FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux 206
dnaumov writes "FreeNAS, a popular, free NAS solution, is moving away from using FreeBSD as its underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers, can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux."
Well, it's open source, so fork it. (Score:2, Informative)
From the last page of comments, it looks like one company is already forking it to keep it on FreeBSD.
Half of the comments are users who picked FreeNAS for it's ZFS functionality worrying that they were stuck on FreeNAS 0.7.
Greater hardware compatibility? Sure, for some desktop computer hardware, but FreeBSD is fine for everything a NAS needs.
Re:Well, it's open source, so fork it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but FreeBSD is a far more reliable and higher-quality core than even Debian could ever hope to be.
The FreeBSD development process and team is far more integrated and centralized. This has resulted in a codebase that is much cleaner than what we see in the more distributed development model non-BSD open source software (including Linux).
Changes and new features go through a strenuous review process before they're admitted to the FreeBSD codebase. If code makes it into a public release of FreeBSD, you can be damn sure that it is of an extremely high quality, and has been reviewed by some of the best minds in the field.
This isn't as much the case with Linux and much of the userland software that Debian uses. The quality of the code is generally lower than that of FreeBSD's code, and bugs can creep in much easier.
For something as critical as storage, FreeBSD is clearly the way to go.
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I would imagine anything that makes it into Debian stable is pretty comparable, given the two years or so between Debian releases. Now if they're using Debian testing as a base, I would concede that its quite feasible that the code could be less stable than a FreeBSD based distro.
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> higher-quality core than even Debian could ever hope to be.
If that's true, it's only because FreeBSD refuses to include anything in the core. Even extremely basic things like Perl and bash are ports-tree stuff and go in
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Experience tells me otherwise. I'm in the position where I administer both Debian and FreeBSD systems. This is roughly over the last five years. The Debian systems haven't skipped a beat during that time. The FreeBSD boxes are generally fine as well, although I did have one crash on me once. Luckily it wasn't a busy system.
Five years of running, and not one single kernel or base OS problem.
Re:Well, it's open source, so fork it. (Score:4, Informative)
btrfs is not even in the same league as ZFS. ZFS is a LVM and fs replacement, done so data doesn't get lost between those two layers.
btrfs offers nowhere near as many featres. ZFS has 64 bit CRCs (which are EXTREMELY useful for finding changed files on backups.) btrfs has 32 bit CRCs which are almost useless as a way of detecting changes, unless one goes by timestamps alone. btrfs also doesn't have transactions (better hope your UPS is up to snuff), and cannot detect corruption on the fly.
Finally, btrfs has not seen any production use and abuse. No way I'm trusting my data to this filesystem for at least 1-2 years, and by then, there will be a "real" filesystem that is on par with ZFS. At best btrfs is a transitional filesystem, like ext4. It isn't a generation changer like ZFS.
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[citation needed] is not a substitute for meaningful discussion and rebuttal.
"Linux is definitely faster and more feature-rich than FreeBSD." Keeping in the spirit of your post, would you care to post some benchmarks concerning the speed of linux vs. BSD in data storage, or for ZFS vs. btrfs?
at any rate, isn't stability more important in terms of this type of storage? if you're using a NAS-type device, i can't see how speed would be your primary concern, since you're limited by the NAS-style architecture
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That benchmark is demonstrating only the speed of the respective filesystems... The FreeBSD graphs are actually benchmarks of UFS, not the underlying operating system. The Linux benchmarks are EXT4 filesystem benchmarks (nice to see an unstable file system compared to stable file systems). And the OpenSolaris benchmarks are ZFS tests.
Now, if both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris were benchmarked with ZFS, we might have something useful to look at.
And in any case, a single benchmark doesn't justify the claim that
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Read it, there are various benchmarks there. And FreeBSD loses in all but one of them. Sometimes badly.
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What the hell are you talking about? If you're referring to just page #7, what I've said applies...
If you're referring to the other benchmarks they performed, FreeBSD significantly surpasses Linux as often as not.
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Apparently so is the guy who wrote them...
