TrueNAS might not be for you, if you are home user.

[Hello_World]

Upfront disclaimer: I obviously cannot speak for iXsystems, since I am not an employee or associated in any other form.

If the idea is that paying around 100-200 USD/EUR for TrueNAS Core as a hobbyist user per year, this is not necessarily something that is attractive for a company in the enterprise business. And that is under the assumption that no support comes with that payment. It is certainly not attractive if support comes into play.

For DSM and Unraid, the payment is usually a one-time fee. The cost of DSM is included in the hardware, and Unraid is a license bound to a USB disk.

If you pay for a yearly subscription, I think most people can afford it in the $10-$30 range. If it is a one-time payment, as a latecomer for home users, it is best not to exceed $100.

 

[Davvo]

Would you agree with @danb35 that we should remove this shell option if we cannot fix?

I don't use the WebUI shell at all, and even if it were to work I'd still use the SSH way for quite a few reasons (tmux one of many).
I do agree that hiding/deleting it from the WebUI would be a good move towards how the product (and as such the brand) is percieved: from this point, I see a correlation with pulgins.

TN CORE is a great product, why showing broken features that decrease its value? It hurts both the brand's and the company's image.

 

[danb35]

I'd still use the SSH way for quite a few reasons (tmux one of many).

If the web UI shell weren't so broken, you could use tmux there too.

 

[Davvo]

If the web UI shell weren't so broken, you could use tmux there too.

I don't want to even think about multiple tabs in a browser window. Don't even know if it's possible, but it surely sounds terribile from a coding pov.

Om the other hand, a working Shell in the WebUI would decrease the difficuly level for new users. In order to diagnose a funny drive the first thing we ask is a smartctl report... Setting up SSH and the likes is not immediate.

Since this is not possibile, I'd get rid of it.
Maybe just hide it as default setting and only show it when using advanced options.

Anyway I have to say, the current way things are handled regarding CORE don't exactly inspire serenity regarding its future. And I'm not about the way you and the other iX employees present on the forum handle it, I appreciate your efforts.

 

[winnielinnie]

If the web UI shell weren't so broken, you could use tmux there too.

Which I would love to do, even while accessing Jails. Having a working Shell within the appliance's web GUI is a great feature. Sure, I know how to whip up a terminal in Linux or Windows to drop in via SSH. But it's... right there... in the web GUI. You don't need to open up another application.

However, I have to agree with the others, if it's broken, you might as well get rid of it. (With the possibility of returning this feature when it's done correctly. It would be a welcome feature.)

 

[winnielinnie]

I don't want to even think about multiple tabs in a browser window.

There wouldn't be multiple tabs. You'd click "Shell" in the left-side menu. Then just do your thing inside this terminal emulator. This includes using "tmux", so that you can work on different tasks and hide them in the "background" in their own tmux session. No browser tabs are involved.

 

[Hello_World]

I try to summarize the most common causes of controversy in the TrueNAS community in one sentence.

TrueNAS is aimed at enterprise users, but most of the actual users are home users. There is a serious conflict between the needs of these two types of users. In a sense, this development model is distorted.

How many home users can correctly understand the concept of zfs-dataset without consulting the documentation? How many enterprise users need to use Jellyfin and qBittorrent?

For home users, they need to invest a lot of time to learn and try, and encounter bugs that usually only exist in home application scenarios and cannot be fixed for a long time.
For iX, a lot of content irrelevant to the main line of the enterprise appeared in the community and Jira, resulting in a waste of resources.
For enterprise users, the increased cost of the iX operating community and development system will become a higher sales price.

Among the home users of TrueNAS, many people cannot accept the high price of DSM, and hope to get data reliability higher than Unraid. This need is long-standing, although it does not match the current development goals of iX.

iX actually does not need to abandon the existing technology system, such as k3s. Just adding more features for home users and making the system easier to use (such as more detailed wizards and instructions) may be able to solve 50% of home user needs. Compared with enterprise high availability standards, this does not require much cost.

I don't know how much iX's 50-person development and testing team will cost per year, but I estimate that new products for home users will be enough to pay 10 developers.

 

[winnielinnie]

Also, while we're at it. Here's another nearly useless feature that ruins the presented quality: Display System Processes

Go ahead. Click it.

All it does it bring up a "Shell" and run the "top" command. Yet the display output is... you guessed it! Cut off from viewing the entire output! (The last column gets cut short.)

It might as well be removed if Shell is going to be removed.

 

[Davvo]

TrueNAS is aimed at enterprise users, but most of the actual users are home users.

Mmmh, I wouldn't be sure the way it's phrased.

