4 ms·

FreeCORE TrueNAS Core – Continued

177 points by sashk 1mo ago

ink_13 1mo ago
What a shame I didn't discover this sooner -- I finally sent my 11-year-old TrueNAS system[1] through the one-way Linux door about a year ago because I gave up on any hope that something like this would come along and I didn't see another way to keep it current. The migration path went smoothly but I preferred the FreeBSD setup if only because it forced me to do something a bit more interesting in my spare time. I do quite a lot of Linux work in my day job and it was nice to occasionally work on something that was surface-level similar but subtly and not-so-subtly different. [1] Over 11 years I have replaced every component (even the CPU/motherboard) at least once except for the case. Migrating from MBR to UEFI was "fun".
- suprjami 1mo ago
  The NAS of Theseus
- Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
  FreeBSD with ZFS tends to be less chaotic once setup. Linux distro in storage appliances can be hit or miss, but ZFS/F2FS/CephFS for /home and ext4+Overlayfs for OS / are reliable these days. Usually, for JBOD file archiving people want to avoid cutting-edge anything. Sometimes Linux kernel less-popular fs updates add or remove data-corrupting fringe filesystem bugs and features. People usually discover this on their own after the first SSD/HDD starts to wear-out, upgrade breaks compatibility, and the solution is re-install/copy-over everything. Accordingly, I was surprised people now deploy btrfs on linux / for some distro, as your options when things go awry was limited at one time. Would be cool if it was finally production ready, and actually reliable on degraded hardware. Too late for me, started my own mini vanity NAS/automated-testing project last year with a few built in features similar to https://guacamole.apache.org https://guacamole.apache.org and Proxmox. If the OS build stops sucking over winter break, than I may share the build-script someplace for people to pull off parts they find useful, and a USB-bootable portable rtx GPU image for test-drive/recovery scenarios. =3
  - CTDOCodebases 1mo ago
    It's worth mentioning that last time I checked encrypted ZFS was not considered production due to obscure file corruption bugs that were unpatched. This was a while ago so it may have changed but then changes can introduce new bugs...
    - Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
      Part of the problem is replicating fs bugs that take months/years to occur is nearly impossible... people still sell USB to SAS/SATA adapters that cause large file corruption in hardware too. ZFS does have bit-rot checksum detection/repair, but the encrypted file feature was a bit of a YOLO feature for awhile. Not sure where it is at these days, as ddr5 ram prices skew away most of ZFS best key features. =3
    - amarshall 1mo ago
      Bigger issue was that native encryption doesn’t (didn’t?) have a maintainer, so even though most bugs got fixed, it’s not a great thing to build on. Some of the key storage is also a bit outdated. IMO use LUKS unless you really need the features of ZFS native enc.
inventor7777 1mo ago
AT first I was very confused, then I realized that this is building on TrueNAS CORE, and not TrueNAS SCALE. Makes much more sense now!
- magicalhippo 1mo ago
  And for those still confused, CORE is FreeBSD-based and has been discontinued, while SCALE is Debian-based and the version that will be developed by TrueNAS going forwards. Hence the "continued" part in the title.
  - a1o 1mo ago
    Ha interesting, any idea why the FreeBSD variant was discontinued? This was one of the projects I always associated with FreeBSD.
    - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
      Chasing dockerized enterprise customers.
      - simondotau 1mo ago
        So by “scale” they mean their business model
    - hatch_q 1mo ago
      Poor hardware support.
      - lproven 1mo ago
        Nah. Doesn't really matter when you are building the hardware to do that job. And in any event, FreeBSD is primarily a server OS, and its support is quite good in that department. Example: OpenBSD and NetBSD both will install X11 and a window manager by default from the installer, if you want. FreeBSD doesn't. They're working on it, but they've been working on it for years.
bhouston 1mo ago
I did the migration to Linux and it actually was painless. I didn't really notice any degradation or hiccups in any way. But I guess this is a good option if FreeBSD is important to you.
mtlynch 1mo ago
Worth noting that TrueNAS recently stopped publishing their build scripts, intentionally making it harder to build their open source code.[0] [0] https://forums.truenas.com/t/clearing-the-air-on-build-scripts/64357 https://forums.truenas.com/t/clearing-the-air-on-build-scrip...
- teruakohatu 1mo ago
