Using FreeNAS is just painful for me...came from Windows(maybe I should give up)

[TheBadFrag]

Hi there!

I just want to leave some feedback on my experience with FreeNAS over the last week. This is not a rant this is just my story and struggle to get anything to work. I'm german so maybe some things are a bit rough to read. I know FreeNAS is FREE and people put a lot of work into it!

I consider myself a very decent and experienced user when it comes to servers and networking. I started hosting gameservers when I was 13 years old (16 years ago) and build a ton of home networks, PCs and Servers over the years. I do PC/Network/Server repair/diagnosis/setup as a hobby even down to SMD component repair on mainboards.

My old homeserver is setup really nice it does a ton of things. I use it for SMB/FTP/VPN/Teamspeak/DLNA/Remote Windows Machine on Android and a few other things. All my friends have access to it and all have different rights, common shares, everything just works. Sometimes 8 people use it at the same time for different things.


Why did I switch my homeserver from Windows to FreeNAS?
I build myself a new homeserver because the old one is dying. I put Windows on the new server just to find out that in my configuration it's basicly useless due to an Intel driver bug that will not get fixed.
I said: Screw that! I heard a lot of good things about FreeNAS so I gave it a try.
Installation was easy.
BUT THAT WAS IT - NOW COMES THE PAIN
Where do I start? That's a long list.

SMB shares.
I got a basic password protected share working. It works when I try to access it with a windows machine. It doesn't work on Android. Every time I change the password for the user I can log in ONCE from an android device. When I try to log in a second time it says that the password is wrong.

Also there seems to be a limit for maximum simultaneous logins with the same account and I can't find out how to disable it. I don't want a separate account for every device I have. I want to log in from all devices with the same account at the same time.(4 PCs, 2 laptops, 1 phone)

I can give users rights to access datasets but I can't remove them. I have no idea how to do that. Maybe move the files to another dataset, delete the old and start over again. Also all my users always have full access no matter what I try. Can't seem to get a User to "read only" for a dataset.

FTP server.
How the hell do I get different datasets to appear in the home directory of the user and the datasets need to have different read/write permission for the user as well? Absolutely no idea just no no no I don't even how what to search for to fix that. I can just create useless files by setting the home directory to somewhere and don't know how to get rid of them.
I didn't even try to get TLS to work (maybe that's actually doable) when I can't even create a working filesystem for the users.

Hardware.
How to read some S.M.A.R.T. data?
After like 10 minutes googleing the shell was spewing out some smart data. So how do I view all my S.M.A.R.T. data side by side? Some screenshoting and photoshop work to put that all together? This takes like 30 minutes for a 10 second job! This is painful.

How to view CPU frequency?
I found some console command to display the frequency of core 0. Now I have to spam that to read....like no just no...ahhhh what?
I tryed that "powerd -v" command. Great!!! Now I got an endless 10000 lines of spam per second in my shell?!?!?!!?
How the hell am I suppose to read that? Record it with OBS in 144fps then play back the video in slow motion? WHAT?
This is like basic taskmanager stuff to view the CPU speed in real time.

How to view disk activity?
Just the same. No idea how to view in realtime what is writing and where what file whatever. Really! I tried hard!
I can't even see the capacity or disk activity on the OS disk. Or even what files are on there?!?

Miscellaneous things.
File explorer? Am I missing something? Where? How?
How do I move files on my server between folders/shares/datasets? Do I need to take the shell and type in everything by hand?
This takes like 8-10 houres for some simple moving/renaming/refoldering stuff that's done in Windows in like a minute max.
Things like renaming 30 files with really long names is physically painful to do in a console. SERIOUSLY!

Mark/Copy/Paste in the shell?
I want to cry. I googled some weird key combinations that somewhat work but not really.

IPv6 IP?
My server somehow just shows "::". Didn't even try to find out why. Doesn't really matter if I can't even move files.

FreeNAS says I have no ethernet adapter?
"No data to display" it says in the network tab. That's it. Somehow I can connect to it and transfer files. Maybe the NSA has something to do with that. Don't know.

VMs?
Didn't even try. I need one for the Teamspeak server for sure.


I'm at a point where I don't know what the F i should do. Set the server on fire? Sit in a corner and cry? Start a fight in a bar?
I feel like the greatest noob ever. I even reinstalled FreeNAS to get a new fresh try without everything messed up.
From being able to do everything to like to sitting in front of a PC for the first time.
For someone else I must look like a 95 year old sitting in front of a computer and putting in an AOL CD into the CD drive with the wrong side facing up.

