Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral

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TinkerGuy

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I just rolled back my boot environment from 10.0.4 to 9.10.2. Everything went smoothly. Other than adding a dataset in 10.0.4 I was pretty much at parity with my use case from 9.10.2 when I jumped back to the old ship.
 

SavageAUS

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I have rolled back to 9 nightlies and I couldn't get plugins to work with nightlies so I rolled back to stable and plugins work. Can I now go back to nightlies with working plugins or are they borked on the latest nightly?

This is a test machine.

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk
 
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Jailer

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I have rolled back to 9 nightlies and I couldn't get plugins to work with nightlies so I rolled back to stable and plugins work. Can I now go back to nightlies with working plugins or are they borked on the latest nightly?

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk
Do you care about your data?
 

scurrier

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When you roll back to 9 from 10, be sure to check that your replication is still working. Mine was not working.
 

WrlsFanatic

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While it's clear the decision has been made and we can try to align 9.10.3 to be more similar to what 10 was supposed to be. It might help a lot of us end users understand what the rationale was to backpedal and go back to FreeNAS 9.

What specifically was it that was so bad that could not be fixed or rectified that necessitated the rollback to FreeNAS 9? I've thought about it and I can only conclude that something or multiple things about corral could not be easily rectified so they were left on the chopping board and thus are going to be left out of 9.10.3. IF there was a fix for it to be put into 9.10.3 then why not just fix the issue with FreeNAS Corral? It sounds like the team decided some features were too hard to fix or it'd take too long so they weren't going to fix it and just abandon it. By making the decision to abandon 10, that just means something's going to be left out and I'd be curious to know what that was.
Just my two cents: I never used v9.x, and I found Corral to be beautiful and incredibly easy. I spent about 3 hours getting all of my shares setup and a Plex docker container running. I will eventually have to move to the v9.x chain, and I don't have visibility into how bad it could have worked. I sincerely hope you give them some feedback to improve the experience so that when I do have to switch, it's as seamless as possible.
 

SavageAUS

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Ericloewe

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I have rolled back to 9 nightlies and I couldn't get plugins to work with nightlies so I rolled back to stable and plugins work. Can I now go back to nightlies with working plugins or are they borked on the latest nightly?

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk
It might be because of FreeBSD 10 vs 11, which the nightlies are on.
 

lukyjay

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migrate the Docker VM to 9.10.3, despite the lack of Docker integration with the host?
This

Integration can come later. I prefer stability over convenience, and Corral doesn't offer stability so I want to jump ship ASAP.
 
J

JasperAmos64

Guest
I just rolled back my boot environment from 10.0.4 to 9.10.2. Everything went smoothly. Other than adding a dataset in 10.0.4 I was pretty much at parity with my use case from 9.10.2 when I jumped back to the old ship.

Same here. Downgrade went A-OK. I wrote about it briefly in this thread.

I read this entire thread earlier and decided to create an account in the forum to give some feedback on "the crisis." Boy, there's a lot to digest today.

News of the decision to abandon Corral (I can't stop calling it Coral) came as a huge shock to me this afternoon. Like many adventurous people here in the thread I upgraded my entire system to it. But, stupidly, I didn't even do a backup of my config. I went all-in. I trusted the direction of the platform, I trusted iXsystems, and, honestly, I was simply excited about the new interface. And now, it's all gone. Just as I was starting to get used to it, and after making a seemingly one-way upgrade, Corral was taken away, and that made me upset.

But I let my emotions die down, and I wanted to share a few thoughts with everyone.

(1) I shouldn't have upgraded so soon.

I was excited for Corral and let that take over my otherwise conservative approach to systems management. Because it was not a work system and just my personal NAS, I didn't have all of my usual guards up. I knew my data would most likely be safe in the upgrade, but I didn't think about possible issues or inconveniences after upgrading. Nor did I consider what a pain it would be to have to roll back manually in some sort of disaster scenario where I had to rebuild everything from scratch if something really went wrong. Luckily, that wasn't the case and the upgrade to Corral happened without a hitch.