  This is disappointing, time to migrate from yet another was-open-source-now-only-technically-open-source software. At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled. Essentially treat open source as closed source. How did we end up with this state of affairs?
  - Grombobulous 1mo ago
    Oftentimes the alternative is migrating to one dying or unstable zero-funding open source project to the next. Which path you go down depends on a lot of factors of that particular piece of software. Can I trust FreeCORE to be a stable, secure project that hangs on to my NAS data if it’s an unfunded fork? Or would it be better to give up some openness for something like TrueNAS SCALE? When it comes to stuff like Proxmox and TrueNAS I think a lot of what keeps those good products for homelab use is the fact that they have commercial customers paying for the development. I can count on TrueNAS being around and getting updates because they have a proven revenue stream. That said, it’s a balance, because sometimes that commercialization becomes a rug pull. A lot of the viability of those projects for homelab use revolves around the companies that put those products out recognizing that they have a customer base that will not pay and accepting that fact without deciding to try to squeeze out every last person who just might pay by compromising the free edition. I like the way Proxmox and OpnSense handle this: you get the community patch channels which are “not for production use” which scares the corporate businesses into paying but has zero negative impact for home users. To be clear I’m also not saying FreeCORE specifically is a fly-by-night project or unstable or anything. I’m genuinely unfamiliar with it. I’m just saying, sometimes projects like that end up not being the right choice for certain use cases.
a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
This seems nice. FreeBSD always seemed nicer than Linux, though now that Linux is being developed by LLMs and Torvalds is vibe-coding, I wonder if they'll be able to keep up.
- inventor7777 1mo ago
  As far as I understand, Torvalds said that he is not going to oppose all AI-generated improvements to Linux, not that he's vibe coding new kernel modules for fun.
  - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
    Torvalds is mostly merging code in the kernel, not writing modules. He claims he's a manager now: https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-summit-linus-torvalds/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-summit-linus-torva... But he's very pro-ai, though, and is vibe closing other projects like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Vide-Coding https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Vide-Coding Linux is definitely going to speed up as it starts to get vibe coded. In a few years, I bet that it's all going to be built with agentic loops, and nobody will be looking at the code at all.
    - sbseitz 1mo ago
      Imagine calling Linus a vibe coder... go look up the definition and then re-evaluate your statement.
      - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
        He calls himself a vibe coder. I gave you the link. Who am I to call him a liar? And why do you act like it's an insult? For most problems, reading and writing code by hand is dead. For the remainder, it will be soon.
        inventor7777 1mo ago
        Linus said that this particular project was vibe coded, not that he was a vibe coder or that he's going to vibe-code everything he does from now on. > "Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding"
discite 1mo ago
Thank you, you made my day 100% better
mvanbaak 1mo ago
There's also bsdnas: https://bsdnas.com https://bsdnas.com
- lproven 1mo ago
  This one is news to me! Thank you! How long has it been around? Anyone tried it and can give an impression of what it's like?
  - mvanbaak 1mo ago
    I heard about it couple of days ago. Since I'm running 'stock' FreeBSD, I cannot comment on what it's like, sorry.
bluGill 1mo ago
Who is behind this? I've been burned once with nas, and I watched the long Plex to Jellyfin saga. What assurance do I have that this will continue to be developed and will become good?
caycep 1mo ago
oh man, just as I upgraded to the debian TrueNAS
rkagerer 1mo ago
I used TrueNAS in the past but last touched it several years ago. I gather now there are two flavors: CORE which continues to use FreeBSD under the hood, and SCALE (aka Community Edition) which is based on Debian Linux. If I understand correctly, the former is only receiving security and stability updates, and iXsystems is developing all new features only on SCALE. If you were to install fresh today, would you prefer this (FreeCORE), BSDnas, or the official SCALE version - and why? No MacOS clients, so don't need SMB Spotlight.
- kalleboo 1mo ago
