6 ms·

If I'm comfortable using command line tools, should I just use FreeBSD and ZFS directly to build a NAS, or should I go with FreeNAS? I assume that using versio

If I'm comfortable using command line tools, should I just use FreeBSD and ZFS directly to build a NAS, or should I go with FreeNAS? I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?

ianai 9y ago
I'm interested in what people think. For me, I'd be inclined to go FreeBSD as I perceive it to be more standard. If you're actually using either branch you had better be great at the cli.
stock_toaster 9y ago
I built a NAS with base FreeBSD, because I am comfortable with the command line, and didn't need a gui solution. Not much to report -- it works great. If you go with plain FreeBSD, yes...go with 11.1. No point using the 10.x branch unless you have some specific reason to (eg. some specific legacy support requirements or something).
alwillis 9y ago
If I were you, I'd use FreeNAS, which is already battle tested.
- 59nadir 9y ago
  FreeBSD is pretty battle tested, both for NAS stuff and in general.
  - alwillis 9y ago
    I just meant it's easier to use a purpose built thing like FreeNAS vs. FreeBSD 11.1 which just came out. FreeNAS will be on 11.1 soon enough; unless there's a feature in FreeBSD 11.1 you absolutely need right now, most people will be better off using FreeNAS for now.
rsync 9y ago
"If I'm comfortable using command line tools, should I just use FreeBSD and ZFS directly to build a NAS, or should I go with FreeNAS? I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?" I would build the NAS using plain old FreeBSD and I would indeed use 11.1. If it were a week ago, I would have advised 10.3 as, historically, x.0 releases of FreeBSD have been ill-advised. If you are comfortable on the command line I see no reason to use FreeNAS/TrueNAS. This is how I run my home fileserver. It is also how I/we run all of rsync.net - ZFS filesystems on top of plain old FreeBSD.
- dijit 9y ago
  I'm going to disagree with you here; I don't believe I'm in such a unique position of having run both FreeNAS and FreeBSD on the same hardware (with the same zpool) so I expect others to chime in. FreeNAS has been better from a performance perspective than FreeBSD raw was- why? Probably because I didn't do the right thing for good performance on FreeBSD. But that's my point here.. why spend ages configuring things to get the same performance you'd get OOTB with FreeNAS? You also get a webUI for "free" and plugins to run things like transmission and plex. I don't advise using raw FreeBSD for home use, power users can still have all the CLI access on FreeNAS too, but may not want the "bloat" of a webUI.
chongli 9y ago
I've been using FreeBSD as a NAS with ZFS since ZFS was first added. I love it! The man pages are fantastic, the FreeBSD handbook is amazing, and the whole system feels really cohesive and well-designed. I use Arch Linux on my desktop but I would switch to FreeBSD in a heartbeat if it addressed the desktop-related issues I had last time I tried it. It would be especially amazing if they fixed all the sleep and power management stuff so it could be used on a laptop with good battery life.
- terminalcommand 9y ago
  I was a long time FreeBSD user before I switched to Arch. FreeBSD is a pure and beautiful system, but Linux provides much better performance and ease of use in desktop related tasks. The network stack on FreeBSD is of magnitudes faster than Linux (based on my experience with both OSes), however this does not compensate for power management issues and general slugishness while using linux software. If you're using FreeBSD on your main computer, you need some kind of a Desktop Environment, if you don't want to stick with KDE4, you install GNOME. However, GNOME is ported from Linux and although most of the time it works without problems, there is a speed compromise (again only based on my experience). Upsides of FreeBSD: • The Package Repository is great, most apps such as firefox, emacs, IDE's are maintained at their latest versions. • The system works solid, no crashes • FreeBSD feels more like Unix, and if you're interested in the low level stuff you can learn more quickly. The source code is clean, the implementations are not complicated. • Drivers are scarcer than Linux, but if there is a driver, it works flawlessly. The points I'm neutral about: • Behyve and ZFS are all great technologies, however they were a bit complex for my test. I couldn't manage to setup a Linux server with X11 forwarding. As for ZFS, I used FreeBSD on my laptop with a 256G SSD drive, so I did not see much benefit of ZFS. However, I was aware that if I had used VMs, ZFS would offer much better IO performance. As for sleep and power management issues: • Power management on FreeBSD is good, not great like Linux and you don't have powertop and tlp available. But it's good. You can expect upto 70-80% of the battery life you get in Linux. (You don't even have to tinker with C-States and all, just powerd or powerdxx works great out of the box.) As for sleep issues, mostly on FreeBSD the closing the lid or pressing the power button won't be recognized as a sleep trigger. But on most laptops 'acpiconf -s3' puts your laptop to sleep.
0xbear 9y ago
You don't have to use FreeBSD if ZFS is your only draw, though. Ubuntu supports ZFS out of the box.
- rleigh 9y ago
