What do you use for file management on FreeNas volumes?

[pirateghost]

Why wouldn't you just install a file manager and SSH to the jail to run the application

 

[devnullius]

Why shouldn't I install a full-featured GUI & OS for a decent file manager? :)

 

[INCSlayer]

Why shouldn't I install a full-featured GUI & OS for a decent file manager? :)

if you have these requirements of you nas maybe freenas isnt for you?

 

[devnullius]

It's 2016, right? ;)

 

[INCSlayer]

It's 2016, right? ;)

your point being?

 

[pirateghost]

Why shouldn't I install a full-featured GUI & OS for a decent file manager? :)

This is an appliance... Stop trying to treat it like it's a general OS

 

[mattbbpl]

It's 2016, right? ;)

Whoa, I think I know what you need to do, actually. You need to stop using FreeNAS and install FreeBSD instead. You can do everything in FreeNAS on FreeBSD as well - and more. And the "more" is apparently what you really what you really want.

FreeNAS is designed to be an appliance. It uses a modified version of FreeBSD as it's base. It takes FreeBSD, strips out unnecessary stuff (the "more" that you want) and wraps what remains inside a nice GUI geared specifically to NAS management. It's not a general purpose operating system at all.

In fact, there are people who proclaim that FreeNAS has no purpose because everyone should just use FreeBSD/linux instead and set up their pools manually. By doing so, they would retain the full feature set of the underlying OS.

This is what you need to do if you'd like to continue down this path.

 

[devnullius]

I feel that in this forum curiosity will kill the cat ;) But I do appreciate your feedback. What I liked about FreeNAS is that, as NAS's go, it has many features built in, for example Plex and stuff. I'm just afraid that it will be too difficult / cumbersome once I switch to FreeBSD again. And if I'd do that, I think I'd like OpenBSD better (I started with FreeBSD a long time ago, got a bit disappointed and found OpenBSD which I like a bit better). Once everything is backup-up'd, transferred and set up as I like, the Server will become more of a NAS for me too. Until then... I assume basic features that are greatly lacking. Correction: scrapped ;p

I know you guys feel it's ugly to have local file browsing or even full X-Windows, but from my seat it looks like an obvious feature. I'd have expected at least some people (trying) to install X-Windows, just because they can. Especially the Jails sound like something built for that. And even in the mid 90s I could take over the complete display of another Unix terminal or sent screens to another terminal - all over the network. So yeah... I assume a lot of stuff to be 'basic' for Unix OS's.

It's now about time to setup my HP Home Server once more; once that one is up and running with all my data (that now is backed up to FreeNAS, I hope) I'll reconfigure my FreeNAS, after I saved for some more hard drives :/

:) Peace!

Devnullius

 

[JDCynical]

I know you guys feel it's ugly to have local file browsing or even full X-Windows, but from my seat it looks like an obvious feature. I'd have expected at least some people (trying) to install X-Windows, just because they can. Especially the Jails sound like something built for that. And even in the mid 90s I could take over the complete display of another Unix terminal or sent screens to another terminal - all over the network. So yeah... I assume a lot of stuff to be 'basic' for Unix OS's.

...which is fine. However, the POV being presented by the other members is not that it's ugly, but that while FreeNAS does use a FreeBSD core, it's not 'FreeBSD' as one might expect, it's a stripped down appliance build. Things like X11 and console tricks ('basic' *nix stuff) isn't going to be there by design, and as an appliance, they shouldn't be there. Configuration is supposed to be done via the console (bare minimum network setup and 'the printer is on fire' kind of toubleshooting and fixing) and the HTML GUI, not via a local X session or curses UI.

I can't really think of any 'enterprise' NAS devices that have a built in file manager. I know the EMC's at the office certainly don't (at least the way we have them configured and licensed).

If you wanted to set up a jail with a vnc server or a port of mc, that might work and IIRC there was at least one post I saw in the past asking about a similar thing to avoid typical windows <=7 SMB/CIFS shenanigans, but I have a feeling that most people in here aren't going to be all that enthused about the idea as was mentioned earlier, it's not really designed for this kind of thing. :)

 

[phoenix]

I'm afraid this is getting to sound more like a "troll" thread, to me.

 

[danb35]

I don't think it's a troll thread at all. The gist of what @devnullius is asking for is entirely reasonable, and on the really low end, it shouldn't be too tough to include mc in the base build (and the fact that you can put it in a jail is not an argument against having it as part of the base). Adding a graphical environment would obviously be much more involved, and not likely to happen any time soon, but it certainly could be done.