"Both FreeBSD 7.2 and 8.0 had also lower CPU utilization than the two Linux distributions tested"
"FreeBSD 7.2 came in slightly behind FreeBSD 8.0 while Ubuntu 9.10 came in fourth and Fedora 12 took a distant fifth place finish."
"FreeBSD 7.2 was slightly faster than FreeBSD 8.0, but both were faster than Ubuntu/Fedora and OpenSolaris."
"OpenSolaris 2010.02 did the best followed by the two FreeBSD releases. Fedora and Ubuntu
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As for btrfs, just let it die, we already have ZFS, Linux has
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As for btrfs, just let it die, we already have ZFS, Linux has a large number of filesystems supported, but the vast majority of them are pretty mediocre and adding btrfs is pointless when pretty much everybody else seems to be hopping on the ZFS bandwagon.
"We" here means a very, very small subset of open source community. Ditto for your "everybody else".
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What does netcraft say?
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FreeBSD surpasses Linux in performance benchmarks all the time.
"Feature-rich" is a bit too vague to argue, but I have yet to find software which works on Linux and not Linux... Even Linux binaries can be run on FreeBSD. So I'm at a loss to guess what "features" Linux may have, which isn't found in another OS that can do pretty much everything Linux can...
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I am a Linux user but for a NAS ZFS is a HUGE advantage and btrfs isn't here yet so that doesn't matter right now.
Linux is faster? For NAS all you really need to worry about is IO. To be anywhere close to fair you would want to benchmark two FreeNAS and say OpenFiler.
Feature rich? What features do you need outside of a filesystem and networking?
Stability and security are all that matters for a NAS.
The one benefit I see with going to Linux is that it will be easier to integrate into a Linux shop than BSD is.
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I re-read his post, and yet still missed the part where he said anything about Linux dropping data.
He simply said FreeBSD is higher quality, which is of course endlessly debatable, but may well be true. While your snarky response dismisses any question of software quality out-of-hand...
The same app
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It all depends on what FreeNAS' target market is going to be. Is it going to be old desktop machines that people recycle into NAS boxes, or will it be the large variety of NAS boxes that are found in the wild today. If the former, then the switch to Linux buys you nothing. Really, FreeBSD and Linux run the same on x86 hardware (sometimes one is faster, or the other, or there's an issue that keeps one or the other from running, but in general both just work damn well). If the target is the latter, then L
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Release 0.6x:
- User authentication I must add at minimum LDAP authentication... For NIS and RADIUS I must check if it's possible (don't know if it's possible to use PAM for samba).
Release 0.7x:
- Migrate to FreeBSD 7.0 (with ZFS support)
- Testing a new way for configuring/using share:
'Adding a new disk' will automatically initialize it (format under UFS) and mount it (transparent process for the user).
. 'Creating a share'(create a folder on a selected disk), with user/group/quota property on this share
Release 0.8x:
- Adding monitoring features (SNMP, email alerting, etc..) - Adding other features (I18n Web GUI, LCD, disk encryption, etc...)
Release 0.9x:
- Only Bug fixes, no more new features - This step will depend a lot's about the development of the "geom vinum tools". If this tools is not stable at this moment, I will replace it by 'geom mirror' for RAID 1 and by 'geom stripe' for RAID 0.
Release 1.0:
- The D day! - Lot's of documentation: User guide and developers guide.
and...
Date: 2009-09-17 17:23
Sender: votdev
--- cut ---
Anyway, 0.7 seems to be the last version of FreeNAS as it is right at the moment. For the next version the whole system will be recoded (what i'm doing at the moment). There will be no more embedded installs anymore, also the OS will be Debian.
Regards
Volker
By any other definition, this would be a fork. It's not even FreeNAS any more, it will be CoreNAS?
Anyone have more insight into what's REALLY going on with this project?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
This story is not the "whole" story.
Basically the author of FreeNAS is going to start over doing it on Linux, but some other group is taking over the FreeBSD portion of FreeNAS:
http://www.freebsdnews.net/2009/12/05/freenas-ready-step/ [freebsdnews.net]
OpenAFS (Score:2)
Basically the author of FreeNAS is going to start over doing it on Linux, but some other group is taking over the FreeBSD portion of FreeNAS
I was just looking at FreeNAS the other week. It would be absolutely fantastic if FreeNAS started supporting OpenAFS. A lot of sites using NAS are actually distributed around a single city or several cities. A distributed, networked file system would be an advantage for a lot of activities.
