Starting our next Open Source Project - TrueNAS SCALE

clausdk

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What's keeping you from running pfSense in a VM to get your all-in-one SMB server?

True! That would be a great idea. Even imagine if it could be done like a plugin for TrueNAS.
But running it natively on the server gives you all the nice benefits like HW offloading etc. When it comes to ISP speeds over 1 Gbit it really starts to get a bit CPU intensive, when running PFsense in a VM.
 

mow4cash

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Jan 20, 2017
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I am very excited to hear this. As a long time FreeNAS user I have always hoped this would be the direction taken. This is what should have been done back during the 10 fiasco. I truly believe this is the direction that will keep FreeNAS relevant. FreeNAS is great but bsd has held it back and driven users to search for alternatives.
 

inman.turbo

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This is amazing news. I run all-in-one "hyper-converged" (hate that word) solutions, and roll my own kvm/libvirt clustering. This will put my nas on metal. I usually put Rhel and Centos on metal but I can live with Debian. Don't like Proxmox, too much extra silly stuff going on in the background, to help the home user I guess; but I have a feeling TrueNAS SCALE even as a hypervisor/container host will be much more production friendly. Kubernetes plugin, anyone?
 

morganL

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Kubernetes will be another service with TrueNAS SCALE ..... the "plugins" will be docker containers.
 

inman.turbo

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Kubernetes will be another service with TrueNAS SCALE ..... the "plugins" will be docker containers.
Absolutely, I understand that. It is possible to run a node in a container though, such as in a common rancher configuration. Or are you saying that SCALE will "ship" with a kubernetes platform service already baked in?

Also I was wondering, keeping in tradition with the jails -- will SCALE leverage firejails for the containers or possibly something like firecracker or kata containers? I suppose I should just head on over and look at the code. I'm excited to try it out, may set up a little CI test system to pull each commit.
 

morganL

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Absolutely, I understand that. It is possible to run a node in a container though, such as in a common rancher configuration. Or are you saying that SCALE will "ship" with a kubernetes platform service already baked in?

Also I was wondering, keeping in tradition with the jails -- will SCALE leverage firejails for the containers or possibly something like firecracker or kata containers? I suppose I should just head on over and look at the code. I'm excited to try it out, may set up a little CI test system to pull each commit.

Easy to enable basic Kubernetes is a primary goal.... after that looking for smart users to tell us what is really useful or contribute.
 

krbyerdog

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Does this mean it will be possible to use debian packages via apt? I understand the design philosophy of FreeNAS/TrueNAS being an appliance, however there are some areas that it has seriously lagged behind.

For instance, The option of bypassing the middleware, directly using freeipa-client to get it running in a non-AD domain environment would personally save me hours of futzing about moving kerberos keytabs around, even if the GUI wasn't able to support it.
 

morganL

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Hey Kyberdog- you may need to clarify your question. Do you want to run apt (and freeipa client) within a container or Helm pod?
.. yes, this would be doable.

If you need it to run within TrueNAS, then please write up the suggestion and perhaps join the developers. The general issue is making it robust across reboots and software updates.
 

krbyerdog

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I'm specifically interested in making IPA domain membership for TrueNAS less painful. Right now there are a lot of configuration steps, a lot of middleware errors and a lot of gui irregularities with getting them to talk to each other.

I haven't yet found a way of getting them to talk securely at all.

Supporting standard debian packages such as freeipa-client would likely allow the package to handle all of that stuff and - i'm speaking from a position of ignorance here - negate the need for the Ix guys to replicate it themselves.
 

morganL

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It would seem you are asking for freeipa support.... built into TrueNAS. The TrueNAS middleware saves all the setting in a configuration file so that a reboot or software update is possible without losing those settings.

I assume that you can't use LDAP etc within your environment? How many systems do you have running freeipa?

Either make it a suggestion in Jira or join the developers?
 

DavidSpek

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@morganL I just saw the announcement of Rancherd. I think this would make sense for TrueNAS SCALE as it would also allow other TrueNAS SCALE nodes to join the Kubernetes cluster if I understand it correctly.
 

Ericloewe

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Rancher has something of a... complicated history around these parts.
 

morganL

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@morganL I just saw the announcement of Rancherd. I think this would make sense for TrueNAS SCALE as it would also allow other TrueNAS SCALE nodes to join the Kubernetes cluster if I understand it correctly.

Hi david, Rancher is doing some cool things. Rancherd looks useful, but its a binary and we prefer open source Kubernetes. We do use code from Rancher. As the article says, you can launch Rancher as a helm chart on Kubernetes. So Rancher environment should be supportable.
 
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It seems people are pleased by the move to Linux, so I guess that's the right move.

From my perspective, the freebsd base was your USP. It's the only reason I have freenas installed. I wish you the best of luck competing with the rest of the Linux ecosystem, and thank you for the last ten years or so I've been running your OS, but here we part ways.
 

danb35

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but here we part ways.
This isn't an airport; you don't need to announce your departure in your very first post ever in the almost four years you've been a member. But if you think iX are saying they're replacing BSD with Linux, you simply aren't paying attention to what they're saying.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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To elaborate on @danb35 post: TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Enterprise will stay on FreeBSD for the foreseeable future. TrueNAS Core was just released with a major update to FreeBSD 12 and improvements galore. TrueNAS Scale is based on Linux and a completely different product.
 

morganL

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It seems people are pleased by the move to Linux, so I guess that's the right move.

From my perspective, the freebsd base was your USP. It's the only reason I have freenas installed. I wish you the best of luck competing with the rest of the Linux ecosystem, and thank you for the last ten years or so I've been running your OS, but here we part ways.

Hi Jon,, as Patrick indicated, TrueNAS can run on either FreeBSD (TrueNAS CORE) or Linux (TrueNAS SCALE). The key change we have made is to make the TrueNAS software, including OpenZFS, more portable. To discuss FreeBSD base, use the TrueNAS 12 subforum. Let us know if/how TrueNAS 12.0 doesn't meet your needs. Thanks Morgan
 

IOSonic

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I am six months late to this party, but I am extremely excited about the potential in SCALE. The debian base will open up all sorts of possibilities for hypervisors and containers and perhaps provide a little more portability for these between other systems. The ready-to-go kube is also a big draw. Very nice guys.

I started dabbling with Freenas about two years ago, but quickly sidelined it, because of difficulty in connecting VMs to my highly VLAN-segmented home network, lack of ready-to-go docker engine, unfamiliar hypervisor, and personal unfamiliarity with ZFS & FreeBSD at large. I know my way around big boy virtualization, networking, storage and I am at least competent in linux server management...and it was still very difficult to get this working as it should (getting things working in bhyve especially was a painful experience).

Thanks to very helpful posts & guides from people like @KevDog @Constantin and @HoneyBadger, I am now getting it to do useful things for family and friends in two continents :) . It was all totally worth it, because I learned a lot, but it would be nice to see the 'cost-of-entry' lowered for basic users. I think TrueNAS scale is headed in that direction.
 

morganL

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Thanks to very helpful posts & guides from people like @KevDog @Constantin and @HoneyBadger, I am now getting it to do useful things for family and friends in two continents :) . It was all totally worth it, because I learned a lot, but it would be nice to see the 'cost-of-entry' lowered for basic users. I think TrueNAS scale is headed in that direction.

Thanks for the story and glad it's working for your family. Would love to hear tor views on what would improve the "cost of entry" (apart from complete docs which is on the list) ?

If it's working, please share your setup and application info.. its helps the developers and the community.
 
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