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.
For recomending a NAS at least some expectations or target market should be specified. I mean… I usually use small NAS enclosures as backup repositories for servers via SMB, and that’s fine for my uses and customers, but sometimes NAS is a far cheaper alternative for file servers or virtualization storage (via iSCSI or something similar)
ZFS quite rocks as storage filesystem; it’s old enough to have his issues solved and be used as product, so i would be pleased to use it for my storage reference, even for virtualized systems. Even OpenZFS (the open source version) is aged enough to be part of a production system. But as far as i can remember, only BSD (FreeNAS base) used this FS in kernelspace, and the porting to Linux IMO is too young to be used on production enviroment, just like BTRFS.
Anyway, ZFS and favourite filesystem thread IMHO is far more big and OT chat for this question “which NAS should i choose?”, therefore: why not split?
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.
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.
Mental note to self: find a victim to evacuate from their PC so I have a spare one to play with (6)