(2) Abandoning Corral at this time is the correct decision.

Corral simply has too many issues. It's pretty, and it's a great idea, but it's no where near as mature as it needs to be to replace 9.10. Corral needs a lot more work behind the scenes and testing before it's usable. There's a lot broken or missing:
  • Corral documentation is almost non-existent or feels too "TBD/in progress." This is f*ing scary!
  • Services and containers fail and I couldn't locate their logs to try and troubleshoot.
  • Why did my jails disappear? How do I get to them back to migrate stuff out of them?
  • The new horizontal scrolling UI looks great when full-screened on a 2560x1440 monitor, but is completely unusable on my 1366x768 laptop.
  • The interface is sluggish and sometimes just stops responding all together.
  • Where are the historical performance charts? You can't scroll back in time on the dashboard charts. I love scrolling back in time through the ones in 9.x.
(3) I don't need FreeNAS to do everything.

Something I realized today is that I need FreeNAS to just be a kick-ass NAS. I want it to be a rock-solid performer, and for some reason I feel proud about FreeNAS (even though I have zero affiliation with the project or iXsystems) and I want to recommend it to others. FreeNAS won me over when I discovered it a few months ago because it did one thing and did it well.

I depend on FreeNAS and am not interested in the glitz and glamor of a new UI. Not at the expense of stability, anyway. Hearing the term "Hyper-converged platform" makes me roll my eyes. But, I get it. The idea of running VMs within FreeNAS is great, and docker containers seem cool (this is my first exposure to them), but I feel that FreeNAS is the kind of system that should be a "set it and forget it" solution, initially configured and then left alone, worked on only when absolutely necessary. I'm a notorious tinkerer, and this new Corral interface and all of the new features was just an invitation for me to play around and make accidents.

At the very beginning of my journey with FreeNAS I knew that I wanted a bare-metal server solely for FreeNAS, and another bare metal server just for a VMware ESXi playground. I want to do my tinkering over there in ESXi. I want to muck around with operating systems and have a safe space to create, change, and destroy things with absolutely zero risk to my FreeNAS box, because my FreeNAS box holds my valuable, personal data. Plus, I don't want to bog down my FreeNAS box with unnecessary stuff.

Not everyone is going to agree with me here, and that's totally fine. Some users need to have one box doing both file storage and VM hosting. But I know the trouble that I can get into personally if I go down that route of playing around too much with the FreeNAS server. I'm happy to roll back to the geeky-looking 9.10 interface and leave the server alone, in the corner of my house, doing its thing and doing it well.

(4) I'm happy to be using FreeNAS and will continue to use it.

Back when I first started using FreeNAS I had some sort of bizarre issue with jails being assigned duplicate IDs. I submitted a ticket and within just a few days I had someone from iXsystems help me out. Not only did he actually write back to me, but he asked to set up a time to do a screen share session and interact directly with my FreeNAS server to find out what the issue was. The only time I could meet was late at night, and even so he was a really friendly and nice guy, and he was happy to talk shop and even showed me around some of the backend in the CLI, and taught me a few things about how it's all set up. I could tell he enjoyed his job, and knew his stuff inside and out. I've never paid a dime for FreeNAS, I'm just a freebie user, and I was very impressed with the level of attention I got to my case. There aren't many companies out there who provide this level of support. Sure, the software is great, but it's the people that really make the software what it is. Maybe that's why FreeNAS has won me over the way it has.

The documentation (for 9.x anyway!) is superb. Everything is thoroughly documented and the platform feels stable and mature. And, from my behind-the-scenes tour of the backend, there are lots of thoughtful safeguards built in to so many places in the OS that make me feel confident that FreeNAS does a better job of protecting my data than I could if I rolled my own FreeBSD/ZFS solution. Even with all of these safeguards I have to say that Corral's replacement needs to have much more thorough documentation, to match that of 9.x, before I'll ever consider moving off 9.10 again.

Ok, let's wrap it up! Thanks for taking the time to read all of this, I know I had a lot to say. I hope that my feedback was a useful contribution to what's happening. I support the organization's decision and hope that FreeNAS continues to be what we know and love it to be -- a dependable place for us to store our valuable data.
 
