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ink_13today at 1:52 AM2 repliesview on HN

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".


Replies

suprjamitoday at 2:00 AM

The NAS of Theseus

Joel_Mckaytoday at 2:48 AM

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