Which Nas OS?
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@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
Hey guys,
I was wanting to get familiar with the more popular operating systems for storage. I know of a few like FreeNas, ReadyNas, OpenMediaVault and so on. I just dont know what is more popular or better if there is such a thing. This is just a learning exercise. I don't need it. I don't have a usecase. Just wanting to try out a couple things to play with. What are the suggestions?The simple answer is... none. NAS OS as a concept is a bad one. Every OS does NAS out of the box. And is easy to use. All NAS OS simply take away from this. The idea of a NAS OS isn't a production concept. There is no reason for them to exist, your best option is to bever use one. Even the best ones aren't good enough to ever be used in production.
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@black3dynamite said in Which Nas OS?:
With FreeNAS, it was difficult for me to set up NAS like I have with my Fedora server.
Not just harder to use, but so much more to go wrong and so much less flexibility!
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@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
@Dashrender said in Which Nas OS?:
I could have sworn that @scottalanmiller has been against at least FreeNAS - just use a Linux OS and manage the shares. What value does FreeNAS/ReadyNAS, etc add on top of Fedora/Ubuntu/CentOS, etc?
Most likely nothing. Was just curious is all. I'm always trying to learn new things and never used one of these before.
Which is a great concept. Definitely learn new things. But this isn't a business / IT thing to learn. Rather it is a home / hobby thing to learn. And even at home, it makes no sense, it's just the kind of thing consumers use without thinking.
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@Dashrender said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
@Dashrender said in Which Nas OS?:
I could have sworn that @scottalanmiller has been against at least FreeNAS - just use a Linux OS and manage the shares. What value does FreeNAS/ReadyNAS, etc add on top of Fedora/Ubuntu/CentOS, etc?
Most likely nothing. Was just curious is all. I'm always trying to learn new things and never used one of these before.
If I continue to recall correctly - FreeNAS puts you at greater risk in Scott's mind because you (the admin) don't understand the under the hood stuff, the stuff most likely to break, and the FreeNAS GUI won't help you solve.. so you'll be diving in there to fix it anyway, might as well just stay there from the beginning.
All true PLUS it adds more code to fail, and is a niche product with no production purpose so the effort that goes into making it reliable and stable is a fraction of what the enterprise OSes like Fedora, Windows, or Ubuntu get. It's not just risky because of what it encourages the end user to do, but also risky because of what it encourages the engineers making the product to do, all because there is no value to the product at all (a NAS OS adds nothing over existing OSes) and has inherent risks that should always be unacceptable when talking about storage.
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@black3dynamite said in Which Nas OS?:
@Dashrender said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
@Dashrender said in Which Nas OS?:
I could have sworn that @scottalanmiller has been against at least FreeNAS - just use a Linux OS and manage the shares. What value does FreeNAS/ReadyNAS, etc add on top of Fedora/Ubuntu/CentOS, etc?
Most likely nothing. Was just curious is all. I'm always trying to learn new things and never used one of these before.
If I continue to recall correctly - FreeNAS puts you at greater risk in Scott's mind because you (the admin) don't understand the under the hood stuff, the stuff most likely to break, and the FreeNAS GUI won't help you solve.. so you'll be diving in there to fix it anyway, might as well just stay there from the beginning.
The thing about FreeNAS, everything should be done from the WebGUI but some adventurous person ends up messing with the CLI and end up breaking something.
Actually, that's not true. Many core functions, especially involving data recovering, aren't exposed in the GUI and the CLI is a requirement for basic functionality. There is no single, functional interface on FreeNAS.
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Ok I did not realize it was so hobby'ish and not production. I read a lot every day and see these things mentioned a lot so that got me curious. From everyone's opinion I should just stay with NFS and Samba?
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@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
. From everyone's opinion I should just stay with NFS and Samba?
That's all that there is. All NAS OSes are just repackaging the same NFS and Samba that everyone else is. There is really only one non-Windows provider of those services.
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@scottalanmiller said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
. From everyone's opinion I should just stay with NFS and Samba?
That's all that there is. All NAS OSes are just repackaging the same NFS and Samba that everyone else is. There is really only one non-Windows provider of those services.
Oh well dang. I lost interest in this fast lol. Thanks for the info.
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@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
. From everyone's opinion I should just stay with NFS and Samba?
That's all that there is. All NAS OSes are just repackaging the same NFS and Samba that everyone else is. There is really only one non-Windows provider of those services.
Oh well dang. I lost interest in this fast lol. Thanks for the info.
That's pretty much how it works. Feels like it must be this amazing, important thing. Then you learn it's nothing but Debian or FreeBSD repackaged, but not up to date, with key features removed and a goofy half-assed web GUI slapped on top of just the stuff that was already there. All negative, no positive. Seems like it must be such a good idea, but it just isn't.
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I run OMV and I've spent more time recovering from randoms crashes then using it. Moving away from it soon.