Anonymous FTP for download is fine, it's like HTTP. But dropping FTP for upload should be a priority.
Re-doing FreeNAS is exciting news.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
I propose forking to create a POSIX version. We can call it PNAS. Hopefully that will satisfy at least half the population. I hope nobody forks PNAS, since that would hurt.
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He could be creating a deb that could be installed that installs and configures various services to make a debian-based system look like the old FreeNAS. I've used FreeNAS and there is really no reason to have a dedicated system for services that it provides. Many of the people that already use it either use FreeBSD or Linux on another system. If those systems could also run the easy configuration of FreeNAS, they could consolidate systems in their environment.
That's all guessing though. I really hope it en
New project (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't the real solution to start a new project for a Linux-based NAS solution and leave FreeNAS development to those who want to use FreeBSD?
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A rose by any other name (Score:2)
That's effectively what's happening, it's just that the project name is following the developer rather than the code base. Apparently a fork from 0.7 that will keep FreeBSD is already announced. It will have a new name. The other branch will keep the name and switch to Debian for the next release.
ugh (Score:5, Funny)
Aww I'm just messing with you all. Anyone who had a genuine emotional reaction to the above needs to go outside right now and recommune with nature.
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ZFS is available for Linux. [zfs-fuse.net]
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And yet, the Linux kernel supports MS-DOS filesystems does it not? The reason for that is that although the original implementation license was incompatible with the Linux kernel, a reimplementation was possible. Is it not possible for ZFS? I suggest that if the code is open enough to be included in FreeBSD, the data structure
Patents (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not saying its not a lot of work, just that it is possible if the desire is there..
It's not a work problem - ZFS is elegantly simple, 6000 LoC or so in its basic form.
The problem is it's heavily patented and you have no rights to those patents if you don't derive your code from the CDDL'ed code, which you can't do with the GPL (but FreeBSD, MacOSX, and the FUSE module did).
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http://kqinfotech.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/hello-world/ [wordpress.com]
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Linux: developing stuff that's like totally going to be better than everything else. No really, when it'll be done in date.getYear()+2 it'll rock.
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Well, ZFS was declared 'stable' in FreeBSD only this year. Considering Debian release schedule, btrfs might be 'stable' by the time the Squeeze+1 is released.
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Even this article points out that btrfs isn't ready for production, while ZFS is in production systems today. How does that make brtfs better? Does it have a better license? Does it have more potential? Maybe. But that alone doesn't make it better today.
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Yet the project needs to have a future. Given that it's still in the pre-1.0 state, it might have been a wise choice.
It's pretty clear that Linux is the focal point of efforts in the OpenSource universe right now.
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Btrfs (a work in progress for now) is better than ZFS
You realise that the linked article doesn't say that, right? It says that ZFS suffers from fragmentation (irrelevant with flash or L2ARC) and at btrfs won't so much. In every feature comparison I've seen, ZFS does almost everything btrfs plans to do, and the few things that btrfs plans to do that ZFS doesn't yet do are also under development for ZFS.
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Ok. Let me rephrase it: "The design of btrfs is better than the design of ZFS".
And it's true, actually. Read the linked article. Btrfs right now has the most features of ZFS: O(1) snapshots, built-in RAID support, easy administration, extents, etc. I've used it in a test environment with great results.
ZFS wins in stability, but that's only for now.
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I hate the GPL ... so much.
You will of course back up this vehement disgust by refusing to associate with anything connected to the GPL's backward, misguided socialism. I suggest you start by refusing to make use of GCC, its entourage of hippie fueled utilities, and all applications created with such tools. Then you can truly stand atop your mountain of smugness and enjoy the the wonderful free toys you have to play with after you have purged yourself of that demon taint. Then again, after that, you might find yourself a bit more pro
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Defending software freedom is a good in the world. (Score:2)
When you say "I hate the GPL ... so much." you should have to explain why; something you have not done with the exception that it won't let you link in GPL-incompatibly licensed code such as ZFS. Perhaps your anger should be directed toward those that license incompatibly with the GPL. After all, as the grandparent poster points out, the GNU GPL has done a lot for you as you "promote BSD" systems. Your hatred of the GPL comes off as though you don't understand what the GPL says or why.
