I really enjoy your discussion, I am searching for a nice NAS solution and both products seem to have it’s advantages, maybe this is worth an own thread…
Maybe this describes it in a diplomatic way:
FreeNAS - Comprehensive solution that’ll appeal to enterprise users.
NAS4Free - If FreeNAS doesn’t work for you, this just might.
I like that diplomatic way 
Both have pros and cons, I want to try nas4free and see if I can get some decent uptime.
Thanks for confirming that. I got crazy when trying to join it to Nethserver. If I remember correctly I also tried FreeNAS as CA and imported the cert to NS but it didn’t work so I gave up but maybe I was missing something.
I know, we rock a z20 and 2 freenas units build by them. I would recommend both their service and products. But yeah, you need to know what you are doing if you want good performance. I don’t mind that requirement in server installations.
Also, why would I want my NAS to run jails ? Or do anything else besides store data reliably ? It’s a a NAS…?!
What do you mean here, use nethserver ad users on your nas ? I have the nas as storage next to proxmox. Not sure if I even bothered to get ad working… I’ll check and report back
It really depends on how you use a nas I think. You seem to use it more low level (which doesn’t mean bad) just providing a lun or something like that. The “higher level logic” is done by Proxmox or some VM. Others use it for having their smb shares and rights on it. For that approach it makes sense to have the NAS joined to the AD. NetApp storages for instance also provide the AD member feature.
I just wanted to close this FreeNAS thread and hoped that some experienced FreeNAS users can help. FreeNAS wants correct certs when joining and I was not able to manage it. Disabling TLS works but it’s not the best solution as regards security.
Thank you very much.
I think you are correct: to me, a NAS is a box with disks, and only a resource to my virtual environment. No user will ever have direct access to it unless it is an IT admin with a specific configuration task. I sleep better that way 
I have been looking at the features that True/Free nas offer aside from being a NAS an have been wondering why someone would ever want to use a NAS for that, and not a virtual machine on it, if only for security reasons.
I just checked; I never even bothered to tie the AD into the NAS, or failed as well when setting up the certificates. There is a partial config there and it has TLS off. Crap … now I need to solve this to sleep again 
Edit: seems straight forward enough, but indeed requires valid certs, not self signed ones. To get AD running with proper certs, you could follow my example and add the FQDN for the samba container (nsdc-server.domain.tld) to the let’s encrypt cert for the Netserver host running the samba container. Then copy the letsencrypt cert to the container, replacing the self-signed one.
This works afaik and checked. Havent tried to add a True- of FreeNAS yet, will investigate monday … have some testing to do now 
Use case. Downloading torrents and .nzbs isn’t directly relevant to a NAS, but the NAS is where the stuff would be stored anyway, so why not do it there? Playing media has nothing to do at all with a NAS, but the NAS is where the media is stored, so running that on the NAS as well can make sense. Of the ~ 30 TB stored on my home NAS, video accounts for most of it. Or a backup server? Makes a lot of sense to run that on the NAS, since that’s where the backups would be stored. Obviously it doesn’t have to be this way, but there is some logic to it.
Separate from that, as @mrmarkuz notes, if you’re using the NAS for file storage, which is entirely in the scope of what a NAS might reasonably be used for, being able to tie it in to your network-wide authentication mechanism would be helpful (if not essential). I haven’t bothered so far; I have four users on my home network, so managing credentials isn’t much of an issue.
I can see how for home users, a NAS could be used that way. I have actually even seen companies do it like that. If your use is semi-personal or very small business, you can get away with this. If you have 20 or more users abusing the CPU and memory of the NAS like that, your primary reason to have it will suffer and access times will rise.
I would probably agree that FreeNAS is not the best choice if you are looking to get a NAS running as a home user. Most of it’s features are completely useless is that scenario and your average Synology will do just fine then … but meh … that’s more a all-in-one sollution than a NAS. If FreeNAS is attempting to be attractive to home use and these kind of uses, I would have to agree it is lacking as it requires way to much in-depth knowledge for an average user.
From my perspective, I only care about IOPS
Hello here,
I’m looking in general, what to do with what king of hardware.
The hardware will determine what type of OS ( an exemple, with a Microserver Gen8, I can be preferable to avoid a Debian base NAS, for a noisy ventilation problem)
So basically there three choice: BSD based, CentOS based or Debian Based.
After, the technology, someone will prefer ZFS, other people will prefer other filesystem.
After there the possibility to add software, like Owncloud, like Plex…
So I don’t really understand what is this discussion for? Or I misunderstood something?
@Jclendineng doesn’t like FreeNAS anymore and @planet_jeroen and @danb35 are satisfied FreeNAS users so a discussion started that I liked because I am searching for a NAS solution, but there are several approaches from “a NAS is just a storage provider” to “a NAS has to be AD member and bittorent client and a webserver etc”.
You have a pragmatic point of view saying “What do I want? What do I need?” and splitting it to hardware and OS which I also like. And you are right, there is not one perfect NAS solution, so it’s hard to discuss but maybe just share some experiences and opinions.
There is a difference between production ready and bleeding edge. And afaik, btrfs is not yet there. I am no expert at all, but haven’t heard of a single production environment adopting it.
Is this changing and are we at the turning point where it is ready for production ?
Hell no … not if they know their stuff. It took me all of 15 minutes to decide we where not going to bother with that stuff, but would invest at least tripple that in a decent NAS. (13 people company atm)
Consumer NAS appliances are a scam if you ask me, they are just an unsecure heap of storage in most cases and to be avoided like the plague in anything even remotely professional.
The level of competence needed to get them secure is almost criminal, and the level of incompetence that can start hosting files equally so. Hackers love this.
Without wanting to become a posterboy for iX, their FreeNAS units are very much affordable and capable to professionally host storage on professional hardware for consumer prices with technical support. There is no reason to enter a WallMart and buy a Synology 1200 or something like that, nor a need to become a storage specialist.
I am sure other companies provide similar services and would love if others could add them here … I only have experience with iX.
More accurately, FreeNAS needs to validate the cert. If FreeNAS issued the cert itself, it can validate it. If the cert was issued from a regular CA, FreeNAS can validate it. If it’s self-signed from somewhere else, there’s no way to validate it.
My two cents…
I switched to Nas4free over the holidays, and this report is almost a month in. If you haven’t tried it, its fantastic. None of the freenas issues, way nicer, and BSD is actually BSD not skinned BSD, meaning jails can be updated without an underlying OS update. Its literally a breath of fresh air, I am wishing I migrated sooner. Freenas was having all sorts of issues with jails, I could not install a sql db because of the changes from bsd made, meaning freenas had to update the jails, which they were not going to do for a while, forcing me to finally switch. So I am running nas4free, all my zfs pools imported nicely, (if you need pointers I have them!), I am running jails for plex and nextcloud, and a VM with rancheros that works so much better than in the “new” freenas ui. Just my 2 cents, but I must say I am very impressed that a much smaller community of devs managed succeed where the much bigger ixsystems did not in my opinion. I might revisit freenas when the jails/rancher/iocage whatever is sorted out and they decide to stick to something for longer than 3 months (corral) but until then I am sticking with nas4free.
this post made my morning.
@Jclendineng ; You are making me curious 
Mental note to self: find a victim to evacuate from their PC so I have a spare one to play with (6)
If you do, install OBI, one button installer, its super easy, and use that to install thebrig, the jail manager. Its way nicer than freenas, you can manage as many jails as you like, do mass updates, etc. You can even have shared ports, so thats really handy if you use ports.