build.

Main issue is, imho, the lack of a linear guide to the resources that lets you gain the knowledge you need step by step; this kind of guide should be sent directly to the mails alongside the forum rules.

But the real problem lies in the response of experienced TrueNAS users, who often appear snappy and rude. While it's understandable that answering the same questions repeatedly can be tiresome, the dismissive attitude is unhelpful and unwelcoming.

I do not agree with the dismissive attitude: it's a forum of technicians, not a cat sharing platform; it's a professional attitude and the thing I like the most about all of this.

There is a significant difference between a NAS system intended for a productive environment and one for a home lab. It's important to recognize that new users have varying needs and preferences, and the forum should be a space that accommodates and respects these differences.

It is also important to recognize that TrueNas is an enterprise-level OS that has very specific hardware requirements; if you (user) have others, it's you who has to change your approach, not the recommendations you receive.
There is no disrespect whatsoever for SOHO and beginners, otherwise me and my meager two-disk system would have been trashed over and over again (which didn't happen a single time); it's not Reddit. From my experiece, the moderation team attention to this (and similar) kind of issues is also very high.

What the TrueNAS community needs is more patience and understanding from experienced users. Rather than providing curt, one-word responses, they should be calm and willing to guide newcomers through the learning process. Unfortunately, this negative tone has become a recurring theme in many forum posts, which not only deters new users and tarnishes the TrueNAS system's reputation. TrueNAS is an exciting platform with vast potential, and it deserves a community that reflects this.

There is a ton of patience and understanding here, and none can say otherwise; users who wanna help reply, those who don't want to just skip the thread. There are tons of great resources, which are made visibile in every possible means by a lot of community members (ie, signature links) but I do agree (as said at the start of this post) that there is a lack of a linear path for those starting from 0 (which is why when we spot this kind of users we point them to a lot of resources in a specific order).

I take pride in being in this community and try as much as I can to give back the help and patience I received; it has personally been a very rewarding experience, and I'm still learning new things every day.

I am sorry, but I do not accept this kind of biased remarks that paint a false image of our community.
I hope you will change your mind; you can look for useful resources in my signature.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

I think @jgreco sticks around because I stopped throwing peanut shells in his pool.

Seriously though @MarcusBay, the responses to your Hardware List inquiry were very straightforward and helpful. You're making a big deal out of a few "direct" responses to questions someone other than yourself asked. Almost all new user threads are highly supportive of a new user getting their system up, running, and stable with as little effort and expense as practical. (The few cringe threads are when a gamer decides to continually ignore the advice they asked for and build a system that will implode due to continued poor choices on their part.)

We do expect you'd read what's previously written, though the information was not directed specifically at your situation and tailored for your personal consumption. We're here to help, but we're not your mom: you have to make your own sandwich.

 

[awasb]

Making sandwiches ... that was already the case 25 years ago on Usenet. The problem is, people don't get the wider picture (i.e.: free software != free beer).

They use free software. They install it voluntarily. They see there is a consistent basic BSD system, centrally compiled and maintained for free. They see there is a plethora of extensive system documentation freely available (centrally maintained as well) they freely ignore. So, why shouldn't others then read everything to them or dictate it into their pen/keyboard for free in a free forum as well? Preferably in a way they freely define as welcome. That is simple free associational logic!

 

[jgreco]

I think @jgreco sticks around because I stopped throwing peanut shells in his pool.

Oh, I was wondering who that was. Fortunately, I meticulously plucked them all out and saved them; you can expect that they will be returned to you in some catastrophic manner at a most inconvenient moment. Thanks for the admission.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Oh, I was wondering who that was. Fortunately, I meticulously plucked them all out and saved them; you can expect that they will be returned to you in some catastrophic manner at a most inconvenient moment. Thanks for the admission.

@MarcusBay thinks he has it bad, ^^^^THIS cannot be good.

 

[Ericloewe]

"Linux! I know that!"

Is that a casual insult thrown at SGI's fsn? I'll allow it.

 

[jgreco]

Is that a casual insult thrown at SGI's fsn? I'll allow it.