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It's not that GPL is the victim of incompatibilities. GPL had a hand in causing these. The philosophy of the BSD/MIT licenses is to give freely. The philosophy of GPL/CDDL is take freely, and give to your friends. Generosity vs. selfishness.
I haven't taken the time to read the GPL, but I generally know what it is about. I have read the MIT and BSD licenses. In the same way, I don't care what the ingredients for some processed food product are or why they are there: there are too many.
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I haven't taken the time to read the GPL, but I generally know what it is about. I have read the MIT and BSD licenses. In the same way, I don't care what the ingredients for some processed food product are or why they are there: there are too many.
Do so. Even if it's only version 2.
Version 3 IMO is a clarification and adds a number of clauses to deal with new challenges like patents and embedded devices which only run signed code, but the general intent is broadly similar.
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Then go read the license, at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html [gnu.org], before making historically false statements. I've worked with all the licenses you name, and the Apache license, and various closed source licenses. The GPL wins hands down for insisting that open source work remain open source even after local fragmenting, in order to block the very "embrace and extend" that was done to BSD in the 1980's and that was attempted by Microsoft with Kerberos and Java.
If you only "know what it is about" and have
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"The GPL wins hands down for insisting that open source work remain open source"
That is exactly why he prefers the MSD and MIT licenses over the GPL licenses - they have different goals. The MIT and BSD licenses give your software away freely to anyone who wants it, which is what you want if you want your software widely used, and the GPL licenses give your software away only to people who agree to also give their software away for free, which is what you want if you want to promote free software. He prefer
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There's a big difference between preferring A and hating B ... so much.
I prefer GPL personally but feel no hatred or even dislike of the BSD or MIT licenses at all.
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Preferences are fine. But he made factual claims about the encumbrances of a legal contract he's never actually read. That's not a preference, that's reasoning from hearsay. And it's fixable in 5 minutes by actually reading the GPL. (It's a fascinating document, especially compared to other, "freer" licenses.) The GPL often seems founded in paranoia about how intellectual property will be misused, but that paranoia is historically well founded. (I remember BSD and AT&T UNIX licensing problems: they were
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GPL licenses give your software away only to people who agree to also give their software away for free
you are making the parent's point perfectly. If you actually read the GPL carefully, you'd see that anybody can use GPL software for anything even if they don't agree with the GPL or the principles of free software or anything. The GPL is an ideal license for giving software away to everybody.
The restrictions of the GPL come in for people who want to distribute GPL code and only really matter for those who want to distribute derivatives of GPL code mixed with code which under a different license. Even
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Incorrect. The GPL does not say who you can give your software to or what they can do with "their" software. The GPL only says that you cannot impose any practical restrictions on the redistribution of GPL-licensed code.
For example, you can download GCC and do anything you like to it, including nothing at all. But if you want to sell or otherwise redistribute it, you have to make the source code a
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Conjecture! I mean, I don't have figures to back this up either, but I do know there is shirtloads of code in a Linux distro with an intact BSD/Apache/MIT license. I am not aware of wholesale re-licensing just for the sake of it.
But there is no point saying "if BSD code was restricted from GPL licensing it would be the other way around" because; 1) that is not the way things are and; 2) the whole point of BSD is it does not have these restrictions.
Where BSD code HAS been incorporated into GPL it has been
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Any why is that not fair? If someone writes and releases a library under a particular set of terms, that pretty much spells out how they want that library to be used and distributed. If you can't agree to those terms, find a different one. If you don't like the software's terms of use, take issue with the copyright holder, not the license itself.
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And why is that not fair?
Never said it wasn't. /thread
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The authors of ZFS chose this licence because it was incompatible with the linux kernel. CDDL [wikipedia.org]
It says
Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that
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Hmm. You moved all of your data to a brand-new file system, with no backups, and were surprised at the results?
openfiler (Score:4, Insightful)
i feel like the only think freenas had over openfiler was ZFS. i've been running openfiler for 2 years now and it has been rock solid.
without zfs why not go for the more mature linux based NAS?
