Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral

[boatymcboatface]

Not to worry, the new one will have a dark theme.


In a nutshell, don't underprovision.

Thanks. I will dedicate a solid amount of fixed resources to FreeNAS.

And a special thanks to you @Ericloewe for managing to contain the aggression your tag suggests in these times ;)
Appreciate all the time you spent writing guides and answering questions.

Cheers!

 

[Ericloewe]

And a special thanks to you @Ericloewe for managing to contain the aggression your tag suggests in these times ;)

Funny story behind it. Back in the day, I meant to ask cyberjock what had driven him to add the rather aggressive "ANY QUESTIONS POSTED HERE WILL BE DELETED." status on his user page, so I asked him what it took to warrant that not-very-passive-but-aggressive line. He misunderstood my point and changed my title to not-very-passive-but-aggressive. :D

 

[boatymcboatface]

Funny story behind it. Back in the day, I meant to ask cyberjock what had driven him to add the rather aggressive "ANY QUESTIONS POSTED HERE WILL BE DELETED." status on his user page, so I asked him what it took to warrant that not-very-passive-but-aggressive line. He misunderstood my point and changed my title to not-very-passive-but-aggressive. :D

Hahah, that is class! It is a bit of a tradition though - every succesful platform has at least one grumpy developer / moderator, otherwise it can't be taken seriously ;)

 

[John Hixson]

For those that are interested in details on the what and why:

https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...ially-halted-for-now.14271/page-3#post-136890

 

[Ericloewe]

Good news, everyone! FreeNAS Corral pools are almost 100% compatible with FreeNAS 9.10.2.

FreeBSD 11, as used in Corral, only introduces two feature flags: the sha512 and skein hashes for checksumming and dedup. These are available for use, but have to actually be selected over the default, which few people will have done. Those who didn't do anything can just import their Corral pools in 9.10.2.

 

[jpringle03]

We will focus on 9.10.X now.
I don't believe iXsystems will be putting more effort in Corral for now, as explained.
However, patches will still be accepted and new versions can be released as they come.

Twitter support doesn't seem to think any new patches will be coming: https://twitter.com/FreeNASTeam/status/852657227206766592

 

[William Grzybowski]

Twitter support doesn't seem to think any new patches will be coming: https://twitter.com/FreeNASTeam/status/852657227206766592

Well, we dont plan to patch ourselves. But if the community send patches our way, we won't deny them!

 

[jpringle03]

Well, we dont plan to patch ourselves. But if the community send patches our way, we won't deny them!

I'm unfamiliar with how your development goes but do you guys usually let the community submit pull requests to your product?

It is very unfortunate that all development is being completely stopped. Like I stated earlier, I really hope you guys take the time to create a way to migrate users from 10.0.X to 9.10.3+. You've basically put users into a boat and then took the engine with no way to get back to shore.

 

[John Hixson]

I'm unfamiliar with how your development goes but do you guys usually let the community submit pull requests to your product?

It is very unfortunate that all development is being completely stopped. Like I stated earlier, I really hope you guys take the time to create a way to migrate users from 10.0.X to 9.10.3+. You've basically put users into a boat and then took the engine with no way to get back to shore.

This is an open source project, you are free to use the source code as you wish and if you want to submit a pull request, you can do that as well ;-)

 

[Diosyntaxa]

tl;dr: Sad to see this, understand the why of it, just not happy about it. Hoping things move forward again and certain things not disappearing

From what I can see of the new GUI (the one in the original post) it looks to me like things are taking a few steps back. I for one actually like, heck loved, the GUI in Corral. I also had the CLI grow on me, fast. This is a sad day for me, and I'm happy I never actually got around to adding shares, dockers and VMs. I'm NOT looking forward to setting everything up again, but it could have been worse I guess. I just hope the new GUI won't be the mess that the old one was, but more like the Corral one, as I actually found it to be intuitive, unlike the old one where I, and a friend of mine I was trying to help, found ourselves wondering "Where the heck did we set that again? Hmm, here? No, there. Ok, but this or that was where?" (I realize some people think differently, but to me and my friend it was a mess.)

Now, I can see where you guys are coming from. Things fell apart and that's a shame, but I hope someone will at least fix the "Error: name 'output_msg' is not defined"-thing... I know, SSH works, but using that when I'm local and have access to both the web-GUI and the physical server makes no sense to me... I will if I have to, but I'd rather have that fixed and stay on Corral until I feel the new/old version is as easy to set up as Corral was, and has full support for everything I'm now used to in Corral... Until that time I guess I'll refrain from setting up anything I'll have to repeat once I do move back to whatever version it is at the time...

I don't think I've seen anything about this in this thread, but I hope you'll continue to use ZFS for the boot pool at least...

Some wonder why some people migrated right away and didn't wait until it was 'stable' and 'tested'. Well, beside the interface making super sense to me, and some people having to use and try new things for things to actually move forward instead of staying old and moldy *chuckles*, my old NAS being toast was a major factor. So basically I had the choice of setting up an old version, and then have to migrate and redo everything again once it was the go-to version (barring something like this happening of course), or simply go with the latest release-version from the get-go.