  I migrated from TrueNAS CORE to SCALE, and found that Linux had better performance. I don't see why you'd use FreeBSD if you don't have a very specific reason (hobby, jails, etc)
- omnimus 1mo ago
  I have two TrueNAS Scale servers and it's been really good, they backup each other and also run several services i use thanks to Docker.
sbseitz 1mo ago
[flagged]
- Brian_K_White 1mo ago
  Is truenas scale and proxmox just butt hurt linux users not wanting to use windows server?
_0xdd 1mo ago
In ~2017 I ditched FreeNAS when my FreeNAS Mini died from the Atom C2000 hardware failure. iXSystems was great about getting me a replacement board, but I decided when I rebuilt the system to just use FreeBSD and get used to command-line only administration. That directly lead to me learning pf, jails, bhyve, etc. Yeah, I don't have any fancy web UI, but I've had a rock solid system for almost 10 years with Samba + NFS running without issue.
- ssl-3 1mo ago
  I've been using things like Samba and NFS since the 1990s. They're not hard to figure out with useful resolution. When I finally became determined to give ZFS a serious go around 2016, I looked at all of my options -- including throwing some hardware together for FreeNAS, and running FreeNAS in a VM. I decided to just use an existing Linux box that was already doing storage stuff and add ZFS to it. It's been fine ever since. Keeping ZFS going isn't deep voodoo at all; of all the things this box does, ZFS has probably been the most hands-off aspect of it.
  - sherr 1mo ago
    This is what I do, to try out ZFS in a "safe" and easy way. An HP Microserver (my home server) with a USB3 disk attached formatted as ZFS. The server still runs Debian stable and uses DKMS ZFS. The recent pain points have only been the time taken to rebuild the kernel module for kernel updates and there have been a lot of them over the past few months (due to all the CVE's found and fixed). The ZFS side has been plain sailing so far but if I hit any ZFS issues I may have trouble (but, as I say, it's a test anyway).
    - ssl-3 1mo ago
      That's a great test environment and it really helps drive away some of the misconceptions about ZFS. It's a lovely filesystem and it can work in very stodgy ways with zetabytes on Serious Hardware, but it can also work with relatively small devices on silly hardware. Another example: I've got a ZFS scratch disk that has seen dozens of terabytes written. It's an old ~120GB Intel-branded SATA SSD that is connected with a very cheap SATA to USB3 adapter cable. I've been using it this way for years. All of the Internet lore has told me that this must result in resolute failure. Whether because USB is broadly not a serious data bus, or because ZFS doesn't like non-serious things, or because 1 copy is 0 copies, or because SSDs are fragile creatures that hate write cycles, or because I've created a portal to hell, or something else: The lore states that it must result in failure, and usually stipulates that ZFS would amplify this concern. But it's been great. Really. Zero issues -- except when I unplugged it on accident while it was hot...but even then, it came back fine. (Of course it did. ZFS is intended to be robust in the face of unplanned failures regardless of cause.) And because ZFS: If it ever has any issues, then they'll be reported and logged either in the normal course of doing things, or during a periodic scrub. Every read is checksummed (even in normal operation), and every discrepancy is reported. It's been clean. It is my intent to keep it as a scratch disk until it becomes problematic, and my further hope is to be able to analyze those problems once they occur. It won't last forever, but it's lasted for quite a long time so far. (A little bit of inquiry with smartctl and some math just now shows that it has endured writes equivalent to ~43,000% of its capacity.)
gnuplustoejam 1mo ago
Why does anyone bother with these ephemeral meme distros when you can accomplish the same with vanilla FreeBSD/Illumos/Linux using standard commands and documentation? If you need your hand held to file share, that's why Windows Server still exists and is the gold standard for SMB.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- unethical_ban 1mo ago
  Why use open source when windows exists?
- televisionsaval 1mo ago
  If you have coworkers or other priorities it's sometimes preferable to have the option to have a hand held at some tasks or incidents rather than making sure someone competent read all the documentation pertaining to some irreversible command lines. You can try to treat a LLM as that hand holding but it can be a psychophantic member of group think while a checkbox stays a stable checkbox.
- Ahrgo 1mo ago
