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.