Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral

[obsodien]

Let me start off that i am a (extreme) novice when it came to how much i utilized all the 9.10.x could do for me. for the most part, my use was limited to CouchPotato/SickBeard/SabNZB/Emby and occasionally Minecraft for my daughter. Ok, i played some Minecraft as well, there i admitted to it....

I realize that any thing any one of us have to say about Corral will bring in back. I also freely jump on the Corral bandwagon, knowing full well of some of its shortcomings when it was released and also knowing (blindly) that they would be addressed it future updates. Didn't expect to relive that Dallas, it was a dream season or even the final episode of Grimm (watch if you want an explanation). But at the time it fit my initial needs and with VM/Docker support built in and expanded Docker Apps, as i call them, was a big leap from 9.10.x... I mean there was a bit of a learning curve when it came to correctly setting up my Dockers, but it was much easier what i was used to on my Synology. Which does not have the memory of horse power to do all i want. And to be quite honest, looked better and easier to set up on Corral. it also helped that there were so many people out there that went wild with youtube videos on setting up Corral and Dockers. I would like to thank all of you in helping a novice like me to go through some of the growing pains. Hats of to all of you.

I am sure that there have been alot of us that have looked at home NAS solutions out there. From preinstalled systems like Synology/Qnap to OS's on your hardware like FreeNAS/FreeBSD/Unraid/U-Nas and probably a few others that don't come to mind at the moment. FreeNAS was my choice, mostly at the time due to the cost. And it was actually pretty good for what i wanted it to do.

Since the decision to drop Corral, i have looked at what unraid looks like from an UI perspective and i was slightly impressed and could see where the team was going, i could be wrong and probably am. But from my overall experience so far with Corral, is that it made it easier for the common user to install/configure/maintain and more importantly expand on their use of a NAS system. i do hope that they take the best from what Corral had to offer and implement into the upcoming 9.10.3 and beyond. Corral had a ton of potential and maybe too much for it to survive the lost of lead advocate.

i will remain on Corral for the time being since it is up and running with very little problems i am currently experiencing (known to be exact). i will remain with FreeNAS as my choice for my home NAS. i will more than likely jump back on the 9.10 train more than likely at 9.10.4... I do understand the decision and support iXsystems in having to make the call.

Thank you for reading the ramblings of this novice user and feel free to criticize me on my lack of knowledge. As i have often said about myself, "I know enough to be dangerous"....

 

[i3luefire]

this thread should be sticky/linked to in the corral sub-forum.

 

[victorhooi]

Not everyone shares your opinion.

Just because is smaller you consider is useless? Again this is just your opinion.

I have found jails simple to implement and maintain. Not sure what you are doing that makes this so complicated.

Yeah, and Docker was so universal there were no issues with it at all in Corral.......

Can you please point to these jails that you implemented? Are they hosted on Github somewhere?

As jfk said, I believe - in all the years that jails were out in FreeNAS...barely anybody actually shared any jails recipes in the community. The only ones were available were those that came with the old FreeNAS 9, and they were barely updated (I would know, as I constantly raised tickets to try to get Transmission updated - I even tried myself, but gave up in desperation). It was sad because the feature seemed awesome, but the community support just didn't seem to be there.

Compare that to Docker, which has a *massive* library of Dockerfiles:

https://hub.docker.com/u/library/

There are literally thousands of Dockerfiles for you to pick from - if you can name a software, somebody has probably made a Dockerfile available for you.

Sorry, but that horse has already left - and I'm definitely looking forward to Docker returning in whatever the next build of FreeNAS is.

 

[Jailer]

I think you are confusing jails with plugins. Plugins are a pre packaged one button installs for software on FreeNAS. Plugins install in jails. I have not created any plugins, all my jails are manual installs of software that I'm running. I ran the Plex plugin for a while without issue but when I updated to 9.10 I switched that to a manual install too.

 

[Cordel]

Well, the new GUI rocked other than the browser compatibility issues, it certainly made me drool...

Losing the jails sucked, the addition of Byhive rocked, though I think what you guys need here is to introduce the operation of each into the distro together for at least short while.

If you are going to think about phasing a feature out, there needs to be overlap for an upgrade path. Other wise it's not an upgrade but a forklift which sucks rocks. I also think Corral should have spent more time in Release Candidate state regardless how bad any of us want to see a release, it's there when it gets there. There are plenty of us that will run an RC version to help find those last annoying issues and I think it would still see allot of hardware variety.

Nothing else if you are trying to reduce gui clutter, in system options you could add options on whether to start and use services for Jails, Byhive, Docker, etc. In that way the services are not started unless being used, and you can hide those menu targets in the GUI. That would also allow users to transition from for example jails over to Byhive, and you would get user matrix feedback to see how users use these services to decide when/if it's appropriate to drop support of the service.

Just my two cents...
With the disbanding of Montage though, your team certainly made the right move unless you want to take on the development of that as well.

 

[danb35]

barely anybody actually shared any jails recipes in the community

I'm not sure what a "jails recipe" is, but I'd interpret it to be a description of how to implement $SOMETHING in a jail. And since a jail is simply a FreeBSD installation, there are a lot of those, here and elsewhere. So what was your complaint again?