  Because I don't want to spend that much time an all systems i'm running? you also get a whole community testing the stack, fixing it too. And don't be that pissi... when I started 20 years ago, stuff like this would have been the gateway to linux world and is for sure still today for plenty of people...
snapplebobapple 1mo ago
Was super excited until i saw thatcit was the old freebsd base and not the |inux future
- sudonem 1mo ago
  The BSD base is the entire point. If you prefer driving towards Linux all that is necessary is to migrate your TrueNAS CORE instance to TrueNAS Scale which is Debian based. (It is reportedly fairly painless). This specific project is for people that didn’t like being pushed towards Debian and wanted to stick to BSD.
  - snapplebobapple 1mo ago
    And that's great, it's just not exciting because the future is linux based, if just for the hardware support. I was hoping for a truenas fork for people annoyed with the truenas closed source/hostility stuff as of late.
kartoshechka 1mo ago
not related to the freecore, but I think it's unfortunate that clean, minimalist web design with monospace font is now smearing AI, at least for me
vermaden 1mo ago
Seems that zVault 'did not make it' - https://zvault.io/ https://zvault.io/ - even the page is gone now. Lets hope FreeCORE will make it longer. Some comparison between Linux based TrueNAS SCALE and FreeBSD based TrueNAS CORE here: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-versus-truenas-scale/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-versu... Regards, vermaden
- Brian_K_White 23d ago
  About to move over myself. Apparently it now works to migrate from zvault 13.3 to freecore. I can not think of any way to decide between freecore and bsdnas. Both freecore and bsdnas seem to be single developer projects so far. Similarly there were at least 2 other 15.x ports done by individuals even earlier but not really pubblicized with their own websites. And one of those, dravanet, was what bsdnas forked from, and dravent continued to develop after that too so that's yet a 3rd distinct not-certainly-dead version really. They are all still a toss up at the moment but as long as it continues to be more or less painless to hop then I guess it doesn't matter which you switch to right now. And then xigmanas is a bit behind still on 14.x but not derelict, but also different and not as painless a migration. But it's been around a long time and even if it's slower to update, seems safer and more predictable if you want to find a new home once and not have to be hopping 3 more times over the next couple years.
mxuribe 1mo ago
This is great and am wishing the team well on this endeavor! One nitpick is that while the site looks clean, and there seems to be some good amount of documentation, i think there was a lost opportunity for a simple, yet more universal description of *what this is*! I mean, i get that this descends from FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE...but why could they not add a small, single line of text that also helps explain it to other folks who don't know fully what the means? Here is a crappy but at least slightly more descriptive option: "FreeCORE is an operating system and associated software for your network attached storage (NAS) needs. FreeCORE descends from FreeNAS and TrueNAS® CORE, and builds on FreeBSD and OpenZFS..." I'm not going to win the Pulitzer prize any time soon, i get that. But at least most folks will get a little more of the gist of what this FreeCore thing is or could help them. I'm only making this suggestion because i want more folks to participate and enjoy free and open source software. I'm not expecting someone's grandparents to understand this, but i betcha other folks who for example might be migrating from Windows NAS-like offerings might have an interest...so making the intro at least a tiny more descriptive helps. Again, even with my comments, i do wish the team well, and only want them to succeed. So please take my comments as merely a suggestion for improving things for all to benefit. In fact I'll be playing around with this to set it up and test on my homelab.
mctt 1mo ago
I installed this on my testing server. Everything worked. It needed 13.3-U1 so I performed a manual tar upgrade/update because I was still on an older release on the boot USB. https://download-core.sys.truenas.net/13.3/STABLE/U1/ https://download-core.sys.truenas.net/13.3/STABLE/U1/ I didn't use the latest U2 because FreeCORE didn't ask for that. I have not tested; sh freecore-enroll.sh --revert or RETURN TO 13.3 from the web admin interface.
bartleeanderson 1mo ago
Well, I was considering giving this a look, maybe spinning it up. But with the elitist bs coming down from the top making this not a community effort but a product, fuck it. There is nothing here for me.
lproven 1mo ago
FWIW, previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438678 (No comments.)