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As another note, sincere thanks to Ericloewe and the community team for their invaluable work as intermediaries throughout this big change. You're going above and beyond to answer questions and provide pathways for less experienced users.

Extremely worthy of recognition and gratitude - thanks mate.
 

dreamerns

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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)...

People who updated from 9.3 to 9.10 also missed working old plugins and jails :smile: I for one never went that road because I would have to delete all jails and recreate them from scratch. Putting effort into making some of the software work under freebsd jail (like SpiderOAK) was much harder then creating VMs and Docker. Just my 5 cents. Hopefully good VM support will fix that in future 9.10 versions :smile:
 

northernsky

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Nov 3, 2016
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Well this has been a culture shock for me as I jumped right to FreeNAS 10 never even looking at 9 (everyone said not to worry about learning 9). Now here I am looking at 9.10 which i just installed and am missing the corral UI. my pools seem to have come over okay and I am happy for that but getting a mapped drive to my smb share is a pita and not as easy as it was for coral. I just hope my pool is not corrupt or something. No complaints just another learning curve to fall over walking down.... :)
 
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raidflex

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People who updated from 9.3 to 9.10 also missed working old plugins and jails :) I for one never went that road because I would have to delete all jails and recreate them from scratch. Putting effort into making some of the software work under freebsd jail (like SpiderOAK) was much harder then creating VMs and Docker. Just my 5 cents. Hopefully good VM support will fix that in future 9.10 versions :)

I have been using plugins for years on FreeNAS and although they are not intuitive to setup they are pretty darn stable. Back in the FreeNAS 8 days plugin support was tough and needed much configuring, 9.10 is a breeze compared to 8. I did re-create mine after the upgrade to 9.10 and although it took some time it really was not that bad. Since power is a premium where I live I prefer to have 1 system to run most of my needed services/servers. Aside from my firewall which is pfSense on a separate PC. Other then the occasional plugin updates I have no issues with jails/plugins and have over 10 plugins/custom jails running on the system in my sig. I would appreciate VM/Docker support to migrate some custom jails over and for more versatility with software though.
 
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Jailer

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Yes I do but this was on a test machine.

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk
That's good to know and thank you for clarifying. I hope that others that read this thread take notice and stay on the 9.10 stable train of they care about their data.
 

nojohnny101

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Thanks to @Kris Moore for explaining the new direction, all the XiSystems developers and staff who have been answering questions on this spirited thread, and @Ericloewe for containing all the madness!

I held off on moving to Corral because of all the issues I was reading about. I'm excited for the new UI coming in 9.10.3 (the current one is long in the tooth, albeit functional) and look forward to a unified path forward for development!
 

andrew2005

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FWIW, the devs are open to having a migration path from Corral to 9.10.3, and I'll be sure to lobby for that to happen.

I think that's only fair. Doesn't haven't to be fully automatic but at least some detailed guides.

Is it better to hang on to Corral until a 9.10.4 that includes Docker support or migrate the Docker VM to 9.10.3, despite the lack of Docker integration with the host?

For me, this one depends on how stable Corral turns out to be. I've got it running quite nicely for the moment so would be happy to wait till full docker integration.

It would be great to have a migration guide or tool to get the VM running in 9.10. If the stability doesn't continue it would be nice to jump ship and at least have the VM migrated over.

Docker integration is quite important for the future of FreeNAS. I love the model of jails, but not all software works as well(/at all) on BSD vs Linux/docker.

Finally, whilst all of this is disappointing, we have to keep in mind FreeNAS is a free product which is amazing for how much we paid. Businesses should be using TrueNAS which hasn't been compromised.

Cheers.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk
 

megalex

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Being a long time FreeNAS user and an advocate. I had to create an account and post my opinion.