The SGI stuff was an inspiration to some of us. Back in the early '90's, I worked for a medical electronics manufacturer that developed monitoring equipment for bedside and operating room applications. Marquette was known for its Tramscope equipment that was known for its horizontally scrolling waveform display which most people preferred to the conventional non-scrolling displays that are common even today. The Tramscope managed its trick with a crapton of embedded dedicated task CPU's, but in designing the next generation Solar monitors, we had a SPARCstation-like system with a custom SBus video card running a TMS34020 onto which we had ported X11, and it communicated with the Solar host using a UNIX I/O syscall emulator shim I had written. The 34020 was (barely?) able to do the job to scroll waveforms horizontally without super-pricey high end graphics hardware, which didn't even really exist at the time when high end graphics for a SPARCstation 1 was really only the cgsix framebuffer (w/ mild acceleration) card.

With that in mind, at one point, we did have SGI stop by and demonstrate the Indigo 2, which may have been the first time I saw fsn, and those of us working on the 34020 system were awed by the sheer quantity of pixels the thing was able to sling with ease. It was really too late to jump ship from SPARC, but it was amazing to see how fast the evolution of graphics technology was happening, and how quickly cutting edge technology became mundane.

Anyways, I can throw shade at SGI anytime I like, I still own two SGI Indy's and I remain miffed that they went out of business.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

@jgreco said: "Back in my day we harvested fields with a sithe and sharpened the blade by hand--many a careless harvester lost a finger," as he spit chew in a stream from the crack between his middle teeth.

 

[jgreco]

Back in my day

Back in my day, we scrolled our pixels by hand, uphill, both ways....

 

[Arwen]

Uh, if we are talking first real experience, they had these cards with holes in them, called inventively enough, "punched cards". Actual data was stored on them. I know, sounds unbelievable, but its true. My first real computer program used such after another ancient event called the moon landing. (I know I don't look that old, but Elves live longer than other races.)

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I know I don't look that old, but Elves live longer than other races.

Make sure not to grieve too much over TrueNAS politics, lest you are bound to fade and go into the West.

 

[awasb]

When things start to fade, I press any key and the screensaver goes off. I wonder if that would have helped those "fairest of all earthly creatures", too.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Uh, if we are talking first real experience, they had these cards with holes in them, called inventively enough, "punched cards". Actual data was stored on them. I know, sounds unbelievable, but its true.

%#[< you're old! When I started we had single-sided floppies already (I think they held 170kB). We didn't have to wash our clothes on stones by the river either.

 

[Jamberry]

I still feel like a newcomer when it comes to TrueNAS, so maybe I can chime in on how a newbie feels when @jgreco gives you an answer: Confused, then you ask again, then he points you into the right direction, then you learn and then you are thankful for the knowledge you learned

I can get how someone could misunderstand these short answers as rude.

I can not get how much patience he has to explain thing again and again without getting disrespectful or dismissive. That is pretty impressive.

Anyway I think the main reason for most of the confusion, misunderstandings and frustrations is a lack of knowledge. As an example, you have used QNAP or Synology and had a NVME as cache. Now you ask what SLOG to use to have a write cache in TrueNAS... I mean, that just screams horror!

So what I think would help immensely helpful for both sides is a flow chart or a "getting started" page.
Do I want core or scale? Describe typical workloads and what mechanisms there are to accelerate them. Maybe describe a default "Plex NAS" build and setup. Maybe also compare said setup with other solutions like OMV or Unraid and describe the clear disadvantages ZFS has for such use case! HDD no spindown alone could be a no go for a lot of people and make them decide to ditch TrueNAS. That would help a lot against frustration on the user side and you guys could save a lot of time in the forum. Ohh and it should be somewhere where newcomers can find it. With that current structure of the forum, I don't even know if I would put it under Core/General Core/Hardware Scale/Hardware or Scale/Installation. That alone is a huge problem.

This is also a problem for the forum in general. I think a lot of the posts are not about Core or Scale but about ZFS.
A better structure in my opinion would be to have a "ZFS" as a main category right beween "News and Announcements" and "TrueNAS". That category could have the forums "Getting started with ZFS" and "ZFS Performance".