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Openfiler's web gui is buggy as hell, its local LDAP server option is poorly documented and provides terrible diagnostic messages when improperly configured, and it has no official support for installing/booting from flash. Never trust a product that wants to charge money for the admin guide.
I only tried FreeNAS briefly, and did end up using openfiler, but I would love to see anything beat openfiler.
no it stays FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4959
"FreeNAS needs some big modification for removing its present limitation (one of the biggest is the non support of easly users add-ons).
We think that a full-rewriting of the FreeNAS base is needed. From this idea, we will take 2 differents paths:
- Volker will create a new project called "'OpenMediaVault" based on a GNU/Linux using all its experience acquired with all its nights and week-ends spent to improve FreeNAS during the last 2 years. He still continue to work on FreeNAS (and try to share its time with this 2 projects).
- And, a great surprise: iXsystems, a company specialized in professional FreeBSD offers to take FreeNAS under their wings as an open source community driven project. This mean that they will involve their professionals FreeBSD developers to FreeNAS! Their manpower will permit to do a full-rewriting of FreeNAS.
Personally, I come back to actively work in FreeNAS and begin to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8.0 (that is "production ready" for ZFS)."
bsd,zfs,fork, bad time? (Score:2)
ZFS has just come out with built-in on line deduplication. Isnt this what you would call a killer feature for a NAS distro like this? FreeNAS is moving away from a killer feature like this?
In my experience, debian(linux) isnt going to offer significantly better hardware support to justify this switch. No graphics cards or exotic hardware are typically used for a small NAS server and thats where linux has better driver support.
I really like FreeNAS because it is so lightweight, runs from a flash key, does
kFreeBSD? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for Debian kFreeBSD.
ZFS works great in Linux (Score:2)
ZFS works quite well in Linux. [zfs-fuse.net] I've been using it for over a year with no problems.
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It's also roughly five times slower, based on what I've read. A non-starter for serious applications.
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It could be slower. I haven't used ZFS outside of Linux for very long and haven't performed any speed tests. But it works for me. I get about 25MB/s with it. I'm using an older version (0.5.0) and a new stable version was released today that is supposed to be much faster. In any case, since FreeNAS is moving to Linux, then if FreeNAS users want to continue using it their choice becomes a matter of ZFS with slower performance or no ZFS at all.
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Yeah, it's pretty horrible. And I don't really get the point. It's not like FreeBSD is particularly hard to install and configure, and configuring Samba to run on it is identical to configuring Samba to run on Linux. I'm hard pressed to think of a reason why you'd want to run ZFS via FUSE on Linux instead of using the real thing on a similar, well-supported Free Unix.
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Yes, it runs in userspace. It's not that slow for me. I can get about 25MB/s out of it, and I'm running an older release. A new stable version was released today and it has a number of performance improvements.
Re:ZFS works great in Linux (Score:4, Informative)
25MB/s _IS_ "that slow"
Its not FreeNAS (Score:2)
If we have a *drastic* fork like this, its only fair that the linux side of the fork should be renamed. With luck the FreeBSD branch wont get absorbed and become commercial, now that its being 'continued' by a for profit company. But if so, then so be it and ill just roll my own.
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Yes there is but it looks like licensing is a big issue. The talk surrounding Freenas' transition to Linux and the possibility of using Fuse essentially came to a conclusion that there are issues with using Fuse on Freenas for some reason. It may very well be that the implementation is too unstable at this point in time.
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Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
You are not inflammatory, you just give more meaning to the position of the first decimal point in the version number than it deserves.
Would the software magically be better if the version was 8.0? 2009.12? 3.141592? 666.123.789? There are many post-1.0 applications that are hopeless, buggy crap, quite a bit of them even commercial, and just as much sub-1.0 software of high stability and overall quality.