177 points by sashk 1mo ago

What a shame I didn't discover this sooner -- I finally sent my 11-year-old TrueNAS system[1] through the one-way Linux door about a year ago because I gave up on any hope that something like this would come along and I didn't see another way to keep it current. The migration path went smoothly but I preferred the FreeBSD setup if only because it forced me to do something a bit more interesting in my spare time. I do quite a lot of Linux work in my day job and it was nice to occasionally work on something that was surface-level similar but subtly and not-so-subtly different. [1] Over 11 years I have replaced every component (even the CPU/motherboard) at least once except for the case. Migrating from MBR to UEFI was "fun".

suprjami 1mo ago
The NAS of Theseus
Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
FreeBSD with ZFS tends to be less chaotic once setup. Linux distro in storage appliances can be hit or miss, but ZFS/F2FS/CephFS for /home and ext4+Overlayfs for OS / are reliable these days. Usually, for JBOD file archiving people want to avoid cutting-edge anything. Sometimes Linux kernel less-popular fs updates add or remove data-corrupting fringe filesystem bugs and features. People usually discover this on their own after the first SSD/HDD starts to wear-out, upgrade breaks compatibility, and the solution is re-install/copy-over everything. Accordingly, I was surprised people now deploy btrfs on linux / for some distro, as your options when things go awry was limited at one time. Would be cool if it was finally production ready, and actually reliable on degraded hardware. Too late for me, started my own mini vanity NAS/automated-testing project last year with a few built in features similar to https://guacamole.apache.org https://guacamole.apache.org and Proxmox. If the OS build stops sucking over winter break, than I may share the build-script someplace for people to pull off parts they find useful, and a USB-bootable portable rtx GPU image for test-drive/recovery scenarios. =3
- CTDOCodebases 1mo ago
  It's worth mentioning that last time I checked encrypted ZFS was not considered production due to obscure file corruption bugs that were unpatched. This was a while ago so it may have changed but then changes can introduce new bugs...
  - Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
    Part of the problem is replicating fs bugs that take months/years to occur is nearly impossible... people still sell USB to SAS/SATA adapters that cause large file corruption in hardware too. ZFS does have bit-rot checksum detection/repair, but the encrypted file feature was a bit of a YOLO feature for awhile. Not sure where it is at these days, as ddr5 ram prices skew away most of ZFS best key features. =3
  - amarshall 1mo ago
    Bigger issue was that native encryption doesn’t (didn’t?) have a maintainer, so even though most bugs got fixed, it’s not a great thing to build on. Some of the key storage is also a bit outdated. IMO use LUKS unless you really need the features of ZFS native enc.

inventor7777 1mo ago

AT first I was very confused, then I realized that this is building on TrueNAS CORE, and not TrueNAS SCALE. Makes much more sense now!

magicalhippo 1mo ago
And for those still confused, CORE is FreeBSD-based and has been discontinued, while SCALE is Debian-based and the version that will be developed by TrueNAS going forwards. Hence the "continued" part in the title.
- a1o 1mo ago
  Ha interesting, any idea why the FreeBSD variant was discontinued? This was one of the projects I always associated with FreeBSD.
  - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
    Chasing dockerized enterprise customers.
    - simondotau 1mo ago
      So by “scale” they mean their business model
  - hatch_q 1mo ago
    Poor hardware support.
    - lproven 1mo ago
      Nah. Doesn't really matter when you are building the hardware to do that job. And in any event, FreeBSD is primarily a server OS, and its support is quite good in that department. Example: OpenBSD and NetBSD both will install X11 and a window manager by default from the installer, if you want. FreeBSD doesn't. They're working on it, but they've been working on it for years.

bhouston 1mo ago

I did the migration to Linux and it actually was painless. I didn't really notice any degradation or hiccups in any way. But I guess this is a good option if FreeBSD is important to you.

mtlynch 1mo ago

Worth noting that TrueNAS recently stopped publishing their build scripts, intentionally making it harder to build their open source code.[0] [0] https://forums.truenas.com/t/clearing-the-air-on-build-scripts/64357 https://forums.truenas.com/t/clearing-the-air-on-build-scrip...