I have told everyone that tried to convince me to switch to synology or unraid that there is no reason to do so because freenas was ahead of the curve in every way. My experience with 9.x series was very rough as a FreeNAS beginner I felt it had tons of features but the UI was too convoluted and not very user friendly lucky for me being a dev/sysadmin I was able to configure all my volumes/shares/jails in a couple of days. I always thought that the jail management and overall UI experience needed a rework. When FreeNAS 10 beta was announced I was extremely excited and followed its progress all the way to release. I put off buying new hardware upgrading my FreeNAS 9.3 to the latest until Coral was released. Finally gets released I order brand new hardware and install FreeNAS Coral.

I was amazed at how easy it was to configure Coral. Did run into some very minor bugs but overall set up everything including migrating all my jails to docker containers in a couple of hours working perfectly!! The UI is way more responsive than the 9.x series allowing me to start navigating to the settings i want right away instead of having to wait until the menu loads. All the async tasking/loading is impressive to say the least. Did not expect to use the CLI at all but gave it a shot. Its the best CLI i have used hands down. Mimicking the same navigation/ hierarchy that the UI has really says allot about how well thought out the design is. I immediately called a few friends that were dubious about FreeNAS and had them look at Coral and convinced them to migrate. I'm not sure what to tell them now about FreeNAS :(

Today I read this post and my heart sinks. Its very unreal that anyone would drop support for a major release so fast. Specially anything that is backed by a company. This is generally a bad idea for any company interested in keeping its customers. The right decision would be to fully support the major release and previous release at least until you have a new release that has the same or better features than your previous release. The reasoning behind the drop are very unusual. Coral team members get laid off. There is no mention as to why on the post but hints to an un-maintainable and unstable codebase as the reasoning. I believe the Coral release was the next important step on FreeNAS and nobody should expect it to work 100% and understood that it would take a year or more to hash out any major issues and bugs.

Honestly Coral is a product I would pay for supporting. I hope the FreeNAS Team and iX Systems re-evaluates the decision to drop support.

I would propose the following:
Only supporting bug fixes (no new features) until the next major release version.
Offer a paid alternative where anyone who wants to use Coral could subscribe to get updates.
A bounty program where a dollar amount can be assigned to a specific ticket that has enough community votes once the amount is reached the ticket can be worked on.
 
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digity

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something told me not to name my new Corral server "delorean"... FUDGE!!!
 

IceBoosteR

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Uff yeah, didn't see that coming.
I was also on the hype-train for Corral, but I was smart enough to make an backup before upgrading. I was so exited over all of this (tested Corral in a virtual machine and worked fine for me), that I upgraded three days after release. After the first few problems I should have said "stop - go back to 9 and wait some weeks", but I just wanted to use those docker and VM features so much, that I shut down my logical part.
After that, I need to reset my password for my encrypted pool in 9.10 to import this in 10. My alarm siren goes on and I ignored them, because I want this and I trusted everyone at iX that all will be fine, as in the past with 9.X
Pool added - fine, but I want my old password back with some special characters. And this was the point were the GUI eats up my pool and I did not get access to it anymore.
This is the story in short:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/i-cannot-mount-my-pool-now-restoring-from-backup.51795/

At the end of all I was upset about Corral and myself - don't EVER go on the first release, alsways wait for the first patchset (also the intension of every big company running businesscritical software...) and about the integration of something really important (encryption) which failed [...].

So I am now happy again with 9.10.2, looking forward to some more good updates and now backup my data every weekend.
Also I understand this was a hard step back (or forward) into a new direction.

We will see how 9.10.X is processing then.

I will not leave FreeNAS as I think it is the perfect os for my data and the integrity. Ok I got a hit in my stomach with a "Restore-Weekend" but I could stand up, looking forward and learned a lot.
I just bought myself now an 16 Core rackmounted server for ESXi and I got my VMs, and FreeNAS is sharing the storage over iSCSI.

Edit: What I did not get was the following: "the solid FreeNAS 9.10 code,"
Yeah 9.10 is stabe af but why did you not look over to 9.10 when programming 10, when it comes to stability and data integrety?
 
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xxsj

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An incredibly difficult decision to make, no doubt, but the right move to make. Thank you again, iX Systems for bringing such a great platform to market.
 
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