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Whenever I see one of these periodic postings of people using FreeNAS, and they come up on HN every few months, I'm always looking for the answer to IMO the mos

Whenever I see one of these periodic postings of people using FreeNAS, and they come up on HN every few months, I'm always looking for the answer to IMO the most obvious, most basic question: Why FreeNAS; why not vanilla FreeBSD? I've never seen a good, detailed answer to this. Mostly the response is along the lines of: "well, of course use FreeNAS, after all you're building a NAS!" From what I can tell, FreeNAS offers a pretty GUI and some tuning on top of FreeBSD. Anything else?

lucaspiller 10y ago
I'd say that people recommend it because it's mostly just plug-and-play and works out of the box. You don't need to learn much about how RAID or ZFS works or understand every little detail about nix administration. If you follow the guide it's pretty hard to go wrong. I however wanted to learn all the details when I set up my NAS, so went with Debian Jessie and BTRFS. I only use AFS and NFS, and I'm the only user, so don't need half the features FreeNAS provides. Graphs are pretty, but I can quickly get all the information I need via SSH.
melp 10y ago
Because I've never done this before and I wanted a more manageable learning curve. I had very little *nix experience and zero bsd or zfs experience before I started this project. My next server will probably be vanilla bsd, but then again it might be freenas because it just makes the whole setup process easier.
floatboth 10y ago
People like that out-of-the-box GUI experience. Yeah, setting up NFS/AFP/Samba is easy but there's also monitoring and snapshot management (like https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid) and possibly external backups…
kiranmova 10y ago
Having a GUI that is easy to setup is definitely a plus. My experience is that along with setting up, we also would like to add some monitoring capabilities that would send us some alerts about the disk failures or usage threshold stats. I have been part of the team that built ElastiStor (ZFS on FreeBSD), http://www.cloudbyte.com/ http://www.cloudbyte.com/.

lucaspiller 10y ago

I'd say that people recommend it because it's mostly just plug-and-play and works out of the box. You don't need to learn much about how RAID or ZFS works or understand every little detail about nix administration. If you follow the guide it's pretty hard to go wrong. I however wanted to learn all the details when I set up my NAS, so went with Debian Jessie and BTRFS. I only use AFS and NFS, and I'm the only user, so don't need half the features FreeNAS provides. Graphs are pretty, but I can quickly get all the information I need via SSH.

melp 10y ago

Because I've never done this before and I wanted a more manageable learning curve. I had very little *nix experience and zero bsd or zfs experience before I started this project. My next server will probably be vanilla bsd, but then again it might be freenas because it just makes the whole setup process easier.

floatboth 10y ago

People like that out-of-the-box GUI experience. Yeah, setting up NFS/AFP/Samba is easy but there's also monitoring and snapshot management (like https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid) and possibly external backups…

kiranmova 10y ago

Having a GUI that is easy to setup is definitely a plus. My experience is that along with setting up, we also would like to add some monitoring capabilities that would send us some alerts about the disk failures or usage threshold stats. I have been part of the team that built ElastiStor (ZFS on FreeBSD), http://www.cloudbyte.com/ http://www.cloudbyte.com/.