  ZFS on Linux is quite inferior; there's a lot of missing functionality and some not so nice bugs. You also can't run ZFS on root without manual installation (I've done this). ZFS on FreeBSD has been flawless for me. ZFS on Ubuntu is functional but limited, and I've experienced some odd glitches.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Zfs on funtoo here. Seems to be working well and since all funtoo installs are manual its not much different from any other install.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    Other than difficulty with ZFS on root, I think you're just making stuff up. I run a rather heavily used set of RAIDZ2 arrays and everything works fine. No "odd glitches" or anything.
    - rleigh 9y ago
      On the contrary, it's quite true. I'm a little disturbed by how readily people ascribe nefarious intent to assertions regarding things they have not experienced themselves. You might not have experienced problems, but that does not logically imply that it is free of problems. A few months back, I booted my Ubuntu 16.10 workstation. No ZFS datasets were mounted at boot. Regular "zfs mount" and "mount" failed. Could not get the datasets to mount at all, even though the pool was active and the datasets were visible. Solution: changing the mountpoint worked for some reason. Still no idea what triggered this or why the fix worked. Either way, it broke the system's normal functioning through no intervention of my own. I've also had the zfs and zpool commands get stuck in "D" state indefinitely because something internal had blocked everything. Mounted filesystems continued to work, but no admin commands would work. Triggered by running some trivial admin function. After a few days I had to hard reset the system to regain control. This looks like a locking bug. I've also had poor behaviour when a disc glitched and I got an oops rather than ZFS coping with the short outage. IIRC I got the same "D" state issue as above. I never encountered any such problems with FreeBSD, and I've run it on both platforms for years. ZFS on Linux is functional, and I use it daily, but the FreeBSD implementation is better.
LeoPanthera 9y ago
I've been using FreeNAS for over two years and I would hate to try to use plain FreeBSD. FreeNAS is, as they say, "batteries included". If you're specifically setting up a NAS, I can't imagine why you would want to do more work for apparently little benefit.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Since I'm not an expert, I went with FreeNAS. It's largely "ready to go" out of the box, and having a GUI makes things very discoverable. Even if you're comfortable with CLI tools, you might not be familiarized with all the tools used in a typical NAS setup. Heck, you might not have much devops experience, which could lead to overlooking a key detail, such as setting up regularly scheduled scrub and SMART tests and having it email you if anything requires your attention. Even if you're well versed on these topics, I'd still suggest trying it out on a VM, or at least reading through their guides. Seeing the approach taken by someone else might help you refine your own setup. Unfortunately, the last few months haven't been great for FreeNAS. They had a horribly botched release. It was killed off fairly quickly, but a few people got burned over it. The good news is that they changed their mind on their expected breaking changes. Initially they intended to kill off jails in favor of docker, which made it a painful upgrade process for some existing users. From an outsider's perspective, it looked rush. Even though I'm happy with my setup, it made me a little more weary about quickly adopting major upstream changes. Go with FreeNAS 11.
toddnni 9y ago
One important thing, that is not pointed out yet: FreeNAS has easy upgrade path for major OS versions. That is something that I miss when running plain FreeBSD. Plus, you can always switch between plain and FreeNAS installation.
bakul 9y ago
For home use FreeBSD+ZFS will leave more control in your hands. For a (stable) filesystem node If I were you, I'd let others debug the latest release and just use 10.3. Or at least lag the latest release by a few months to a year or so.
tete 9y ago
It mainly depends on what you are trying to achieve and whether you consider that time worthwhile. They are both great options and FreeNAS already gives you a lot of flexibility. It's a bit like with a router. Do you use something along the lines OpenWRT and mainly log in to the command line, not because you have to, but because you can then you might want to go with FreeBSD and ZFS. However, if you don't know if it is flexible enough and fits: Go with FreeNAS and fall back to FreeBSD. I think that's the best option for most people.
floatboth 9y ago
You're comfortable with CLI tools, but there are other considerations. Do you like "appliances"? How much do you value "stability" as in running old stuff? I would recommend HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT but maybe that's just me :D
- insertnickname 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12681143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12681143 >HardenedBSD is one of the bigger jokes in the BSD community. [...]
  - floatboth 9y ago
    a comment from someone on hacker news 288 days ago, sounds like a credible source alright
lmm 9y ago
I'd use plain old FreeBSD. FreeNAS makes some questionable choices; to my mind it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.