 

[NetMind]

I am a beginner in this system with only 1 year of use but despite this after testing versions 9.x and 10 / Corral I can only say for the iXsystems team: Thanks ... thanks for the hard work of making this good opensource.

I have been reading everything that has been said since the beginning about the end of the Corral, and I respect the ideas described here before, but I find myself experiencing gaelanlloyd (# 249) and recalling:

NAS = stable.

Small but steady steps ...

Thank you

 

[Ericloewe]

this thread should be sticky/linked to in the corral sub-forum.

I'd tried, but had no permissions. Then your post reminded me that I could create it elsewhere and then move it. Gotta love XenForo permissions.

 

[drb]

Please, please do not jeopardize the stability of 9.10.2.

I am coming from the other side in this, I am still running 9.3.1.

Now with the way trains work, I am forced into a decision, do I upgrade to 9.10.2 in the next couple of weeks, or do I stay with 9.3.1 long term?

I decided not to upgrade from 9.3 to 9.10 as I was watching Corral keenly. My plan was to move directly from 9.3 to Corral after a good amount of time like when the forum trouble reports had settled down.

With IX System's decision to relegate the status of Corral to "technology preview" and begin porting its features to the 9.10 base, I am very concerned that this might jeopardize the stability of the 9.10 train. With many Corral users wanting those Corral features in 9.10.3, will IX Systems be hurrying those features into a stable train, when they may not be truly stable?

So if I stay on 9.3.1, I might be there for a long time if 9.10.3 and newer lack stability. The other concern is that 9.3.1 appears to be abandoned, even some files appear to be lost. See this bug report: https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/23093.

If I move to 9.10.2 now, then at least I can ignore updates until 9.10.whatever is really stable.

If I stay too long on 9.3.1, then the option to move to 9.10.2 is gone as 9.10.3 or newer is my only choice.

The best solution is for IX Systems to create a new train for what they propose right now for 9.10.3. In my mind this should be 11.0.0. Then those of us who are happy with 9.3 or 9.10.2 can stay with what has been proven stable, and migrate to 11.whatever when we feel it is appropriate.

Those on Coral can move to 11.whatever when they feel it is appropriate for them based on features in 11.whatever.

Again, please do not jeopardize the stability of 9.10.2.

 

[Jailer]

FreeBSD 9.3 (which FreeNAS 9.3.1 is based on) is end of life. It's no longer supported and will receive no more patches. If your NAS is strictly a file server on your local network and is serving your needs without any issues then your fine. But if you have anything exposed to the outside world you will want to update.

I have a feeling that after the Corral debacle that future updates and feature integrations will be fleshed out a bit more carefully.

 

[brando56894]

To everyone that has installed Corral when it was released a month ago, and are now complaining that they spent so much time setting it up and that there is no upgrade path to the new FreeNAS, get a grip on reality... I have been using it for everything in my apartment for the past 4 months and was up and running within an hour or two on a completely different OS. I had a web server VM running, a VM for usenet apps (sickrage, couchpotato, nzbget, htpc-manager), a VM for mediaservers (plex shared with 8 people and Emby for my own use), and a few Docker containers. After reading this thread for about an hour, I tore everything down and reinstalled Linux. I had Plex up and running within an hour.

If they really owned up to the whole debacle, they would pull FreeNAS Corral from stable and put it into another releases candidate or beta and continue working from there. Instead they're abandoning that platform and early adopters and so much of the work that was previously done. The old team that worked on Corral were forward thinking and tried to do things different, but were perhaps pushed by management to push a product that was not ready. The team taking over is much more aligned with the enterprise and don't care for the new features. It's great for enterprise IT users and I'm sure that's where the money's at but not so good for the home user or hobbyist. This does not allow FreeNAS to compete with other feature rich NAS softwares on the market.

Fixing all the bugs in Corral is akin to fixing all the bugs in Windows (pick any version, there all buggy messes hahaha), it's simply not going to happen. Why continue hacking on something that clearly had no future? It would just result in bot releases slowing down since the entire company would be fragmented and focusing on two completely different versions of the same software. Montage was dead so the dev team was left to keep it going on their own, which just resulted in silly little things constantly being broken. 9PFS, which was the transport protocol for VMs and Docker containers, was difficult to implement since it's not commonly used and they had to hack support for it into FreeBSD so it was mostly up to Chris Torek (one of the devs, not sure if he's still around) to find and fix all the bugs, which there were many. There were far too many issues with it in general that it would have taken forever to get it to the stability of what 9.10 is. You have to remember that at it's core, iX Systems is a business and they're out to make money and provide rock solid products to the enterprise sector. Time is money and buggy software that will literally take a year or more to fix just wasn't practical.

why would you use Dockers at the enterprise level?

Docker is used by thousands of companies, specifically in DevOps teams, since it allows for quick deployment of services, there's a reason why it has a gigantic following ;)

 

[SavageAUS]

What are you using now brando? Details please.