 

[amiskell]

For those that are interested in details on the what and why:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/freenas-corral-canned-–-development-essentially-halted-for-now.14271/page-3#post-136890

Thanks for the link to the explanation. Although it does leave questions about iX's management in their engineering division and how it's run.

It really does seem like scrapping Corral was a foregone conclusion and iX was just waiting for jkh to leave in order to move forward with killing it off (along with a number of devs that were working on the project being let go right after jkh left).

It really does start to feel that I wasted a bunch of time helping test, submitting bug reports, building and submitting docker containers to the repos and will really cause me to rethink spending time contributing to the project in the future, although I doubt that anyone really cares :)

So now we're left with an abandoned release with the only recourse being going back to a product that lacks a number of major features of the abandoned product (yes, I understand they are "coming soon").

 

[William Grzybowski]

I'm unfamiliar with how your development goes but do you guys usually let the community submit pull requests to your product?

It is very unfortunate that all development is being completely stopped. Like I stated earlier, I really hope you guys take the time to create a way to migrate users from 10.0.X to 9.10.3+. You've basically put users into a boat and then took the engine with no way to get back to shore.

That will be considered if there are enough people screaming for this. We certainly do not plan on leaving our users hanging.
This whole situation has not been easy for us either.

 

[William Grzybowski]

Thanks for the link to the explanation. Although it does leave questions about iX's management in their engineering division and how it's run.

It really does seem like scrapping Corral was a foregone conclusion and iX was just waiting for jkh to leave in order to move forward with killing it off (along with a number of devs that were working on the project being let go right after jkh left).

It really does start to feel that I wasted a bunch of time helping test, submitting bug reports, building and submitting docker containers to the repos and will really cause me to rethink spending time contributing to the project in the future, although I doubt that anyone really cares :)

So now we're left with an abandoned release with the only recourse being going back to a product that lacks a number of major features of the abandoned product (yes, I understand they are "coming soon").

Its completely understandable, I don't blame you.

Unfortunately people who upgraded from 9.10 to Corral also missed some key features (like the jails, working old plugins, more complete iSCSI, etc), but they chose to upgrade anyway. That alone was not OK (not providing a complete upgrade path). You will understand why it happened if you read https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...ially-halted-for-now.14271/page-3#post-136890 .
Now we are facing the same problem once again, Corral users who cannot go to 9.10.X because of another set of missing features.
All we can do now is apologize for the problem caused and time wasted. We will do our best to make up for our mistakes.

 

[lukyjay]

Remove Corral from the downloads page please, it would be confusing for newcomers and they will assume it's the next update / beta when it's actually dead in the water
http://www.freenas.org/download-freenas-release/

 

[cheetahshrk]

Its completely understandable, I don't blame you.

Unfortunately people who upgraded from 9.10 to Corral also missed some key features (like the jails, working old plugins, more complete iSCSI, etc), but they chose to upgrade anyway. That alone was not OK (not providing a complete upgrade path). You will understand why it happened if you read https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...ially-halted-for-now.14271/page-3#post-136890 .
Now we are facing the same problem once again, Corral users who cannot go to 9.10.X because of another set of missing features.
All we can do now is apologize for the problem caused and time wasted. We will do our best to make up for our mistakes.

Just personally, I consider jails to be a worthless feature. The community is so so small compared to docker its unjustifiable. Granted it has its strengths in its implementation but for ease of use? nah. I personally updated to 10 just because of docker. Me running jails with custom scripts and maintaining them was a pita on 9.10 and sure I could have created a package...for bsd...somehow from other OSes unlike docker which is universal

 

[Jailer]

Remove Corral from the downloads page please, it would be confusing for newcommers and they will assume it's the next update / beta when it's actually dead in the water
http://www.freenas.org/download-freenas-release/

I have to agree with this post. It's a beta at best at this point and shouldn't even be an option on the release download page.

 

[Ericloewe]

Iocage is meant to alleviate many of the concerns with jails.

somehow from other OSes unlike docker which is universal

Docker isn't universal, it's as Linuxy as it gets. Everyone else has to do some form of compatibility, which generally implies a VM running the Linux kernel. If you're big enough (i.e. Microsoft big), you can write a translation layer that takes Linux syscalls and converts them to NT kernel operations.

 

[Jailer]

Just personally, I consider jails to be a worthless feature.

Not everyone shares your opinion.

The community is so so small compared to docker its unjustifiable.

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

Granted it has its strengths in its implementation but for ease of use? nah.

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

somehow from other OSes unlike docker which is universal

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

 

[Barlog951]

UFF .... my first impression was WTF ...
really WTF just happened?
It's late April joke or WHAT?

But needs balls to have this decision ... And I now understand why ...

I upgrade to Corral because of Docker; I really hate old JAIL and a few plugins for them.
I spend more that 70 hours setup and migrate all my staff ...

So now when is Corral most likely dead ...

really PLESE All developers from FREENAS team,
make the upgrade(downgrade) to new majority version easy as possible, for us who spend days setting up our Corral ...

One click to "update" and after restart, only new GUI will be great :)

 

[Jeremy]

Remove Corral from the downloads page please, it would be confusing for newcommers and they will assume it's the next update / beta when it's actually dead in the water
http://www.freenas.org/download-freenas-release/

This will be done sometime tomorrow. Good suggestion.