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@scottalanmiller said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
. From everyone's opinion I should just stay with NFS and Samba?
That's all that there is. All NAS OSes are just repackaging the same NFS and Samba that everyone else is. There is really only one non-Windows provider of those services.
Oh well dang. I lost interest in this fast lol. Thanks for the info.
That's pretty much how it works. Feels like it must be this amazing, important thing. Then you learn it's nothing but Debian or FreeBSD repackaged, but not up to date, with key features removed and a goofy half-assed web GUI slapped on top of just the stuff that was already there. All negative, no positive. Seems like it must be such a good idea, but it just isn't.
I'm assuming the closest to a best idea is just a NetInstall of one of those OSes and then install only what you need for file sharing.
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@scottalanmiller said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
. From everyone's opinion I should just stay with NFS and Samba?
That's all that there is. All NAS OSes are just repackaging the same NFS and Samba that everyone else is. There is really only one non-Windows provider of those services.
Oh well dang. I lost interest in this fast lol. Thanks for the info.
That's pretty much how it works. Feels like it must be this amazing, important thing. Then you learn it's nothing but Debian or FreeBSD repackaged, but not up to date, with key features removed and a goofy half-assed web GUI slapped on top of just the stuff that was already there. All negative, no positive. Seems like it must be such a good idea, but it just isn't.
Just like any NAS is then? Half-assed software on top of half-assed hardware?
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@Pete-S said in Which Nas OS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
@scottalanmiller said in Which Nas OS?:
@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
. From everyone's opinion I should just stay with NFS and Samba?
That's all that there is. All NAS OSes are just repackaging the same NFS and Samba that everyone else is. There is really only one non-Windows provider of those services.
Oh well dang. I lost interest in this fast lol. Thanks for the info.
That's pretty much how it works. Feels like it must be this amazing, important thing. Then you learn it's nothing but Debian or FreeBSD repackaged, but not up to date, with key features removed and a goofy half-assed web GUI slapped on top of just the stuff that was already there. All negative, no positive. Seems like it must be such a good idea, but it just isn't.
Just like any NAS is then? Half-assed software on top of half-assed hardware?
Not quite. Many NAS are garbage, but not necessarily . The difference is the combination of custom hardware, software for that specific hardware, and support all as a single package. So while in general I'd be wary of getting a NAS, there are certainly good NAS vendors and good times to use a NAS when it's a full NAS. The same thing with a NAS OS, never do that. One is an appliance, and appliances are fine. The other is the software component of an appliance without any appliance to go with it.
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If you could manage shares from Cockpit it would be a game changer in the NAS category.
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@brandon220 said in Which Nas OS?:
If you could manage shares from Cockpit it would be a game changer in the NAS category.
You can manage samba with Webmin. Redhat pushes Cockpit of course but Webmin has a lot more functionality.
If you want a turnkey solution you could install one of the fileserver images from Turnkeylinux.
You get SMB, SFTP, NFS, WebDAV, rsync and management with Webmin.
https://www.turnkeylinux.org/fileserver -
Not really adding anything constructive, but definitely echoing the sentiment of just building something from a minimal Linux install. I'm currently experiencing the issue of a commercial NAS making some simple things much harder than they should be. All I can put it down to is the tangle of customization and variance from general standards they do behind the scenes.
I wont be replacing them with newer versions - I'm nearly at the point of ripping their storage for dedication to a Linux VM setup to do the same duties.
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@jmoore i am totally in love with ZFS filesystem... has all the nice features , deduplication , dubblets(ditto bloks), unlimited snapshot, cloning, writable clones., raidz (many versions)
you can get it in most linux os today.. but i use eigther https://www.illumos.org/ or the free nexenta version with has a nice web interface... supports SMB V2 , NFS , ISCSI etc https://community.nexenta.com/s/
if you want to know abount ZFS here is 2 youtube videos from the creators of ZFS
part one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRoUC9P1PmA
part two https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwCXVp_u86o -
@jkaspersen Thanks for the info. Zfs is certainly a nice file system. I will look more into Nexenta, I have heard the name a long time but never checked out what they do.
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@jmoore said in Which Nas OS?:
@jkaspersen Thanks for the info. Zfs is certainly a nice file system. I will look more into Nexenta, I have heard the name a long time but never checked out what they do.
Nexenta is a NasOS, just based on Solaris instead of FreeBSD or Linux. No reason to check them out, same problems as anyone else. Falls into the "never, ever use or consider or even look at" category, it makes no sense. Use the OS that they use under the hood, looking for "simple GUIs" slapped on top of simple functionality is a bad idea, especially with critical workloads like storage.
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@jkaspersen said in Which Nas OS?:
if you want to know abount ZFS here is 2 youtube videos from the creators of ZFS
I got to work with the ZFS team on the original SAM-SD. Back in 2007 when ZFS was still pretty new.