 

[jgreco]

Confused, then you ask again, then he points you into the right direction, then you learn and then you are thankful for the knowledge you learned

I apparently have fans. Awesome.

It's very difficult to guess at the skill level of someone on the other side of the glass. It's even harder because I sometimes look at dozens of messages per day, and I don't usually retain my estimations between responses. I don't know how that works for other people, but it is a good bit of work to be constantly trying to judge the level of response and detail necessary. It's one of the reasons I like to redirect people to stickies or Resources that contain more detailed answers, but that only works in certain cases.

I can not get how much patience he has to explain thing again and again without getting disrespectful or dismissive.

Lessons learned from the drudgery of having been a sysadmin for many years. Same stuff, different day.

So what I think would help immensely helpful for both sides is a flow chart or a "getting started" page.

There sort-of is. We used to have a "New to FreeNAS" subforum with some good articles in it like

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC and other newbie mistakes! I've put together a Powerpoint presentation(and PDF) that gives some useful info for newbies to FreeNAS. I decided to create this slideshow because in the last 5 months I've been on this forum I've seen a lot of people...

www.truenas.com

But it's now a bit dated.

 

[Jamberry]

That slideshow was how I started to learn about ZFS and I think this is a awesome slideshow. However there are some drawbacks in my opinion.

First of all, you would never ever find that as a newcomer. In the dead FreeNAS category? No way!

Another problem is that I think there is stuff that you need to learn before the stuff in this slide. For me the chronology would be

1. Disadvantages of ZFS
2. Advantages of ZFS
3. Scale or Core
4. Hardware requirements Scale
4. Hardware requirements Core
5. ZFS Basics (vdev, zpool)

154. Difference between a sync and a async write
155. SLOG
156. L2ARC
157. Special vdev

And even for advanced users, I think we would profit by decoupling ZFS from Core and Scale into its own category. I am no forum expert by any means and I don't know how to say it nice in English, but the current structure is very bad in my opinion.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

That slideshow was how I started to learn about ZFS and I think this is a awesome slideshow. However there are some drawbacks in my opinion.

First of all, you would never ever find that as a newcomer. In the dead FreeNAS category? No way!

Another problem is that I think there is stuff that you need to learn before the stuff in this slide. For me the chronology would be

1. Disadvantages of ZFS
2. Advantages of ZFS
3. Scale or Core
4. Hardware requirements Scale
4. Hardware requirements Core
5. ZFS Basics (vdev, zpool)

154. Difference between a sync and a async write
155. SLOG
156. L2ARC
157. Special vdev

And even for advanced users, I think we would profit by decoupling ZFS from Core and Scale into its own category. I am no forum expert by any means and I don't know how to say it nice in English, but the current structure is very bad in my opinion.

I agree, and to this point I've spent the day updating my signature with a help section (as I'm often diving into the noob posts to help out). Hope this helps.

(plus although it's Friday we're short-staffed and I can't start drinking early so have to do something to fill my time in order to look productive)

 

[jgreco]

First of all, you would never ever find that as a newcomer. In the dead FreeNAS category? No way!

Right, I'm just saying things have been overcome by newer developments (pun?) not that I expect people to find the old stuff. Part of this is that it is hard to write good resources in the first place, and then keeping them up to date is even rougher -- the moderation queue currently includes my 10 Gig Networking Primer which is way overdue for an overhaul including SCALE. Anyone interested in posting useful information is welcome to volunteer.

I don't know how to say it nice in English, but the current structure is very bad in my opinion.

I doubt anyone would ding you for using a few choice unnice words. The moderation team and many of the longtime users are equally frustrated with it, even if we generally understand the shape of the problem and how it came to be.

 

[awasb]

[…] Lessons learned from the drudgery of having been a sysadmin for many years. Same stuff, different day. […]

Classic Sesame Street - If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake

Better framerate

youtu.be

 

[joeschmuck]

This thread has been an interesting read. Time to go read other interesting threads.