The problem is that handling large amounts of data over the network is slow. It has to travel down the wire to a client machine, which will do whatever it does, and then send it back up the wire to the FreeNAS box. Much, much slower than doing the operation locally on the FreeNAS box. Of course, FreeNAS includes the standard command-line tools, but using cp, rm, mv, etc., can be tricky and/or tedious, depending on what exactly you're trying to accomplish. There have been a number of threads in the past (and bugs reported) requesting some sort of GUI or web-based file manager, and however valid the reasons may be for not including this, I don't think the desire is going to go away. The threads I've seen focus more on the idea of a web-based file manager than a full X environment, but I suppose that by using noVNC or something similar, the X environment can become web-based.

I've installed X in a jail before, and got it working at least to the point of giving me a root window via a noVNC connection, but I haven't kept any notes about how I did that. That would still be limited by the jail, of course, but it might nonetheless be simpler to get working than a standalone web-based file manager.

 

[Tenek]

Sounds like easiest solution is to get a Jail with MC and with attached datasets you would like to manage. It is always faster to do a server side copy/move operations and MC will be much more user friendly than cp,mv,rm.
If you guys can get X working in Jail that would be awesome.

 

[emk2203]

@devnullius: If you install mc in a jail (I reuse my transmission jail for this), you can attach all your storage and use the file manager for it. Use of mouse included, over ssh. A copy session which takes some hours can be done via ssh --> tmux --> mc and detached and reattached. I use this a lot. I don't miss X on the server because mc is more than enough. Left pane the server 1, right pane the server 2 via ftp. Select files, start copy, detach session. Reattach later to clean up or whatever. Try it, it is one of the most productivity-enhancing tools for me when working with FreeNAS.

I asked for something like this in 2014 (similar to your question now), and here is my followup after a year: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...s-move-copy-on-nas-via-gui.17748/#post-229691

 

[ethereal]

on my windows machines i use directory opus - i have been using it for about 18 years. highly customisable and very powerful

 

[RichTJ99]

I am a little late to the party but is the server side copy with windows 8 Explorer the same as SSHing into the freenas box & moving/deleting files using the CP, mv, rm commands? Just in a GUI format? I am really confused on why explorer would work so differently in Win7 vs Win8?

 

[anodos]

I am a little late to the party but is the server side copy with windows 8 Explorer the same as SSHing into the freenas box & moving/deleting files using the CP, mv, rm commands? Just in a GUI format?

Not exactly, but it is much faster than having it go through your client.

I am really confused on why explorer would work so differently in Win7 vs Win8?

For the same reason why explorer behaves differently in all versions of windows. Because... microsoft. :)

 

[RichTJ99]

I did give this a try on my win8 laptop - it is amazing how much faster the wireless win8 machine is on copying files on the server vs my win 7 ethernet connection. I guess I should get a win8 VM running for file copying - though I am starting to get used to running everything though SSH.

 

[anodos]

I did give this a try on my win8 laptop - it is amazing how much faster the wireless win8 machine is on copying files on the server vs my win 7 ethernet connection. I guess I should get a win8 VM running for file copying - though I am starting to get used to running everything though SSH.

Or you could just upgrade everything to windows 10 :D
By the way, server-side-copy only works if the source and destination are on the same share.

 

[nightshade00013]

I think what the OP is wanting is something that is a simple click, click move interface whether it is within the same dataset or another dataset. I seem to remember installing webmin into a jail at one point on 9.3 and it worked perfectly. It's a prebuilt package so it's a pretty simple setup and then access the GUI through a browser. This is a control panel for web hosting but it has a built in file manager as most control panels of this nature have and I remember it working pretty well for a few things.

http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin/Installation#pkg_.28FreeBSD.29

Once it's up and running just access at 10000 port and the Jail IP address unless you changed it during the setup. And add access to the storage you want it to be able to handle

I do however have to say it seems to have some scary access abilities if you click on "Hardware" and then partitions on local disks you can actually see the physical disks and some other stuff without adding storage. Since my system is up and running I am not going to add mounts but it is interesting that it is accessible from the jail.

 

[RichTJ99]

http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin/Installation#pkg_.28FreeBSD.29

So that one is a gui vs using the command line?