For home users, they need to invest a lot of time to learn and try,

That's one of the things I like about it thought. Powerful software requires great competence.

Also, while we're at it. Here's another nearly useless feature that ruins the presented quality: Display System Processes

View attachment 68671

Go ahead. Click it.

All it does it bring up a "Shell" and run the "top" command. Yet the display output is... you guessed it! Cut off from viewing the entire output! (The last column gets cut short.)

It might as well be removed if Shell is going to be removed.

Totally forgot about that... and I sometimes use it! With just minimal fixing it would be a great feature imho.

 

[winnielinnie]

With just minimal fixing it would be a great feature imho.

It would likely require fixing the underlying issue of the "Shell" itself.

It would also be preferable if it invokes "htop" instead of "top". Colored output and graphs.

 

[Davvo]

As of now, still more useful than the Shell itself.

 

[Patrick_3000]

I would add this for those saying that Truenas is difficult to use for home users. I completely disagree. It's a piece of cake and is by far the easiest way to get the data integrity advantages of ZFS, at least that I'm aware.

I speak from experience. In addition to my Truenas Scale installation, which contains my main pool and datasets, I also have a ZFS pool for backups set up from scratch on a Linux system. Messing around with ZFS from scratch, without the benefit of an appliance such as Truenas (Scale or Core), takes a lot more work, all of it at the command line. It's still not all that difficult, but it's more difficult than working with Truenas.

Try setting up all your scrubs and snapshots at the command line and keeping track of them. It's a little bit of a hassle. And I haven't even bothered to set up notifications, which is a lot of work from the command line but super simple with Truenas.

So, while I don't have any experience with commercial, proprietary NAS systems (nor do I want such experience; open source all the way and no vendor lock-in is my preference!), I can attest to the fact the Truenas, whether Scale (best imo) or Core, is far more robust and simple to use than setting up a ZFS pool from scratch on a Linux system.

 

[Johnny Fartpants]

Would you agree with @danb35 that we should remove this shell option if we cannot fix?

The shell UI in Core is really bad but don’t pull it altogether as it’s better than nothing. I use it daily for add-hoc cmds. Granted anything more than that then you’re better off sshing.

 

[Johnny Fartpants]

I must admit I was already worried about the future of Core based on iX marketing and a massive lean towards SCALE but this thread worries me even more. I hadn’t realised that most improvements are only being applied to SCALE and not Core. iX have been asked on various different platforms about the future of Core and they continue to say it’s going nowhere and the company with run both versions (“forever”) but actions speak louder than words. I’m sure there are very good reasons to move to SCALE (Linux) long term but all I’d say is be honest and transparent about it and potential timescales and you will more likely bring long term users with you.

 

[morganL]

I must admit I was already worried about the future of Core based on iX marketing and a massive lean towards SCALE but this thread worries me even more. I hadn’t realised that most improvements are only being applied to SCALE and not Core. iX have been asked on various different platforms about the future of Core and they continue to say it’s going nowhere and the company with run both versions (“forever”) but actions speak louder than words. I’m sure there are very good reasons to move to SCALE (Linux) long term but all I’d say is be honest and transparent about it and potential timescales and you will more likely bring long term users with you.

The TrueNAS strategy is multi-faceted. First, the strategy is to make sure TrueNAS provides a good experience.. regardless of CORE or SCALE. Users can switch between the two "editions". Both editions are free.

SCALE is where new features are developed.
CORE is where maintaining storage quality is the primary focus.

Many storage Improvements are being backported to CORE (e.g there is a 13.1 in development)
e.g. ZFS, Samba

Apps, Clustering are only being done on SCALE.
Jails are only on CORE
New hardware has better support on SCALE

The UI for SCALE is being evolved rapidly. There is less resistance to change.
The UI for CORE is not changing much. Existing customers prefer stability.

CORE users that want new features can sidegrade to SCALE for specific systems.
There is no rush to do this... decide based on quality and use-case
TrueCommand can manage both systems simultaneously.

Right now about 30% of systems are running SCALE. 70% are running CORE
Interestingly, the number of CORE systems has grown slightly in last 12 months
It's expected that 50% of systems will run SCALE in late 2024.

We are selling CORE based systems today and will support those customers for 6+ years.

By definition, there is no edition that combines the maturity of CORE with the new capabilities of SCALE. The only solution for that will be SCALE maturing and becoming as reliable as CORE. That's a goal for 2024 and is achievable with community support.

 

[Johnny Fartpants]

Thanks @morganL so reading between the lines its just a matter of time before Core will die and SCALE will be the only product even for just pure storage requirements (ie. no need for containers our VMs)?

Im not having a dig but that's good to know so people like me can start using SCALE more and assist to its long-term reliability with bug fixes and improvements etc.