ianai 9y ago

I'm interested in what people think. For me, I'd be inclined to go FreeBSD as I perceive it to be more standard. If you're actually using either branch you had better be great at the cli.

stock_toaster 9y ago

I built a NAS with base FreeBSD, because I am comfortable with the command line, and didn't need a gui solution. Not much to report -- it works great. If you go with plain FreeBSD, yes...go with 11.1. No point using the 10.x branch unless you have some specific reason to (eg. some specific legacy support requirements or something).

alwillis 9y ago

If I were you, I'd use FreeNAS, which is already battle tested.

59nadir 9y ago
FreeBSD is pretty battle tested, both for NAS stuff and in general.
- alwillis 9y ago
  I just meant it's easier to use a purpose built thing like FreeNAS vs. FreeBSD 11.1 which just came out. FreeNAS will be on 11.1 soon enough; unless there's a feature in FreeBSD 11.1 you absolutely need right now, most people will be better off using FreeNAS for now.

rsync 9y ago

"If I'm comfortable using command line tools, should I just use FreeBSD and ZFS directly to build a NAS, or should I go with FreeNAS? I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?" I would build the NAS using plain old FreeBSD and I would indeed use 11.1. If it were a week ago, I would have advised 10.3 as, historically, x.0 releases of FreeBSD have been ill-advised. If you are comfortable on the command line I see no reason to use FreeNAS/TrueNAS. This is how I run my home fileserver. It is also how I/we run all of rsync.net - ZFS filesystems on top of plain old FreeBSD.

dijit 9y ago
I'm going to disagree with you here; I don't believe I'm in such a unique position of having run both FreeNAS and FreeBSD on the same hardware (with the same zpool) so I expect others to chime in. FreeNAS has been better from a performance perspective than FreeBSD raw was- why? Probably because I didn't do the right thing for good performance on FreeBSD. But that's my point here.. why spend ages configuring things to get the same performance you'd get OOTB with FreeNAS? You also get a webUI for "free" and plugins to run things like transmission and plex. I don't advise using raw FreeBSD for home use, power users can still have all the CLI access on FreeNAS too, but may not want the "bloat" of a webUI.

chongli 9y ago

I've been using FreeBSD as a NAS with ZFS since ZFS was first added. I love it! The man pages are fantastic, the FreeBSD handbook is amazing, and the whole system feels really cohesive and well-designed. I use Arch Linux on my desktop but I would switch to FreeBSD in a heartbeat if it addressed the desktop-related issues I had last time I tried it. It would be especially amazing if they fixed all the sleep and power management stuff so it could be used on a laptop with good battery life.

terminalcommand 9y ago
I was a long time FreeBSD user before I switched to Arch. FreeBSD is a pure and beautiful system, but Linux provides much better performance and ease of use in desktop related tasks. The network stack on FreeBSD is of magnitudes faster than Linux (based on my experience with both OSes), however this does not compensate for power management issues and general slugishness while using linux software. If you're using FreeBSD on your main computer, you need some kind of a Desktop Environment, if you don't want to stick with KDE4, you install GNOME. However, GNOME is ported from Linux and although most of the time it works without problems, there is a speed compromise (again only based on my experience). Upsides of FreeBSD: • The Package Repository is great, most apps such as firefox, emacs, IDE's are maintained at their latest versions. • The system works solid, no crashes • FreeBSD feels more like Unix, and if you're interested in the low level stuff you can learn more quickly. The source code is clean, the implementations are not complicated. • Drivers are scarcer than Linux, but if there is a driver, it works flawlessly. The points I'm neutral about: • Behyve and ZFS are all great technologies, however they were a bit complex for my test. I couldn't manage to setup a Linux server with X11 forwarding. As for ZFS, I used FreeBSD on my laptop with a 256G SSD drive, so I did not see much benefit of ZFS. However, I was aware that if I had used VMs, ZFS would offer much better IO performance. As for sleep and power management issues: • Power management on FreeBSD is good, not great like Linux and you don't have powertop and tlp available. But it's good. You can expect upto 70-80% of the battery life you get in Linux. (You don't even have to tinker with C-States and all, just powerd or powerdxx works great out of the box.) As for sleep issues, mostly on FreeBSD the closing the lid or pressing the power button won't be recognized as a sleep trigger. But on most laptops 'acpiconf -s3' puts your laptop to sleep.