In this case, as with many FOSS projects, the sub-1.0 numbers probably mean "there are still features to be added before we consider our work complete". The keywords are "we", "consider" and "complete". "We" != "any other user with a different set of requirements", "consider" != "claim as absolute truth", "complete" != "stable". In other words, a 0.8 version might be perfectly stable, just not feature-complete from the author's point of view, and perfetly sufficient for a subset of potential users with less sophisticated needs.
And why 0.8 and not 2.3.075? My best guess is "because they could and they liked it better."
Case closed, have a good day.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
In this case, as with many FOSS projects, the sub-1.0 numbers probably mean "there are still features to be added before we consider our work complete".
I'd change your definition to "before we consider the initial version of our work complete". This is exactly why I mentioned sub 1.0 version number in a piece of free software. It means there is no marketing department requiring bumping up the version number to impress anybody.
So, as you say, the devs themselves don't think it has the capabilities to be granted the 1.0 number. For whatever reasons they feel.
In other words, a 0.8 version might be perfectly stable, just not feature-complete from the author's point of view, and perfetly sufficient for a subset of potential users with less sophisticated needs.
The key word here is "might". It might, it might not. One also has to consider that even if the system does have all the features you want and seems stable, is it being properly tested and maintained? Has it been around long enough for it to count as some indication that the devs aren't going to just give up on it soon? Is there already a community around it?
All of this goes into choosing a sub-1.0 project for something important. This is what I meant. To depend on an early version of a piece of software is too big of a commitment without the proper analysis of these and many other issues, most of which are not related to the features per se.
And, in any case, it is free software. So anyone can fork the project and continue with it. And it seems there is actually a fork of this project to keep it running over FreeBSD.
None of this changes what I said. If whoever is using it and worried about its future did consider this issues, good for them. If not, well...
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Or, they don't care. Changes in major release number often mean incompatible features. I'd have given a lot, for example, for OpenSSL to use a sane numbering system and release "0.97" as "9.7", and "0.98" as "9.8". Or the idiots over at CPAN who release version 1.1, 1.2, 1.21, 2.2105, then 1.3.
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I think you're still too married to the version # (Score:2)
One also has to consider [tested and maintained, broad userbase, active community, future maintenance]
Those are all very good points.
All of this goes into choosing a sub-1.0 project for something important.
Now, what does the version number have to do with the above considerations? Are you advocating investigating these issues for some version numbers but not others? So if I cobble something together which compiles and I call it "version 1.0", I can sneak my shoddy code past all your careful considerations?
To me, it sounds like the prudent thing would be to investigate the project for future dependability (however you define it, e.g. as above, or more detailed) no matter its cu
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The key word here is "might". It might, it might not.
And the very same thing can be said about 8.0, 3.141592 or 666.456.789 with the same implications about being properly tested and maintained and other things you pointed out in the rest of the quoted paragraph. I've seen too much post-1.0 buggy crap to believe otherwise.
I'd change your definition to "before we consider the initial version of our work complete". This is exactly why I mentioned sub 1.0 version number in a piece of free software. It means there is no marketing department requiring bumping up the version number to impress anybody.
So, as you say, the devs themselves don't think it has the capabilities to be granted the 1.0 number. For whatever reasons they feel.
Well, that's what I had in mind. 1.0 is the point where the devs can do a high fiver, pull out the bottle of champagne and (when sober again) start thinking about completely new features. The exact point of completeness is, however, absolute
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From the context it is extremely obvious that is definitely not the case. You are just grumbling because they are numbering releases differently to the way you would do it.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
If a vendor isn't willing to go to 1.0 then why should a customer have confidence? 1.0 is a milestone. Certainly it has absolutely no technical meaning, but that does not mean it has no meaning at all.
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Because they've done their testing of the software and found it to be highly reliable?
Because they've been following development, reading release notes, etc., and know what is and isn't stable, forward compatible, and/or feature complete?
Because they're not idiots who base their software decisions on intangible version numbers, rather than any actual knowledge of the product?
0.7 is a milestone. 2.0.5 is a m
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Vendor != Developer
If a vendor wants to base their product on FreeNAS 0.8, they are more than welcome to call their product NASPoint 1.0 or NASPoint 2010 or whatever the hell they want.
