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  • Hacker News
  • FWIW, previously:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49438678

    (No comments.)

    by lproven
  • 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/

    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.

    by mctt
  • 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.
    by bhouston
  • 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.

    by mxuribe
  • 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!
    by inventor7777
  • 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.

    by magicalhippo
  • 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.

    by rkagerer
  • 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.
    by omnimus
  • 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)
    by kalleboo
  • There's also bsdnas: https://bsdnas.com
    by mvanbaak
  • 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?

    by lproven
  • Seems that zVault 'did not make it' - 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-versu...

    Regards,

    vermaden

    by vermaden
  • 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.

    by gnuplustoejam
  • Why use open source when windows exists?
    by unethical_ban
  • 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.
    by televisionsaval
  • 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...

    by Ahrgo
  • 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.
    by _0xdd
  • As a sysadmin that has got a fleet of ~500 other servers to manage, I don't have the time nor do I care about all the command line switches that are under the hood . I want to install the system, check the checkboxes for the features the company needs and then pay iXsystems a few thousand dollars to think about all the underlying compatability and configurations and security features for me. That's the whole point of it's existance.
    by KetoManx64
  • Yeah, I just run bare Debian myself. It's really not hard to setup LVM and Samba. And all of the major frontier models are well-versed in those things, so I used their help to get all of the various bits setup to make access from MacOS fast.
    by asteroidburger
  • 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.

    by ssl-3
  • 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".

    by ink_13
  • The NAS of Theseus
    by suprjami
  • 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 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

    by Joel_Mckay
  • 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-scrip...

    by mtlynch
  • Doesn't this violate the whole spirit of the GPL? He's shocked that the usual suspects are ripping off GPL code. Tale as old as time.

    It's like those SOHO router vendors that release incomprehensible tarballs of their GPL components; lotsa luck building it.

    If I'm paying for closed-source ZFS, I'll go with the real thing and buy a Solaris license.

    by gnuplustoejam
  • 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?

    by teruakohatu
  • Doesn't the GPL require build scripts?

    > The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities.

    by RobotToaster