CLI Life Preserver

[Oko]

As I play harder and harder with TrueOS and FreeNAS I start noticing more and more things. I was kind surprised to find out that CLI version of Life Preserver is not included in FreeNAS. Life Preserver seems like a very cool feature to have in spite the fact that the same things can be done through FreeNAS GUI.

 

[dlavigne]

Which bits of LP do you think would be interesting in FreeNAS? FreeNAS already has a mechanism to schedule snapshots and replicaiton. While LP's built in file-browser is cool for browsing local snapshots, FreeNAS clients use the features of their OS and sharing protocol to browse for file versions (e.g. shadow copies, time machine).

 

[Oko]

Which bits of LP do you think would be interesting in FreeNAS? FreeNAS already has a mechanism to schedule snapshots and replicaiton.

Do you mean GUI, vanilla FreeBSD zfs command + cron, zfsnap (that 800. script in /etc/defaults/periodic.conf looks like zfsnap to me or something else like zfstools?

While LP's built in file-browser is cool for browsing local snapshots, FreeNAS clients use the features of their OS and sharing protocol to browse for file versions (e.g. shadow copies, time machine).

I think that you and me have completely different deployment scenarios in mind and I am getting scared that I am using FreeNAS in the wrong way. You see I have 2 large FreeNAS servers which are main file servers for our lab and two TrueOS file servers for backups and other data. I am in the process of adding more as we are in the constant need of data storage (data mining/machine learning lab here hellow :) ) My folks are using mostly Red Hat clients but their home directories and everything else are just ZFS data sets on my servers exported via NFS. They have hard time saying ZFS let alone using it. The only person who will every do browsing and looking for accidentally deleted files is me :) Being able to that in CLI efficiently is very important.

The another thing which is becoming increasingly important is ability to manage my FreeNAS/TrueOS boxes with ansible. GUI is not going to cut there.

Now having close to 80 machines under my control and being away from FreeBSD for more than 5 years made adoption of pre-configured FreeNAS with GUI, no brainier half a year ago but as I have more time to play with it I see that I expect more and more to do thing TrueOS way.

P.S. I never got collectd on FreeNAS boxes to report to remote server. Other than that monitoring tools on FreeNAS are all in place for mass enterprise level deployment. IMHO you guys really should consider adding a GUI which allows to specify remote loggin server and restarting syslog as a feature in the same way it is done with SNMP daemon. The same goes for collectd. Those are very low hanging fruits which will please enterprise users.

 

[dlavigne]

Thanks, I was hoping you would state your use case as that's important in the feature request. Please create one at bugs.freenas.org (so that it goes into the dev queue) and post the issue number here.

 

[Oko]

Done please refer to features 6437, 6438, and 6439 at bugs.freenas.org.

 

[cyberjock]

6437 was already shot down as "behaves correctly".

 

[Oko]

I saw it! I also like the fact that syslog-ng will become default in 9.3. 6438 is accepted and hopefully by 9.3.1 or latter one will be able to send rrd data collected by collectd daemon to remote servers from a service tab.