teruakohatu 1mo ago
This is disappointing, time to migrate from yet another was-open-source-now-only-technically-open-source software. At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled. Essentially treat open source as closed source. How did we end up with this state of affairs?
- Grombobulous 1mo ago
  Oftentimes the alternative is migrating to one dying or unstable zero-funding open source project to the next. Which path you go down depends on a lot of factors of that particular piece of software. Can I trust FreeCORE to be a stable, secure project that hangs on to my NAS data if it’s an unfunded fork? Or would it be better to give up some openness for something like TrueNAS SCALE? When it comes to stuff like Proxmox and TrueNAS I think a lot of what keeps those good products for homelab use is the fact that they have commercial customers paying for the development. I can count on TrueNAS being around and getting updates because they have a proven revenue stream. That said, it’s a balance, because sometimes that commercialization becomes a rug pull. A lot of the viability of those projects for homelab use revolves around the companies that put those products out recognizing that they have a customer base that will not pay and accepting that fact without deciding to try to squeeze out every last person who just might pay by compromising the free edition. I like the way Proxmox and OpnSense handle this: you get the community patch channels which are “not for production use” which scares the corporate businesses into paying but has zero negative impact for home users. To be clear I’m also not saying FreeCORE specifically is a fly-by-night project or unstable or anything. I’m genuinely unfamiliar with it. I’m just saying, sometimes projects like that end up not being the right choice for certain use cases.

a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago

This seems nice. FreeBSD always seemed nicer than Linux, though now that Linux is being developed by LLMs and Torvalds is vibe-coding, I wonder if they'll be able to keep up.

inventor7777 1mo ago
As far as I understand, Torvalds said that he is not going to oppose all AI-generated improvements to Linux, not that he's vibe coding new kernel modules for fun.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
  Torvalds is mostly merging code in the kernel, not writing modules. He claims he's a manager now: https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-summit-linus-torvalds/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-summit-linus-torva... But he's very pro-ai, though, and is vibe closing other projects like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Vide-Coding https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Vide-Coding Linux is definitely going to speed up as it starts to get vibe coded. In a few years, I bet that it's all going to be built with agentic loops, and nobody will be looking at the code at all.
  - sbseitz 1mo ago
    Imagine calling Linus a vibe coder... go look up the definition and then re-evaluate your statement.
    - a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
      He calls himself a vibe coder. I gave you the link. Who am I to call him a liar? And why do you act like it's an insult? For most problems, reading and writing code by hand is dead. For the remainder, it will be soon.
      - inventor7777 1mo ago
        Linus said that this particular project was vibe coded, not that he was a vibe coder or that he's going to vibe-code everything he does from now on. > "Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding"

discite 1mo ago

Thank you, you made my day 100% better

mvanbaak 1mo ago

There's also bsdnas: https://bsdnas.com https://bsdnas.com

lproven 1mo ago
This one is news to me! Thank you! How long has it been around? Anyone tried it and can give an impression of what it's like?
- mvanbaak 1mo ago
  I heard about it couple of days ago. Since I'm running 'stock' FreeBSD, I cannot comment on what it's like, sorry.

bluGill 1mo ago

Who is behind this? I've been burned once with nas, and I watched the long Plex to Jellyfin saga. What assurance do I have that this will continue to be developed and will become good?

caycep 1mo ago

oh man, just as I upgraded to the debian TrueNAS

rkagerer 1mo ago

I used TrueNAS in the past but last touched it several years ago. I gather now there are two flavors: CORE which continues to use FreeBSD under the hood, and SCALE (aka Community Edition) which is based on Debian Linux. If I understand correctly, the former is only receiving security and stability updates, and iXsystems is developing all new features only on SCALE. If you were to install fresh today, would you prefer this (FreeCORE), BSDnas, or the official SCALE version - and why? No MacOS clients, so don't need SMB Spotlight.

kalleboo 1mo ago
I migrated from TrueNAS CORE to SCALE, and found that Linux had better performance. I don't see why you'd use FreeBSD if you don't have a very specific reason (hobby, jails, etc)
omnimus 1mo ago
I have two TrueNAS Scale servers and it's been really good, they backup each other and also run several services i use thanks to Docker.

sbseitz 1mo ago

[flagged]

Brian_K_White 1mo ago
Is truenas scale and proxmox just butt hurt linux users not wanting to use windows server?