Is it me or I don't know...?
How is it possible that I can't even do basic stuff? I never had something like that in my entire life.

I hope that this wasn't to painful for you to read. :(:(

 

[danb35]

Mark/Copy/Paste in the shell?

Highlight, Shift+Insert, Ctrl+Insert. These are standard Windows command shortcuts that work just about anywhere (but nobody seems to know). But seriously, don't use the shell (by which I mean the shell accessible through the web GUI) for anything more than a simple command or two; you should be using ssh instead (if you're using Windows 10, they finally shipped a SSH client with the OS; otherwise you can use PuTTY or Bitvise (see here for some setup information: https://www.familybrown.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fester112:ssh_setup)

VMs?

Can't help you here, though I think I've seen Teamspeak server running in a jail rather than a VM.

FreeNAS says I have no ethernet adapter?

What's your hardware? Motherboard, network interface? You must have a working NIC if you're able to connect to the web GUI.

IPv6 IP?

Do you have something on your network that will do IPv6 autoconfig?

File explorer? Am I missing something?

No, there isn't one. And yes, it's a common feature request, though there are not-insignificant security concerns with implementing one. Midnight commander can ease the pain a bit at the shell, though; run mc to get it started and see here for documentation: https://midnight-commander.org/

How do I move files on my server between folders/shares/datasets?

Use a network-connected machine and do it using the file browser there. Or use the shell.

How to view CPU frequency?

No idea how to view in realtime what is writing and where what file whatever.

I can't even see the capacity or disk activity on the OS disk.

Why do you care about any of these? You can view disk activity in terms of bytes in/out and read/write operations/second, but nothing at the file level. The OS disk contains the OS and only the OS; you can't use it for shares or any other purpose.

How to read some S.M.A.R.T. data?

The web GUI will show you temperatures on the Dashboard page. Other than that, the system's design is "don't worry about it, we'll let you know if something is wrong"--the system will alert you of bad blocks or overtemp disks. There are a number of scripts around here you can run periodically if you want more information, but nothing else through the GUI.

On the FTP server, I can't help you; I don't use it. SMB works fine for me (as well as for many others), but permissions are a frequent problem. IIRC, @m0nkey_ has a video on permissions that may help you--maybe he'll chime in with a link.

 

[garm]

I’ll share @m0nkey_ ’s vid, I love it and it should be on auto play for anyone opening the smb service page in FreeNAS for the first time!! https://youtu.be/RxggaE935PM

 

[John Doe]

you are right, it took me a long time to get familiar with freenas, especially if you are used to the windows world.

give it a chance, it is a great system, once it is set up.

 

[danb35]

I'd also suggest that, if you're looking at sharing files with people who are offsite, you may want to look into Nextcloud. It's a fairly involved installation, but I've written a script to automate most of it--see here: https://forum.freenas-community.org/t/scripted-installation-of-nextcloud-16-in-an-iocage-jail/25

There is a plugin available for Nextcloud, but I don't recommend using it--it doesn't give you a complete and usable installation, nor is there any way to get there within the GUI (which kind of defeats the purpose of a plugin).

 

[TheBadFrag]

Thanks guys.
I threw FreeNAS of my server and installed OMV. It has still a few bugs but from the usability it's way more like Windows. I like that very much. :)

I will give FreeNAS another try when the version number gone up a bit. For now I'm sticking with OMV+Windows(VM). I would love to see a version thats way more friendly for newcomers. Currently the barrier to entry is really high even for experienced serveradmins.

 

[danb35]

I would love to see a version thats way more friendly for newcomers.

Given how long FreeNAS has been out, I doubt we're going to see fundamental changes in its architecture. They're continuing to revamp the GUI, I understand, but I don't think the overall system is going to work all that differently. But that's fine, there's plenty of room in the marketplace for a number of F/OSS NAS OSs.

 

[pschatz100]

Thanks guys.
I threw FreeNAS of my server and installed OMV. It has still a few bugs but from the usability it's way more like Windows. I like that very much. :)

I will give FreeNAS another try when the version number gone up a bit. For now I'm sticking with OMV+Windows(VM). I would love to see a version thats way more friendly for newcomers. Currently the barrier to entry is really high even for experienced serveradmins.

There is a learning curve for FreeBSD operating system, no doubt. As you said, OMV is more windows-like, which is due to the distribution of Linux that it is based on.

I doubt you will find FreeNAS interesting, until you decide to learn more about FreeBSD. But that is perfectly OK. Good luck.