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

 

[nasrettin]

I am a newbie Freenas user. I have it installed for about 6 months now and my goal was really to learn more about networking. One thing that I really enjoyed about FreeNAS was the activities in this forum. It seemed to me that the community was really excited about Corral. People were contributing ideas, detailed walk-throughs, many many videos. It appeared to me that this was the "next best thing" in decentralization of the net. I followed the forum eagerly and configured Corral enthusiastically. It was exciting not only because I was learning more about networking, but also I felt like I was in the same boat with many people here who cared about sharing knowledge. Now that there is a let down, I am seriously considering moving away. I understand that devs prioritize TrueNAS as they have to eat as well, but the canning of Corral really suggests to me that this is yet again corporate central not community central effort. In other words, it seems to me that the current FreeNAS devs want to use free community input to improve their software so that they can sell their better product rather than improving the community by providing free software that is high-quality, polished and easy to use/learn. To put it another way, I really believed that FreeNAS was the priority as it adds to the society and TrueNAS was secondary and was there since the devs have to have some income as well but now I realize that TrueNAS is the priority and FreeNAS is a way to get free input from the community.

Is there anyone here that agrees with me or am I really missing the point here? Note that, this is simply my current thought process with very little that I can put together with my limited knowledge (as I said I am a newbie). So, I would really be happy to be corrected if I got it all wrong.

Are there any suggestions about where to look for a community-driven operating system development that I could use in my home server and eventually help contribute to its development as a way of contributing to society?

Thanks and apologies in advance if I am misinterpreting the situation.

 

[Ericloewe]

Are there any suggestions about where to look for a community-driven operating system development that I could use in my home server and eventually help contribute to its development as a way of contributing to society?

There's always GNU/Hurd, and we all know what a joke that is.

Is there anyone here that agrees with me or am I really missing the point here?

What's best for FreeNAS is what's best for TrueNAS. There's very little point to storing data on an unreliable system. VMs, Docker and a shiny interface are useless is the storage isn't there.

 

[Michael Schultz]

To everyone that has installed Corral when it was released a month ago, and are now complaining that they spent so much time setting it up and that there is no upgrade path to the new FreeNAS, get a grip on reality... I have been using it for everything in my apartment for the past 4 months and was up and running within an hour or two on a completely different OS. I had a web server VM running, a VM for usenet apps (sickrage, couchpotato, nzbget, htpc-manager), a VM for mediaservers (plex shared with 8 people and Emby for my own use), and a few Docker containers. After reading this thread for about an hour, I tore everything down and reinstalled Linux. I had Plex up and running within an hour.

I mean... yeah if you ONLY use the pirate suite... just because your needs are trivial doesn't mean my needs are equally as trivial. I have ~20 dockers setup. haproxy, mysql, nginx, 3x nodejs, a centos box for hubot, a redis db for said hubot, as asterisk box, a mumble box, gitlabs. There's more but im lazy. Most people do more than just pirate stuff.

 

[Abdullah AL Zayadi]

Okay... I have upgraded both of my production servers to FreeNAS corral.. one of them I had the flash drive die on me, so I fully reinstalled with config backup..
Now I should revert back to 9.10? I have 4 live docker images and 2 VM Windows servers in production, and all in live environment and I worked really hard to get them working and stable.
is there a migration process from corral to 9.10? what if I don't have that option on boot drive??
I'm little upset sorry... smh

 

[Abdullah AL Zayadi]

To the people saying get a " get a grip on reality" I recommended FreeNAS and I'm responsible for keeping it live for all our companies... If this project is not successful. My job is might be endanger. that's my reality.
a Migration process will make things much easier for all. please try to make that happen. thanks

 

[Ericloewe]

I mean... yeah if you ONLY use the pirate suite... just because your needs are trivial doesn't mean my needs are equally as trivial. I have ~20 dockers setup. haproxy, mysql, nginx, 3x nodejs, a centos box for hubot, a redis db for said hubot, as asterisk box, a mumble box, gitlabs. There's more but im lazy. Most people do more than just pirate stuff.

Again, what's the point of docker if you can't easily move stuff?

 

[educatedwarrior]

I wanted to vent a little about Corral since I was one of the early adopters and contributors to docker container scripts.

The only reason I was one of the earlier adopters of FreeNAS Corral was because of the hyperconverged architecture and Docker integration. The cherry on top was the UI...and as bugs were fixed the UI got better and better.

I saw a comment that there were so many bugs in Corral and it would have taken it a year to get up to the stability of 9.x. Well, what do you expect when you are designing a system from scratch. The expectation that a brand new system would go to production without some bugs is unrealistic ... the main reason agile methodology was invented to replace waterfall development... unrealistic expectations.

If performance was the major issue with Corral, performance testing should have been done before the official release.

To me, there has to be more to the story. Looks to me like innovation wasn't given a chance. Jordan Hubbard was a very talented man and he is no longer with iXSystems.. and the development team (middleware and ui) were talented as well. Too bad to see all that great work be a so-called "failure".

 

[Jailer]

Maybe you missed the part where the team behind the new UI disbanded. So that means either taking that project on yourself and continuing development or change to something with more active support and starting over from scratch. And that's just one of the stated issues.