_0xdd 1mo ago

In ~2017 I ditched FreeNAS when my FreeNAS Mini died from the Atom C2000 hardware failure. iXSystems was great about getting me a replacement board, but I decided when I rebuilt the system to just use FreeBSD and get used to command-line only administration. That directly lead to me learning pf, jails, bhyve, etc. Yeah, I don't have any fancy web UI, but I've had a rock solid system for almost 10 years with Samba + NFS running without issue.

ssl-3 1mo ago
I've been using things like Samba and NFS since the 1990s. They're not hard to figure out with useful resolution. When I finally became determined to give ZFS a serious go around 2016, I looked at all of my options -- including throwing some hardware together for FreeNAS, and running FreeNAS in a VM. I decided to just use an existing Linux box that was already doing storage stuff and add ZFS to it. It's been fine ever since. Keeping ZFS going isn't deep voodoo at all; of all the things this box does, ZFS has probably been the most hands-off aspect of it.
- sherr 1mo ago
  This is what I do, to try out ZFS in a "safe" and easy way. An HP Microserver (my home server) with a USB3 disk attached formatted as ZFS. The server still runs Debian stable and uses DKMS ZFS. The recent pain points have only been the time taken to rebuild the kernel module for kernel updates and there have been a lot of them over the past few months (due to all the CVE's found and fixed). The ZFS side has been plain sailing so far but if I hit any ZFS issues I may have trouble (but, as I say, it's a test anyway).
  - ssl-3 1mo ago
    That's a great test environment and it really helps drive away some of the misconceptions about ZFS. It's a lovely filesystem and it can work in very stodgy ways with zetabytes on Serious Hardware, but it can also work with relatively small devices on silly hardware. Another example: I've got a ZFS scratch disk that has seen dozens of terabytes written. It's an old ~120GB Intel-branded SATA SSD that is connected with a very cheap SATA to USB3 adapter cable. I've been using it this way for years. All of the Internet lore has told me that this must result in resolute failure. Whether because USB is broadly not a serious data bus, or because ZFS doesn't like non-serious things, or because 1 copy is 0 copies, or because SSDs are fragile creatures that hate write cycles, or because I've created a portal to hell, or something else: The lore states that it must result in failure, and usually stipulates that ZFS would amplify this concern. But it's been great. Really. Zero issues -- except when I unplugged it on accident while it was hot...but even then, it came back fine. (Of course it did. ZFS is intended to be robust in the face of unplanned failures regardless of cause.) And because ZFS: If it ever has any issues, then they'll be reported and logged either in the normal course of doing things, or during a periodic scrub. Every read is checksummed (even in normal operation), and every discrepancy is reported. It's been clean. It is my intent to keep it as a scratch disk until it becomes problematic, and my further hope is to be able to analyze those problems once they occur. It won't last forever, but it's lasted for quite a long time so far. (A little bit of inquiry with smartctl and some math just now shows that it has endured writes equivalent to ~43,000% of its capacity.)

gnuplustoejam 1mo ago

Why does anyone bother with these ephemeral meme distros when you can accomplish the same with vanilla FreeBSD/Illumos/Linux using standard commands and documentation? If you need your hand held to file share, that's why Windows Server still exists and is the gold standard for SMB.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
unethical_ban 1mo ago
Why use open source when windows exists?
televisionsaval 1mo ago
If you have coworkers or other priorities it's sometimes preferable to have the option to have a hand held at some tasks or incidents rather than making sure someone competent read all the documentation pertaining to some irreversible command lines. You can try to treat a LLM as that hand holding but it can be a psychophantic member of group think while a checkbox stays a stable checkbox.
Ahrgo 1mo ago
Because I don't want to spend that much time an all systems i'm running? you also get a whole community testing the stack, fixing it too. And don't be that pissi... when I started 20 years ago, stuff like this would have been the gateway to linux world and is for sure still today for plenty of people...