The developers of FreeNAS use a number less than 1.0 because they feel their product is not yet feature complete for a 1.0 release. Obviously, one of the issues is a reliance on an underlying operating system which they see as hampering them in some way, so they are going to switch operating systems before 1.0.
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bingo. I agree entirely.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
FreeNAS is an "easy-to-use" NAS for old hardware, and light on documentation -- read: it has a wiki; generate your own. So it's going to get a lot of first-timers, however technical, and they're going to have questions about the migration. Hence "concerns" in this sense really shouldn't be read as 'emotional outbursts of near panic', but as inquiries.
Anyhow, the traditional /. missing link for this story would be: http://www.learnfreenas.com/blog/ [learnfreenas.com]
I guess /. is running the story because it's a migration from a BSD to a Linux. But it's a nice minor news items on an interesting project, and is mostly useful by bringing FreeNAS to the attention of /.'ers who are starting to think about setting up a NAS.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I hope they use an older kernel. The new linux kernels have great speed, and total shit compatibility. I've got four old PCs sitting next to me, and not one of them can detect a DVD drive or read stably off a PATA HDD in Ubuntu 9.10 - yet it works fine in 9.04 (minus the CD drives), and in 8.10/8.04 everything is working great.
It's sad to see an OS cut support for old hardware, like a 2.2ghz Athlon XP w/ 2GB of RAM running off a 120GB PATA HDD. (Still fast enough to browse the internet :P )
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Well there are a couple things to consider. First, as others have mentioned, the fact that it's not yet at 1.0 has less importance in many free software projects. There are definitely projects that haven't reached 1.0 yet are still production ready.
Also, you seem to throw "free" in there like it's a bad thing (or maybe I'm misreading?), but the fact that people are using an open-source project may indicate that they're very concerned about future maintenance of the software they're using. Being open sou
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"I don't want to be inflammatory, but having "concerns regarding the future of their existing setups" when using a piece of free software in version 0.7 for something as important as data storage?"
You are kidding, right?
First, the meaning of version numbers is purely dependent on the project. There are plenty of pieces of software that were fine to use in production with version numbers less than 1.0, and there are plenty of pieces of software with larger version numbers (e.g. every other Linux kernel versi
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Version numbers are totally meaningless.
No, they are a significant milestone in how people think of a project. You can't compare versions of different packages, but version 1.0 means *someone* thought it significant, whether that be marketing, devs, or the guy running the ouija board. For a free source unpaid project, it means the devs think things have stabilized significantly. It has no significance in relation to other projects or indeed any one not heavily involved with the project.
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but version 1.0 means *someone* thought it significant
Call me old fashioned, but I think the practice of numbering releases with ordinal numbers is far less confusing. Alpha and beta monikers mean 'still adding features' and 'working out bugs' respectively. One dot (1.1) releases are feature changes, two dot (1.1.1) are bug fixes, and no-dot (2.0) reflect significant re-works (architectural, interface, etc.).
0.87 tells me nothing based on the number. 4.1b7 encodes lots of information.
Re:... and that sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, what's stopping people using NexentaStor (non-free) or NexentaOS (free as in beer/speech)? Better yet, Nexenta is OpenSolaris w/ ZFS, etc, but is an Ubuntu LTS 8.04-based distribution. Its always been the best of both worlds. If you have something using ZFS today, you can export the pool, install Nexenta, and reimport, being back up in minutes.
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If you have something using ZFS today, you can export the pool, install Nexenta, and reimport, being back up in minutes.
Maybe. (Open)Solaris is a bit pickier about wanting ZFS vdevs to be inside of GPT partitions. FreeBSD is layered on top of their GEOM subsystem, so it lets you put a ZFS vdev on just about anything. If it's inside of a bsdlabel partition, Solaris may not be able to find it to import the pool.
It may very well work. Just be sure to have a good backup just in case :)
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ZFS has some nice features, but I don't see any of them as being relevant for a media server. For instance, Linux can create a single logical volume from multiple raids just fine with LVM. Or aufs2 for that matter (Linux only). Which has some advantages over either ZFS or LVM (you can lose one RAID and still have all the data on the other). I don't think it's policy based method of creating an union of multiple writable drives is available anywhere else.
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