0xbear 9y ago

You don't have to use FreeBSD if ZFS is your only draw, though. Ubuntu supports ZFS out of the box.

rleigh 9y ago
ZFS on Linux is quite inferior; there's a lot of missing functionality and some not so nice bugs. You also can't run ZFS on root without manual installation (I've done this). ZFS on FreeBSD has been flawless for me. ZFS on Ubuntu is functional but limited, and I've experienced some odd glitches.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Zfs on funtoo here. Seems to be working well and since all funtoo installs are manual its not much different from any other install.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Other than difficulty with ZFS on root, I think you're just making stuff up. I run a rather heavily used set of RAIDZ2 arrays and everything works fine. No "odd glitches" or anything.
  - rleigh 9y ago
    On the contrary, it's quite true. I'm a little disturbed by how readily people ascribe nefarious intent to assertions regarding things they have not experienced themselves. You might not have experienced problems, but that does not logically imply that it is free of problems. A few months back, I booted my Ubuntu 16.10 workstation. No ZFS datasets were mounted at boot. Regular "zfs mount" and "mount" failed. Could not get the datasets to mount at all, even though the pool was active and the datasets were visible. Solution: changing the mountpoint worked for some reason. Still no idea what triggered this or why the fix worked. Either way, it broke the system's normal functioning through no intervention of my own. I've also had the zfs and zpool commands get stuck in "D" state indefinitely because something internal had blocked everything. Mounted filesystems continued to work, but no admin commands would work. Triggered by running some trivial admin function. After a few days I had to hard reset the system to regain control. This looks like a locking bug. I've also had poor behaviour when a disc glitched and I got an oops rather than ZFS coping with the short outage. IIRC I got the same "D" state issue as above. I never encountered any such problems with FreeBSD, and I've run it on both platforms for years. ZFS on Linux is functional, and I use it daily, but the FreeBSD implementation is better.

LeoPanthera 9y ago

I've been using FreeNAS for over two years and I would hate to try to use plain FreeBSD. FreeNAS is, as they say, "batteries included". If you're specifically setting up a NAS, I can't imagine why you would want to do more work for apparently little benefit.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

Since I'm not an expert, I went with FreeNAS. It's largely "ready to go" out of the box, and having a GUI makes things very discoverable. Even if you're comfortable with CLI tools, you might not be familiarized with all the tools used in a typical NAS setup. Heck, you might not have much devops experience, which could lead to overlooking a key detail, such as setting up regularly scheduled scrub and SMART tests and having it email you if anything requires your attention. Even if you're well versed on these topics, I'd still suggest trying it out on a VM, or at least reading through their guides. Seeing the approach taken by someone else might help you refine your own setup. Unfortunately, the last few months haven't been great for FreeNAS. They had a horribly botched release. It was killed off fairly quickly, but a few people got burned over it. The good news is that they changed their mind on their expected breaking changes. Initially they intended to kill off jails in favor of docker, which made it a painful upgrade process for some existing users. From an outsider's perspective, it looked rush. Even though I'm happy with my setup, it made me a little more weary about quickly adopting major upstream changes. Go with FreeNAS 11.

toddnni 9y ago

One important thing, that is not pointed out yet: FreeNAS has easy upgrade path for major OS versions. That is something that I miss when running plain FreeBSD. Plus, you can always switch between plain and FreeNAS installation.

bakul 9y ago

For home use FreeBSD+ZFS will leave more control in your hands. For a (stable) filesystem node If I were you, I'd let others debug the latest release and just use 10.3. Or at least lag the latest release by a few months to a year or so.

tete 9y ago

It mainly depends on what you are trying to achieve and whether you consider that time worthwhile. They are both great options and FreeNAS already gives you a lot of flexibility. It's a bit like with a router. Do you use something along the lines OpenWRT and mainly log in to the command line, not because you have to, but because you can then you might want to go with FreeBSD and ZFS. However, if you don't know if it is flexible enough and fits: Go with FreeNAS and fall back to FreeBSD. I think that's the best option for most people.

floatboth 9y ago

You're comfortable with CLI tools, but there are other considerations. Do you like "appliances"? How much do you value "stability" as in running old stuff? I would recommend HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT but maybe that's just me :D

insertnickname 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12681143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12681143 >HardenedBSD is one of the bigger jokes in the BSD community. [...]
- floatboth 9y ago
  a comment from someone on hacker news 288 days ago, sounds like a credible source alright

lmm 9y ago

I'd use plain old FreeBSD. FreeNAS makes some questionable choices; to my mind it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.