snapplebobapple 1mo ago

Was super excited until i saw thatcit was the old freebsd base and not the |inux future

sudonem 1mo ago
The BSD base is the entire point. If you prefer driving towards Linux all that is necessary is to migrate your TrueNAS CORE instance to TrueNAS Scale which is Debian based. (It is reportedly fairly painless). This specific project is for people that didn’t like being pushed towards Debian and wanted to stick to BSD.
- snapplebobapple 1mo ago
  And that's great, it's just not exciting because the future is linux based, if just for the hardware support. I was hoping for a truenas fork for people annoyed with the truenas closed source/hostility stuff as of late.

kartoshechka 1mo ago

not related to the freecore, but I think it's unfortunate that clean, minimalist web design with monospace font is now smearing AI, at least for me

vermaden 1mo ago

Seems that zVault 'did not make it' - https://zvault.io/ https://zvault.io/ - even the page is gone now. Lets hope FreeCORE will make it longer. Some comparison between Linux based TrueNAS SCALE and FreeBSD based TrueNAS CORE here: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-versus-truenas-scale/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-versu... Regards, vermaden

Brian_K_White 23d ago
About to move over myself. Apparently it now works to migrate from zvault 13.3 to freecore. I can not think of any way to decide between freecore and bsdnas. Both freecore and bsdnas seem to be single developer projects so far. Similarly there were at least 2 other 15.x ports done by individuals even earlier but not really pubblicized with their own websites. And one of those, dravanet, was what bsdnas forked from, and dravent continued to develop after that too so that's yet a 3rd distinct not-certainly-dead version really. They are all still a toss up at the moment but as long as it continues to be more or less painless to hop then I guess it doesn't matter which you switch to right now. And then xigmanas is a bit behind still on 14.x but not derelict, but also different and not as painless a migration. But it's been around a long time and even if it's slower to update, seems safer and more predictable if you want to find a new home once and not have to be hopping 3 more times over the next couple years.

mxuribe 1mo ago

This is great and am wishing the team well on this endeavor! One nitpick is that while the site looks clean, and there seems to be some good amount of documentation, i think there was a lost opportunity for a simple, yet more universal description of *what this is*! I mean, i get that this descends from FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE...but why could they not add a small, single line of text that also helps explain it to other folks who don't know fully what the means? Here is a crappy but at least slightly more descriptive option: "FreeCORE is an operating system and associated software for your network attached storage (NAS) needs. FreeCORE descends from FreeNAS and TrueNAS® CORE, and builds on FreeBSD and OpenZFS..." I'm not going to win the Pulitzer prize any time soon, i get that. But at least most folks will get a little more of the gist of what this FreeCore thing is or could help them. I'm only making this suggestion because i want more folks to participate and enjoy free and open source software. I'm not expecting someone's grandparents to understand this, but i betcha other folks who for example might be migrating from Windows NAS-like offerings might have an interest...so making the intro at least a tiny more descriptive helps. Again, even with my comments, i do wish the team well, and only want them to succeed. So please take my comments as merely a suggestion for improving things for all to benefit. In fact I'll be playing around with this to set it up and test on my homelab.

mctt 1mo ago

I installed this on my testing server. Everything worked. It needed 13.3-U1 so I performed a manual tar upgrade/update because I was still on an older release on the boot USB. https://download-core.sys.truenas.net/13.3/STABLE/U1/ https://download-core.sys.truenas.net/13.3/STABLE/U1/ I didn't use the latest U2 because FreeCORE didn't ask for that. I have not tested; sh freecore-enroll.sh --revert or RETURN TO 13.3 from the web admin interface.

bartleeanderson 1mo ago

Well, I was considering giving this a look, maybe spinning it up. But with the elitist bs coming down from the top making this not a community effort but a product, fuck it. There is nothing here for me.

lproven 1mo ago

FWIW, previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438678 (No comments.)