I think some of the messaging from iX has been confusing and at times could have be seen as a little disingenuous and I think we would all just appreciate honesty around the game plan and the future of the products.

Appreciate your above response, thanks.

 

[winnielinnie]

Storage and performance-wise, Core (FreeBSD) is better. Memory management, ARC, ZFS is a first-class citizen, no constant CPU usage from K3s, no issues with share paths intersecting with Jail mounts (unlike with Apps and HostPath), no insane clutter and used space from the Apps system (I keep seeing how the ix-applications dataset balloons in size), etc, etc, etc.

As far as better hardware support, it seems less of an issue for a server use-case; unlike gaming and desktop users.

Take the performance and stability of TrueNAS Core + the improvements in UI and bugfixes of SCALE + rapid development for a community userbase = an amazing NAS appliance that doesn't feel "old in the tooth".

 

[Patrick_3000]

There really are potential hardware limitations with FreeBSD that make Scale more attractive than Core. Until recently, FreeBSD didn't have good support for Nbase-T network cards, that is 2.5gbps and 5gbps. They only supported those with Intel drivers, not Realtek drivers, and Intel drivers use more power and so are not able to support fanless cards with more than two ports per card (i.e. all quad port cards with Intel drivers have a fan, which of course is noisy, power-hungry, and another potential point of failure). In addition, cards with Intel drivers are more expensive.

This actually didn't affect me with Truenas, since I don't need quad port cards there, but it was a big hassle with my Pfsense and OPNsense routers.

As I recall, FreeBSD may have fixed this problem and added support for Nbase-T Realtek drivers in its most recent version, but they were much later at this than Linux Debian (which underlies Scale) was. In general, Linux Debian is supposed to support more hardware than just about any other platform, or so I recall from what I've read online.

I also prefer the user interface with Scale. It just seems cleaner. And on the rare occasions that I need to use the command line, I much prefer working in Linux compared to FreeBSD because I understand the Linux commands better and especially understand the directory structure in Linux, like where files are in /etc and /mnt.

Moreover, while I don't currently run any apps or VMs in Scale, it's nice to know that it's easy and convenient to do so if I ever have the need.

Overall, while I think Core is great (though I do wonder how robustly iXSystems is going to support it long-term), in my opinion, Scale is better.

 

[victort]

I actually use the shell a lot. Just for simple commands that i need to run. I would not like to see it go away.

I do understand the reasons people don't like it as I have also found myself needing to copy paste many times.

 

[Davvo]

There really are potential hardware limitations with FreeBSD that make Scale more attractive than Core. Until recently, FreeBSD didn't have good support for Nbase-T network cards, that is 2.5gbps and 5gbps. They only supported those with Intel drivers, not Realtek drivers, and Intel drivers use more power and so are not able to support fanless cards with more than two ports per card (i.e. all quad port cards with Intel drivers have a fan, which of course is noisy, power-hungry, and another potential point of failure). In addition, cards with Intel drivers are more expensive.

This actually didn't affect me with Truenas, since I don't need quad port cards there, but it was a big hassle with my Pfsense and OPNsense routers.

As I recall, FreeBSD may have fixed this problem and added support for Nbase-T Realtek drivers in its most recent version, but they were much later at this than Linux Debian (which underlies Scale) was. In general, Linux Debian is supposed to support more hardware than just about any other platform, or so I recall from what I've read online.

I also prefer the user interface with Scale. It just seems cleaner. And on the rare occasions that I need to use the command line, I much prefer working in Linux compared to FreeBSD because I understand the Linux commands better and especially understand the directory structure in Linux, like where files are in /etc and /mnt.

Moreover, while I don't currently run any apps or VMs in Scale, it's nice to know that it's easy and convenient to do so if I ever have the need.

Overall, while I think Core is great (though I do wonder how robustly iXSystems is going to support it long-term), in my opinion, Scale is better.

No Jails no gain. @jgreco would likely disagree to your statement that SCALE has better hardware support than CORE; chelsio and mellanox are good alternatives to intel NICs: just because it works, it doesn't mean you should use realtek trash drives. SCALE's UI is indeed better. Apparently, it also has better energy saving management.

You didn't mention any of the drawbacks of SCALE, from the kubernet issue to the ARC issue (which is being worked on).
Again, CORE's jails are a feature that I do not see being able to be replaced by the current SCALE capabilities.

Thus, I do not think SCALE is better. At the very least, not yet.

I actually use the shell a lot. Just for simple commands that i need to run. I would not like to see it go away.

I do understand the reasons people don't like it as I have also found myself needing to copy paste many times.

Why don't you use ssh and something like putty?